What Happens When The Internet Breaks?

It’s a crazy idea to think that a network built to be completely decentralized and resilient can be so easily knocked offline in a matter of minutes. But that basically happened twice in the past couple of weeks. CloudFlare is a service provide that offers to sit in front of your website and provide all kinds of important services. They can prevent smaller sites from being knocked offline by an influx of traffic. They can provide security and DNS services for you. They’re quickly becoming an indispensable part of the way the Internet functions. And what happens when we all start to rely on one service too much?

Bad BGP Behavior

The first outage on June 24, 2019 wasn’t the fault of CloudFlare. A small service provider in Pennsylvania decided to use a BGP Optimizer from Noction to do some route optimization inside their autonomous system (AS). That in and of itself shouldn’t have caused a problem. At least, not until someone leaked those routes to the greater internet.

It was a comedy of errors. The provider in question announced their more specific routes to an upstream customer, who in turn announced them to Verizon. After that all bets are Continue reading

Technology Short Take 116

Welcome to Technology Short Take #116! This one is a bit shorter than usual, due to holidays in the US and my life being busy. Nevertheless, I hope that I managed to capture something you find useful or helpful. As always, your feedback is welcome, so if you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, you’re welcome to contact me via Twitter.

Networking

  • David Gee discusses jSNAPy and how it can be used to enable unit tests in infrastructure-as-code scenarios.
  • Jon Langemak tackles understanding RTs (Route Targets) and RDs (Route Distinguishers) are in MPLS VPNs. I also appreciate that Jon included a “Lab time” section in his article that encourages readers to try out the concepts he’s explaining.

Servers/Hardware

  • Although I’ve by and large moved away from Apple hardware (I still have a MacBook Pro running macOS that sees very little use, and a Mac Pro running Fedora), I did see this article regarding a new keyboard for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. That’s good—the butterfly keyboards are awful (in my opinion).

Security

  • If you’re unfamiliar with public key infrastructure (PKI), digital certificates, or encryption, you may find this Linux Journal article helpful. It provides the basics behind X.509v3 digital Continue reading

Setting up an encrypted SOCKS proxy using Dante and stunnel

Overview

Why Dante?

In the previous post, I talked about why we might need a SOCKS proxy at all, and how we can properly setup a secure one using only stunnel.

That approach is fine and all, but it still suffers from some limitations. The most important of which are:

  • UDP relaying is not supported.
  • Advanced SOCKS options like BIND or UDPASSOCIATE is not available.
  • Only suited for personal use and should not be shared with untrusted clients.

Comparing to the stunnel limited SOCKS functionality, Dante (which is one of the most popular SOCKS server available), comes with pretty much every functionality one can imagine out of a SOCKS server.

From advanced authentication and access control, to server chaining, traffic monitoring and even bandwidth control1, Dante has got them all.

Dante and SOCKS encryption

While it might be okay to use a non-encrypted SOCKS proxy in you local network, it is definitely not a good idea to do so over the internet.

For this, RFC 1961 added GSS-API authentication protocol for SOCKS Version 5. GSS-API provides integrity, authentication and confidentiality. Dante of course completely supports GSS-API authentication and encryption.

But GSS-API (which is typically used with Kerberos Continue reading

Automating chaos experiments in production

Automating chaos experiments in production Basiri et al., ICSE 2019

Are you ready to take your system assurance programme to the next level? This is a fascinating paper from members of Netflix’s Resilience Engineering team describing their chaos engineering initiatives: automated controlled experiments designed to verify hypotheses about how the system should behave under gray failure conditions, and to probe for and flush out any weaknesses. The ‘controlled’ part is important here because given the scale and complexity of the environment under test, the only meaningful place to do this is in production with real users.

Maybe that sounds scary, but one of the interesting perspectives this paper brings is to make you realise that it’s really not so different from any other change you might be rolling out into production (e.g. a bug fix, configuration change, new feature, or A/B test). In all cases we need to be able to carefully monitor the impact on the system, and back out if things start going badly wrong. Moreover, just like an A/B test, we’ll be collecting metrics while the experiment is underway and performing statistical analysis at the end to interpret the results.

