QAA: How Important is it to Understand Hardware Architecture?

This question on reddit  For example, I’m going through a Cisco Live presentation on troubleshooting ASR routers, and the first 50 slides or so are completely dedicated to describing the Route Processors, Packet Engines, ASICs, Buffers, etc., and the different paths that packets can take through the hardware. While that’s all obviously important to the […]

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Cisco’s 2960-XR switch line: An affordable, under-utilized option

As we head towards the end of the year and end of our budgets, my engineers are reminding everyone that the Cisco 2960-XR family is an affordable and under-utilized option compared to other switch siblings in the Cisco 2960 family.The 2960-XR Series switches provide easy device onboarding, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. These fully managed switches can provide advanced Layer 2 and Layer 3 features, as well as optional Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) power. The switches deliver enhanced application visibility, network reliability, and network resiliency that continues to make it a great networking choice.Since the 2960-XR switches are part of the 2960-X family, users will be familiar with the switches port counts and types, the identical levels of PoE+, and the identical stacking module/capability. But be sure to read on, as I have more to say about stacking.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco’s 2960-XR switch line: An affordable, under-utilized option

As we head towards the end of the year and end of our budgets, my engineers are reminding everyone that the Cisco 2960-XR family is an affordable and under-utilized option compared to other switch siblings in the Cisco 2960 family.The 2960-XR Series switches provide easy device onboarding, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. These fully managed switches can provide advanced Layer 2 and Layer 3 features, as well as optional Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) power. The switches deliver enhanced application visibility, network reliability, and network resiliency that continues to make it a great networking choice.Since the 2960-XR switches are part of the 2960-X family, users will be familiar with the switches port counts and types, the identical levels of PoE+, and the identical stacking module/capability. But be sure to read on, as I have more to say about stacking.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: Fallout from Australia’s Anti-Encryption Law

A lack of support: Australia’s new law requiring technology companies to give law enforcement agencies access to customers’ encrypted communications isn’t so popular with the public, The Economist reports. The government there received 343 public comments leading up to the vote in favor of the law, and only one person expressed support.

Minor offenses: Meanwhile, critics of the Australian law say it may be used to target suspects of minor crimes, The Guardian says. The law is neither “appropriate or proportionate,” one lawyer says. One of Australia’s spy chiefs is defending the law, however, saying it will be used to target terrorists, pedophiles, and other criminals, not law-abiding citizens, ABC News Australia reports.

Getting tough: The Russian parliament is planning to vote on a package of bills intended to increase penalties for spreading fake news, Euronews reports. One of the bills would allow for fines and a short jail sentence for people “expressing obvious disrespect” for society and state officials. The Dutch government is taking a different approach to fake news, by planning an online campaign to make voters aware of disinformation and help them recognize it, NLTimes says.

China vs. trolls: The Chinese government has detained 30 members of Continue reading

Working with tarballs on Linux

The word “tarball” is often used to describe the type of file used to back up a select group of files and join them into a single file. The name comes from the .tar file extension and the tar command that is used to group together the files into a single file that is then sometimes compressed to make it smaller for its move to another system.Tarballs are often used to back up personal or system files in place to create an archive, especially prior to making changes that might have to be reversed. Linux sysadmins, for example, will often create a tarball containing a series of configuration files before making changes to an application just in case they have to reverse those changes. Extracting the files from a tarball that’s sitting in place will generally be faster than having to retrieve the files from backups.To read this article in full, please click here

Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective

Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective Hazelwood et al., _HPCA’18 _

This is a wonderful glimpse into what it’s like when machine learning comes to pervade nearly every part of a business, with implications top-to-bottom through the whole stack. It’s amazing to step back and think just how fundamentally software systems have changed over the last decade in this regard.

Just how pervasive is machine learning at Facebook?

  • “At Facebook, machine learning provides key capabilities in driving nearly all aspects of user experience… Machine learning is applied pervasively across nearly all services.”
  • “Facebook funnels a large fraction of all stored data through machine learning pipelines, and this fraction is increasing over time to improve model quality.”
  • “Looking forward, Facebook expects rapid growth in machine learning across existing and new services…. Over time, most services indicate a trend toward leveraging increased amounts of user data.. the training data sets are trending towards continued and sometimes dramatic growth.”

