Un triste début d’année pour le Congo

À peine la page du calendrier tournée que nous constatons plus de troubles sur Internet.

Aujourd’hui, Cloudflare peut confirmer, chiffres à l’appui, qu’Internet a été coupé en République Démocratique du Congo, information précédemment révélée par de multiples organes de presse. Cette coupure a eu lieu alors que se déroulait l’élection présidentielle le 30 Décembre dernier, et perdure pendant la publication des résultats.

Tristement, cette situation est loin d’être une nouveauté. Nous avons fait état d'événements similaires par le passé, y compris lors d’une autre coupure d’Internet en RDC il y a moins d’un an. Une courbe malheureusement bien familière est aujourd’hui visible sur notre plateforme de gestion du réseau, montrant que le trafic dans le pays atteint péniblement un quart de son niveau habituel.

Notez que le diagramme est gradué en temps UTC, et que la capitale de la RDC Kinshasa est dans le fuseau horaire GMT+1.

La chute du trafic a démarré en milieu de journée le 31 Décembre 2018 (à environ 10h30 UTC, soit 11h30 heure locale à Kinshasa). Celà est d’autant plus frappant quand sont superposées toutes les courbes quotidiennes:

Ci-dessus, la courbe rouge représente le trafic du 31 Décembre, et les courbes grises celui des 8 Continue reading

Sad start to the new year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The calendar has barely flipped to 2019 and already we’re seeing Internet disruptions.

Today, Cloudflare can quantitatively confirm that Internet access has been shut down in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, information already reported by many press organisations. This shutdown occurred as the presidential election was taking place on December the 30th, and continues as the results are published.

Sadly, this act is far from unprecedented. We have published many posts about events like this in the past, including a different post about roughly three days of Internet disruption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo less than a year ago. A painfully familiar shape can be seen on our network monitoring platform, showing that the traffic in the country is barely reaching a quarter of its typical level:

Note that the graph is based on UTC and Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital Kinshasa has the timezone of GMT+1.

The drop in bandwidth started just before midday on 31 December 2018 (around 10:30 UTC, 11:30 local time in Kinshasa). This can be clearly seen if we overlay each 24 hour day over each other:

The red line is 31 December, the gray lines the previous eight days. Looking Continue reading

Ryuk Ransomware Takes Down Cloud Hosting Provider’s Systems

Threat researchers linked Ryuk to the North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus Group believed to be behind the WannaCry attack.

Kernel of Truth episode 10: 2019 predictions

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Click here for our previous episode.

As we enter the year, many, if not most, organizations have already been engaging in 2019 planning and strategizing. With that in mind, we thought what better way to wrap up our first season of Kernel of Truth than with an episode dedicated to trends and predictions straight from the brains of some of Cumulus’ brightest — CTO and Co-founder, JR Rivers, TME manager Pete Lumbis, and consultant David Marshall.

Join as we as discuss EVPN, virtualization, keeping up with the demands of digital transformation and more. This will be our last episode of the season, with our next season kicking off later this month.

Guest Bios

JR Rivers: JR is a co-founder and CTO of Cumulus Networks where he works on company, technology, and product direction. JR’s early involvement in home-grown networking at Google and as the VP of System Architecture for Cisco’s Unified Computing System both helped fine tunehis perspective on networking for the modern datacenter. Follow him on Twitter at @JRCumulus

Pete Lumbis: Pete is a Technical Marketing Engineer at Cumulus Networks. He helps Continue reading

2018 was a good and busy year ! Things I have done during the last year

2018 is done! I wanted to share what I have done during the last year.   During 2018, probably the biggest decision for me was establishing a company in Turkey.   This photo was taken during a CCDE Bootcamp 10 days after I opened an office in Istanbul. Before I established an Office, I was …

Continue reading "2018 was a good and busy year ! Things I have done during the last year"

The post 2018 was a good and busy year ! Things I have done during the last year appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Asterisk on Raspberry Pi

RaspPBX is a project which brings the free and open source Asterisk and FreePBX into Raspberry Pi board. RaspPBX turns Pi into a communications server which can be used by small businesses with up to 12 extensions. FreePBX is a web-based open source GUI  that controls and manages Asterisk. Our goal is to show installation of the latest RaspPBX into Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2.

