New Year, New Post, NFDx!

You may be thinking “Wait, he hasn’t posted in ages.. how lazy is he?” but thankfully I haven’t been entirely slothful for the last seven months. Most recently I authored a series of six posts related to SDN and automation on the Solarwinds Orange Matter blog. I can’t republish that content here, but I will be sharing links to the posts in the coming days and I hope you’ll find them interesting and thought-provoking.

Cisco SP – Networking Field Day Exclusive!

More immediately, I’m preparing to start the new year with a quick trip to see Cisco’s Service Provider group at a Networking Field Day Exclusive event. I’ve seen the proposed agenda, and it looks like it’s going to be an intense day filled with the kind of topics that I know my readers will appreciate. As always, I’ll be posting about some of the topics covered (maybe even all of them…who knows?), but it’s even better if you can take part too.

The event takes place on Tuesday, January 15th, 2019. If you can, I recommend hopping on the live stream on Tech Field Day and then using the #TFDx hashtag on Twitter to join in the Continue reading

Windstream sells EarthLink consumer internet business

Another nail in the “telco cannot provide customised services” folder. Windstream sells its consumer business: “This transaction enables us to divest a non-core segment and focus exclusively on our two largest business units. In addition, it improves our credit profile and metrics in 2019 and beyond,” said Tony Thomas, president and CEO of Windstream. As […]

The post Windstream sells EarthLink consumer internet business appeared first on EtherealMind.

Investing in Indigenous Connectivity Is an Investment in Our Future Online

There’s one New Year’s resolution we can bank on to improve the health and livelihoods of millions of people across North America this year, and it doesn’t involve buying into health fads or gadgets.

The newly-released 2018 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) Community Report shows a strong correlation between Indigenous connectivity and the well-being and sustainability of rural and remote Indigenous communities, especially when solutions are local.

The report summarizes outcomes of the 2018 Indigenous Connectivity Summit that brought nearly 140 Indigenous leaders, policy makers, network operators, and community members to the Arctic community of Inuvik, NT last October.

Like most New Year’s resolutions, connectivity solutions are neither quick nor cheap. This is especially true in northern rural and remote regions of the U.S. and Canada with geographic hurdles that make it hard for Internet service providers to achieve economies of scale.

It’s one of the main reasons today in 2019, millions of people across North America – yes, millions – still don’t have access to reliable broadband Internet.

Last October, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities called on the federal government to invest $4 billion over ten years to connect all Canadians to the Canadian Radio-television and Communications Commission’s universal Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Massachusetts Town Says ‘No Thank You’ to Broadband Network

Build your own: A Massachusetts town has declined an offer from a major ISP to build a high-speed broadband network and instead will create its own, the Boston Globe reports. While a locally owned network will initially cost more, residents of Charlemont say they want local control and local customer service.

Congo shuts it off: The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has shut down the Internet in several cities after a much-delayed presidential election, the BBC reports. Opposition candidate Martin Fayulu’s campaign accused the government of ordering the shutdown to avoid broadcasting his “overwhelming victory.” The shutdown in the Congo shows that China’s philosophy of Internet censorship is spreading, CNN comments.

Bangladesh, too: Meanwhile, Bangladesh ordered its own mobile network shutdown related to an election, Engadget reports. The country’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission shut down 3G and 4G mobile data ahead of its Dec. 30 parliamentary elections to “prevent rumors and propaganda” from influencing the vote.

Blockchain marries IoT: Some large companies are looking for ways to use the blockchain technology with the Internet of Things, Network World says. Volkswagen is one of the companies, and automotive uses for blockchain include authenticating mileage for a lease return, or remote, Continue reading

5G versus 4G: How speed, latency and application support differ

You've probably already heard about 5G, the new cellular technology that's poised to bring massive change to both mobile and fixed wireless data networks. What you may be wondering is how 5G differs from 4G, the current cellular network standard, and what benefits the new technology will bring both enterprises and individual users.To bring you up to speed on 5G's structure and capabilities, and how it improves on 4G technology, here's a quick update:What is 5G? As the latest step forward in cellular network evolution, 5G will see untold thousands of small antennas deployed onto cell towers, utility poles, lampposts, buildings and other public and private structures. The technology, which is designed to supplement rather than replace current 4G networks, promises to accelerate cellular data transfer speeds from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps and beyond, a massive boost that will make next-generation wireless competitive with even the fastest fiber-optic wired networks.To read this article in full, please click here

VyOS 1.2.0 Epa2 Realased

Finally, VyOS 1.2 epa2 ISO live image is released to subscribers. VyOS is a Linux-based network operating system that provides software-based network routing, firewall, and VPN functionality.

Free subscription is available for contributors, nonprofits and educational and research institutions, and both long-time contributors. Everyone who contributed before the release model change gets a perpetual subscription, the amount of contributions doesn’t matter. After that, contributing within a given year will give us a yearly subscription. If you are not a subscriber you can still download VyOS rolling release or built the ISO image from the source code.

You can use my Bash and Expect scripts to automatize VyOS 1.2.0 installation to VMware disk image. The scripts are available in the Script (1.1) section. Firstly, run the script  deploy_vyos-1.2.0.sh and after the ISO images boots up, you can run the second script  install_vyos-1.2.0.sh. You can run the image using GNS3 project and test open-source routing.

Large Layer-2 Domains Strike Again…

I started January 2018 blogging with a major service provider failure. Why should 2019 be any different? Here’s what Century Link claimed was causing two-day outage (more comments here).

Supposedly it was a problem with the management network used by their optical gear, but it looks a lot like a layer-2 network spanning 15 data centers and no control-plane policing on the managed devices… proving yet again that large-scale layer-2 networks are a really bad idea.

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The tradeoffs of large scale learning

The tradeoffs of large scale learning Bottou & Bousquet, NIPS’07

Welcome to another year of The Morning Paper. As usual we’ll be looking at a broad cross-section of computer science research (I have over 40 conferences/workshops on my list to keep an eye on as a start!). I’ve no idea yet what papers we’ll stumble across, but if previous years are anything to go by I’m sure there’ll be plenty of great material to keep interest levels high.

To start us off, today’s paper choice is “The tradeoffs of large scale learning,” which won the ‘test of time’ award at NeurIPS last month.

this seminal work investigated the interplay between data and computation in ML, showing that if one is limited by computing power but can make use of a large dataset, it is more efficient to perform a small amount of computation on many individual training examples rather than to perform extensive computation on a subset of the data. [Google AI blog: The NeurIPS 2018 Test of Time Award].

For a given time/computation budget, are we better off performing a computationally cheaper (e.g., approximate) computation over lots of data, or a more accurate computation Continue reading

StackStorm ChatOps Integration

StackStorm is IFTTT for ops. Its original claim to fame was popularizing chat driven workflows for ops know as ChatOps. In this post I will cover integrating ST2 with Slack to enable ChatOps. Lab Environment The ST2 instance connects out to Slack which is a SAAS application. This means...
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