Netflix’s system is deployed on Continue reading

In Patagonia: A New Community Network in the Village of El Cuy

Patagonia, a region in Argentina made up of deserts, pampas, and grasslands, is known for its large areas of uninhabited territory. In the north sits the village of El Cuy, with just 400 residents. Far from the large urban centers, the people of El Cuy have adapted to the difficulties of accessing different services and technologies. The Internet is no exception, thanks to a new community network.

In several ways, the community network model represents the Internet model of networking come to life. Community networks are built and implemented by people, through collaboration – all stages of the process include the community working together. In the case of the El Cuy community network, support was also provided by the CABASE and the ENACOM.

For Christian O’Flaherty, the Internet Society’s senior development manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, Internet access has become a positive catalyst for community development. “The operation of this pilot program has motivated the residents to organize themselves into a cooperative. This step will allow inhabitants from El Cuy to have access to various fundings offered by actors such as ENACOM to increase the capacity of the Internet connection.”

Abel Martínez, a resident of El Cuy Continue reading

Becoming Broadband Ready Means Community Innovation and Collaboration

There are countless communities across North America that are hungry to see better broadband access for their residents. It’s clear to local leaders that high-quality Internet access is the bedrock of a healthy and successful community – providing job opportunities, bolstering education, transforming health care, and democratizing access to information. What isn’t always so clear is how to make it happen.

That’s why Next Century Cities teamed up with the Internet Society and Neighborly to create the Becoming Broadband Ready toolkit. This comprehensive toolkit provides local leaders with a roadmap to encourage broadband investment in their community.

While every community will choose to tackle connectivity a little differently – a small island community and a large urban center will likely have unique considerations and approaches – there are many common threads that run through successful broadband projects. Becoming Broadband Ready compiles these threads into an easy-to-use and impactful resource for any community, providing resources specific to:

  • Establish Leadership
  • Build a Community Movement
  • Identify Goals
  • Evaluate the Current Circumstance
  • Establish Policies and Procedures to Support Investment
  • Prioritize Digital Inclusion
  • Identify Legislative and Regulatory Barriers
  • Explore Connectivity Options
  • Explore Financing Options
  • Be a Clear Collaborator
  • Measure Success

Next Century Cities identified the Continue reading

Datanauts 168: Why Design Process Matters For Data Centers And The Cloud

When you're tasked with a new infrastructure project on premises or in the cloud, a design process will significantly improve your chances of success. Guest Adam Post joins the Datanauts podcast to discuss a proper design process, examine frameworks for virtualized and cloud environments, and more.

The post Datanauts 168: Why Design Process Matters For Data Centers And The Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Campus design feature set-up : Part 5

In this blog series, we’ve been on a journey of sorts. We’ve shown you all the different ways to set up the CL 3.7.5 campus feature: Multi-Domain Authentication in this 6-part series and guess what? We’re getting into the home stretch!

In blogs 1-4 we had guides for Wired 802.1x using Aruba ClearPass, Wired MAC Authentication using Aruba ClearPass, Multi-Domain Authentication using Aruba ClearPass and Wired 802.1x using Cisco ISE. After this blog, we’ll just have one more covering. Multi-Domain Authentication using Cisco ISE. But we’re not here to talk about those now.

In this fifth guide, I’ll be sharing how to enable Wired MAC Authentication in Cumulus Linux 3.7.5+ using Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) 2.4, Patch 8.

Keep in mind that this step-by-step guide assumes that you have already performed an initial setup of Cisco ISE .

Cisco ISE Configuration:

1. Add a Cumulus Switch group to Cisco ISE:

First, we are going to add a Network Device Group to Cisco ISE:

Administration > Network Resources > Network Device Groups. Click the “+Add” button

Make sure to set the “Parent Group” to “All Device Types.” The result will look Continue reading

Internet Society Asia-Pacific Policy Survey 2019 Now Open: Consolidation in the Internet Economy

The Internet Society recently embarked on a year-long effort to explore the trends of consolidation in the Internet economy, and I write to sincerely invite you to share your views with us in the Regional Policy Survey 2019, an annual exercise of the Asia-Pacific Bureau of the Internet Society.