The latest image available for download includes Asterisk 13.20.0 and FreePBX 14.0.2.10.

1. Download, Extract and Copy RaspPBX Image to SD Card

$ wget http://download.raspberry-asterisk.org/raspbx-04-04-2018.zip
$ sudo dd bs=4M if=raspbx-04-04-2018.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 status=progress conv=fsync
$ unzip raspbx-04-04-2018.zip

2. Utilize all space on your SD card

By default the image utilizes only 4GB of your SD card space. Login to the console with username root and password raspberry and issue the command below.

# raspi-config

Navigate to Advanced Options-> A1 Expand Filesystem Ensures that all of the SD card storage is available to the OS. The filesystem will be enlarged upon the next reboot.

3. Configure Static IP Address

Set static IP address for interface eth0.

# echo "interface eth0" >> /etc/dhcpcd.conf
# echo Continue reading

BGP Implicit and Explicit Withdraw

BGP Implicit and Explicit Withdraw are important BGP messages. Understanding these two mechanisms not only help for understanding BGP convergence but also helps for BGP path diversity.    While I was explaining BGP Add-Path in my Instructor Led CCDE course, I used the term ‘BGP Implicit Withdraw’ Then someone asked what is ‘ BGP Explicit …

Continue reading "BGP Implicit and Explicit Withdraw"

The post BGP Implicit and Explicit Withdraw appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Whither Network Engineering? (Part 1)

An article on successful writers who end up driving delivery trucks. My current reading in epistemology for an upcoming PhD seminar. An article on the bifurcation of network engineering skills. Several conversations on various slacks I participate in. What do these things have in common? Just this:

What is to become of network engineering?

While it seems obvious network engineering is changing, it is not so easy to say how it is changing, and how network engineers can survive those changes. To better understand these things, it is good to back up and take in a larger view. A good place to start is to think about how networks are built today.

Networks today are built using an appliance and circuit model. To build a network, an “engineer” (we can argue over the meaning of that word) tries to gauge how much traffic needs to be moved between different points in the business’ geographical space, and then tries to understand the shape of that traffic. Is it layer 2, or layer 3? Which application needs priority over some other application?

Once this set of requirements is drawn up, a long discussion over the right appliances and circuits to purchase to Continue reading

Response: Modchips, Hardware Implants and Bloomberg falsehoods

This video was presented at the 35C3 conference in Germany last week. The presenter is highly credible on the topic. Hardware implants and supply chain attacks have been in the news recently, but how feasible are they and what can we do about them? In this talk we’ll examine the design of a proof of […]

The post Response: Modchips, Hardware Implants and Bloomberg falsehoods appeared first on EtherealMind.

AT&T Sells Its Colocation Data Centres

AT&T has finally found a buyer for its colocation business. AT&T Inc announced today that it has completed the sale of its data center colocation operations and assets to Brookfield Infrastructure and its institutional partners (“Brookfield”). The company previously announced a strategic alliance with Brookfield that included the transfer of these operations and assets. Why […]

The post AT&T Sells Its Colocation Data Centres appeared first on EtherealMind.

Nokia Names Fixed Networks Biz Leader, Access Networks Remains Headless

Sandra Motley was named president of the Fixed Networks Business organization. She previously served as COO of that group and will now report directly to Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri.

Flor de Ceibo Conecta2: Sharing Experiences

Today’s guest author is María Julia Morales González, the “Flor de Ceibo Conecta2” project manager and a professor at the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Space of the University of the Republic Uruguay.

The Internet Society Uruguay Chapter, in partnership with the The University of the Republic and the Consejo de Formación en Educación, as well as with financial support from the Beyond the Net Funding Programme, has taken significant steps to help children and teenagers to develop digital skills in a creative and innovative way in three of the nineteen segments in which Uruguay is politically divided: Paysandú, Rivera, and Salto. Their project Flor de Ceibo Conecta2 aims to train young people from disadvantaged communities using digital resources in creative and challenging classes to help them improve their everyday lives and expand their chances for a better future.

Hoy queremos acercarles 2 experiencias que estamos transitando en el Proyecto Flor de Ceibo Conecta2.