The modern user-experience is increasingly powered by machine learning models, and the quality of those models depends directly on the volume and quality of the data powering them: “For many machine learning models Continue reading

Internet Economics

The way in which we communicate, and the manner, richness and reach of our communications has a profound impact on the shape and function of our economy and our society, so its perhaps entirely proper that considerations of the manner in which we develop and tune public policies in this industry take place in open forums. One way is to bring together the various facets of how we build, operate and use the Internet and look at these activities from a perspective of economics and public policy.

GE rolls out its industrial IoT platform Predix out into separate company

GE has spun off its industrial internet of things platform into a separate company while making other changes including selling off its interest in field-service software  ServiceMax.These moves shake up of the company’s GE Digital division and also include parting ways with the group’s CEO, Bill Ruh.Predix is GE's ingestion and processing platform for industrial operations data, developed with the idea of providing a standardized way for companies to utilize the information coming from their sensor-equipped industrial gear. One business might use the software, which is delivered in a PaaS format, as a way to automate reliability and maintenance for production line equipment, another might use it to track whether a generator is in danger of breaking down.To read this article in full, please click here

Tools: Dark Mode Chrome Extension

“Eye Care” Add dark mode to Chrome via extension. Source seems to check out.  Source Web Site:  Dark Reader – https://darkreader.org/ Also has extension for Firefox and Safari.  Link: Dark Reader – Chrome Web Store – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh/related Side Note: All those years of brightest possible monitors declaiming about number of NITS a screen and now […]

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Notes on Build Hardening

I thought I'd comment on a paper about "build safety" in consumer products, describing how software is built to harden it against hackers trying to exploit bugs.

What is build safety?

Modern languages (Java, C#, Go, Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc.) are inherently "safe", meaning they don't have "buffer-overflows" or related problems.

However, C/C++ is "unsafe", and is the most popular language for building stuff that interacts with the network. In other cases, while the language itself may be safe, it'll use underlying infrastructure ("libraries") written in C/C++. When we are talking about hardening builds, making them safe or security, we are talking about C/C++.

In the last two decades, we've improved both hardware and operating-systems around C/C++ in order to impose safety on it from the outside. We do this with  options when the software is built (compiled and linked), and then when the software is run.

That's what the paper above looks at: how consumer devices are built using these options, and thereby, measuring the security of these devices.

In particular, we are talking about the Linux operating system here and the GNU compiler gcc. Consumer products almost always use Linux these Continue reading

Enhance Security with NSX Cloud and Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure

While virtual desktops have successfully helped address security and operational challenges, IT organizations still have concerns about a growing threat landscape and an expanded security perimeter that they need to protect, especially in public cloud environments. Malware, phishing, and other emerging advanced threats can be used to compromise a virtual desktop to serve as jumping off point for an attacker to move laterally into the rest of the network.  Until now, customers could secure their VMware Horizon deployments in on-premises data centers with VMware NSX. We are happy to announce that NSX can now also secure virtual workloads deployed by VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, providing a more robust security posture in cloud-hosted virtual desktop environments in Microsoft Azure.

It’s been a great year for Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. This service offering allows customers to easily pair their own Microsoft Azure capacity with the intuitive Horizon Cloud control to quickly deliver virtual desktops and apps to end-users in a matter of hours. There is a lot of momentum from customers as they adopt Horizon Cloud to deliver virtual desktops and application from their own Microsoft Azure infrastructure to any device, anywhere.

One of the key features of the Continue reading

Some Random Thoughts From Security Field Day

I’m spending the week in some great company at Security Field Day with awesome people. They’re really making me think about security in some different ways. Between our conversations going to the presentations and the discussions we’re having after hours, I’m starting to see some things that I didn’t notice before.

  • Security is a hard thing to get into because it’s so different everywhere. Where everyone just sees one big security community, it is in fact a large collection of small communities. Thinking that there is just one security community would be much more like thinking enterprise networking, wireless networking, and service provider networking are the same space. They may all deal with packets flying across the wires but they are very different under the hood. Security is a lot of various communities with the name in common.
  • Security isn’t about tools. It’s not about software or hardware or a product you can buy. It’s about thinking differently. It’s about looking at the world through a different lens. How to protect something. How to attack something. How to figure all of that out. That’s not something you learn from a book or a course. It’s a way of adjusting your Continue reading

Reading Between the MLPerf Lines

Every important benchmark needs to start somewhere.

The first round of MLperf results are in and while they might not deliver on what we would have expected in terms of processor diversity and a complete view into scalability and performance, they do shed light on some developments that go beyond sheer hardware when it comes to deep learning training. …

Reading Between the MLPerf Lines was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

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