Your input is very important to us. It will help us understand the issue from your perspectives and produce a report to be released later this year. Ultimately, your input will help us come up with technical and policy recommendations for policymakers with the aim of preserving the Internet’s properties that give us the critical abilities to connect, speak, innovate, share, choose, and trust.

Please take 5-10 minutes to complete the survey, which covers all Internet users in Asia-Pacific. To show our appreciation, we will be offering 2 tablet computers in a lucky draw, and the winners will be notified by email after the survey closes on July 31.

Read about the previous installments of the survey.

Thank you again for your time and input.

The post Internet Society Asia-Pacific Policy Survey 2019 Now Open: Consolidation in the Internet Economy appeared first on Internet Society.

An eco-friendly internet of disposable things is coming

Get ready for a future of disposable of internet of things (IoT) devices, one that will mean everything is connected to networks. It will be particularly useful in logistics, being used in single-use plastics in retail packaging and throw-away shippers’ carboard boxes.How it will happen? The answer is when non-hazardous, disposable bio-batteries make it possible. And that moment might be approaching. Researchers say they’re closer to commercializing a bacteria-powered miniature battery that they say will propel the IoDT.[ Learn more: Download a PDF bundle of five essential articles about IoT in the enterprise ] The “internet of disposable things is a new paradigm for the rapid evolution of wireless sensor networks,” says Seokheun Choi, an associate professor at Binghamton University, in an article on the school’s website.To read this article in full, please click here

One SQL to rule them all: an efficient and syntactically idiomatic approach to management of streams and tables

One SQL to rule them all: an efficient and syntactically idiomatic approach to management of streams and tables Begoli et al., SIGMOD’19

In data processing it seems, all roads eventually lead back to SQL! Today’s paper choice is authored by a collection of experts from the Apache Beam, Apache Calcite, and Apache Flink projects, outlining their experiences building SQL interfaces for streaming. The net result is a set of proposed extensions to the SQL standard itself, being worked on under the auspices of the international SQL standardization body.

The thesis of this paper, supported by experience developing large open-source frameworks supporting real-world streaming use cases, is that the SQL language and relational model as-is and with minor non-intrusive extensions, can be very effective for manipulation of streaming data.

Many of the ideas presented here are already implemented by Apache Beam, Calcite, and Flink in some form, as one option amongst several. The streaming SQL interface has been adopted by Alibaba, Hauwei, Lyft, Uber and others, with the following feedback presented to the authors as to why they made this choice:

  • Development and adoption costs are significantly lower compared to non-declarative stream processing APIs
  • Familiarity with standard SQL eases adoption Continue reading

Intro Guide to Dockerfile Best Practices

There are over one million Dockerfiles on GitHub today, but not all Dockerfiles are created equally. Efficiency is critical, and this blog series will cover five areas for Dockerfile best practices to help you write better Dockerfiles: incremental build time, image size, maintainability, security and repeatability. If you’re just beginning with Docker, this first blog post is for you! The next posts in the series will be more advanced.

Important note: the tips below follow the journey of ever-improving Dockerfiles for an example Java project based on Maven. The last Dockerfile is thus the recommended Dockerfile, while all intermediate ones are there only to illustrate specific best practices.

Incremental build time

In a development cycle, when building a Docker image, making code changes, then rebuilding, it is important to leverage caching. Caching helps to avoid running build steps again when they don’t need to.

Tip #1: Order matters for caching

However, the order of the build steps (Dockerfile instructions) matters, because when a step’s cache is invalidated by changing files or modifying lines in the Dockerfile, subsequent steps of their cache will break. Order your steps from least to most frequently changing steps to optimize caching.

Tip #2: Continue reading

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