Una de ellas se desarrolla en la ciudad de Salto en el liceo N° 7 del Barrio Artigas, zona de alta vulnerabilidad. Allí el equipo está trabajando en el uso de redes sociales y en particular en este taller en referencia al uso de whatsapp.

Se Continue reading

SK Telecom Gets the 5G Ball Rolling in 2019

The 5G juggernaut rumbles on with South Korea getting a headstart on announcements in the new year. Meanwhile, posts on Reddit indicate AT&T's 5G is underwhelming, so far.

IDG Contributor Network: Did IoT cyberattacks cause NY power transformers to explode?

Officials blamed a power surge for the blackout on Dec. 28th that left LaGuardia airport in the dark for about 45 minutes, grounding flights. A look at the trend of power outages at American airports shows a disturbing pattern and possibly sinister cause.Background Attacking an adversary’s infrastructure is asymmetrical warfare. It causes a lot of damage for a very small cost. Cyberattacks are an ideal weapon as they disguise who might be behind them, making retaliation much harder.  Attacks on the power grid for airports are especially devastating as they ground flights, stranding passengers and disrupting business nationwide. Just take a look at recent power outages:To read this article in full, please click here

History Of Networking – EVPN – Rahul Aggarwal

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – EVPN – Rahul Aggarwal appeared first on Network Collective.

How blockchain will transform the IoT

Two giant industrials, Bosch and Volkswagen, are among companies that are taking seriously the idea that the Internet of Things (IoT) and decentralized data marketplaces should co-exist. That means a type of "blockchain meets IoT" is likely in our future.Both German organizations have recently teamed up with fellow-country, decentralized transactional platform IOTA on various development projects. IOTA’s Tangle is a transactional data transfer and settlement system for connected devices.[Also see our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] Bosch announced in November that it intends to use a combination of its XDK (Cross Domain development Kit) product (an IoT prototyping and programmable sensor module used as a come-on to get organizations to work with Bosch on custom mass production and series engineering), and morph XDK with IOTA marketplace along a masked communications channel.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: India Pushes for Sites to Remove ‘Unlawful’ Content, Break Encryption

Not this again: India’s government wants websites and social media platforms to remove content regulators determine as “unlawful” within 24 hours and to create automated tools to identify this material, BuzzFeed reports. The government also wants the tech companies to trace the source of the content, requiring platforms like WhatsApp to break encryption. This follows passage of an Australian law that forces online services to provide the government there with encryption workarounds.

The Wire of India defends the proposal, however, saying it’s aimed at holding websites and social media platform more responsible for the content they distribute.

More blocking: The government of Sudan has shut down most Internet access in the country and blocked access to social media platforms, Rogue Media Labs says. The government blamed the shutdown on massive protests over income inequality and other issues.

Missed assignments: In a related story, some college students in the Indian region of Kashmir have missed deadlines for submitting online application forms of their bachelors of education examination because of frequent and lengthy Internet shutdowns there, reports Kashmir Reader. Students are asking the University of Kashmir to extend its deadline.

Blockchain vs. national security? An ex-CIA official is targeting blockchain, saying the Continue reading

SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles of 2018

Cisco lays off hundreds in California; Cisco updates its routers with SD-WAN; and all the details of Verizon's outsourcing deal.

Six IoT predictions for 2019

This time of year, it can seem like the world is swimming in predictions for the new year, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is no exception. In fact, in fast-evolving areas like IoT, multitudes of trends and opportunities and challenges are in play, making predictions ridiculously easy — just about anything can happen, and probably will.[ Also read: Gartner’s top 10 IoT trends for 2019 and beyond | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] So, my goal here is to identify a set of IoT predictions that are both likely to happen … and likely to have a significant impact on the development and implementation of the technology.To read this article in full, please click here

Six IoT predictions for 2019

This time of year, it can seem like the world is swimming in predictions for the new year, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is no exception. In fact, in fast-evolving areas like IoT, multitudes of trends and opportunities and challenges are in play, making predictions ridiculously easy — just about anything can happen, and probably will.[ Also read: Gartner’s top 10 IoT trends for 2019 and beyond | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] So, my goal here is to identify a set of IoT predictions that are both likely to happen … and likely to have a significant impact on the development and implementation of the technology.To read this article in full, please click here