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

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

Smart Data: The Secret Weapon Underpinning the Cloud

2019 Is The King of Content

2018 was a year full of excitement and fun. And for me, it was a year full of writing quite a bit. Not only did keep up my writing here for my audience but I also wrote quite a few posts for GestaltIT.com. You can find a list of all the stuff I wrote right here. I took a lot of briefings from up-and-coming companies as well as talking to some other great companies and writing a couple of series about SD-WAN.

It was also a big year for the Gestalt IT Rundown. My co-host with most Rich Stroffolino (@MrAnthropology) and I had a lot of fun looking at news from enterprise IT and some other fun chipset and cryptocurrency news. And I’ve probably burned my last few bridges with Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg to boot. I look forward to recording these episodes every Wednesday and I hope that some of you will join us on the Gestalt IT Facebook page at 12:30 EST as well.

Content Coming Your Way

So, what does that leave in store for 2019? Well, since I hate predictions on an industry scale, that means taking a look at what I Continue reading

CircleCI, Docker and Systemd

I have been battling to get the combination of CircleCI, Docker and systemd to play together. After much frustration, I have a workable solution. Machine Executor, privileged: true, cgroup passthrough, and disabling AppArmor.

Background: CircleCI for Ansible Linting & Checks

In the StackStorm team we use CircleCI with most of our repositories. We check things like code style checks, and run unit tests. With every Pull Request we trigger these checks, and checks must pass before merging. Some repos also use CircleCI for post-merge deployment steps.

We use Ansible and Terraform to manage some of our internal infrastructure. All configurations are stored in Git. All changes to that configuration must be submitted as a Pull Request. All PRs need approval, and all commit checks must pass. We use CircleCI to run these commit checks.

We run multiple checks, but for Ansible playbooks, they include using ansible-lint, and ansible-playbook --syntax-check. We then spin up a Docker container using CircleCI and run some of our playbooks twice, checking that it passes both times, and that the second run records no changes.

Here’s a snippet of some of our CircleCI configuration:

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 Continue reading

CircleCI, Docker and Systemd

I have been battling to get the combination of CircleCI, Docker and systemd to play together. After much frustration, I have a workable solution. Machine Executor, privileged: true, cgroup passthrough, and disabling AppArmor.

Background: CircleCI for Ansible Linting & Checks

In the StackStorm team we use CircleCI with most of our repositories. We check things like code style checks, and run unit tests. With every Pull Request we trigger these checks, and checks must pass before merging. Some repos also use CircleCI for post-merge deployment steps.

We use Ansible and Terraform to manage some of our internal infrastructure. All configurations are stored in Git. All changes to that configuration must be submitted as a Pull Request. All PRs need approval, and all commit checks must pass. We use CircleCI to run these commit checks.

We run multiple checks, but for Ansible playbooks, they include using ansible-lint, and ansible-playbook --syntax-check. We then spin up a Docker container using CircleCI and run some of our playbooks twice, checking that it passes both times, and that the second run records no changes.

Here’s a snippet of some of our CircleCI configuration:

1
2
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5
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9
 Continue reading

CircleCI, Docker and Systemd

I have been battling to get the combination of CircleCI, Docker and systemd to play together. After much frustration, I have a workable solution. Machine Executor, privileged: true, cgroup passthrough, and disabling AppArmor.

Background: CircleCI for Ansible Linting & Checks

In the StackStorm team we use CircleCI with most of our repositories. We check things like code style checks, and run unit tests. With every Pull Request we trigger these checks, and checks must pass before merging. Some repos also use CircleCI for post-merge deployment steps.

We use Ansible and Terraform to manage some of our internal infrastructure. All configurations are stored in Git. All changes to that configuration must be submitted as a Pull Request. All PRs need approval, and all commit checks must pass. We use CircleCI to run these commit checks.

We run multiple checks, but for Ansible playbooks, they include using ansible-lint, and ansible-playbook --syntax-check. We then spin up a Docker container using CircleCI and run some of our playbooks twice, checking that it passes both times, and that the second run records no changes.

Here’s a snippet of some of our CircleCI configuration:

version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    working_directory:  Continue reading

Keep Pace with Network Infrastructure Tech Changes in 2019

How to hide (obfuscate) SSH traffic using obfs4

Overview

In the previous post, I talked about pt-spec-v1 and obfs4 and explained how obfs4proxy can be setup and used outside of Tor. You are advised to read it to get the most out of this post.

In this post I’m going to give you a real example of obfs4proxy being used to obfuscate SSH traffic.

For this, I’ll be using two Ubuntu 18.04 Servers. But with a little to no adjustment, any other decent distro should work.

Assumptions

• Both server and client are running Ubuntu 18.04 Server
• Server IP address is 10.0.0.1
• Client can access the obfs4proxy server port (2222 in our example)

Common configurations

These are configurations that needed on both sides:

Installing obfs4proxy

You can either compile it from source or use your distro’s repository:

sudo sh -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install obfs4proxy'

Setting up the user and pt_state

There should be no reason to run obfs4proxy as root. So we create a dedicated user/group for it:

sudo adduser \
  --system \
  --home "/var/lib/obfs4proxy-ssh/" \
  --shell "/usr/sbin/nologin" \
  --group \
  --gecos "obfs4proxy for ssh" \
  obfs4-ssh

Note that in the process, we also made a home directory with the Continue reading

NAT64Check Version 2 is launched!

With the New Year comes the launch of NAT64Check version 2 from the Internet Society. The first version of NAT64Check was introduced a couple of years ago and has proved very popular and successful, so for the past year we’ve been working on a number of enhancements in response to feedback and requests. And we’re very happy to be able to make the new version available as we welcome in 2019.

NAT64Check is a tool developed by the Internet Society in collaboration with Stichting IPv6 Nederland, Go6, SJM Steffann, Internetbureau Max and Simply Understand. This allows you to enter the URL of a particular website, and then run tests over IPv4, IPv6 and NAT64 in order to check whether the website is actually reachable in each case, whether identical web pages are returned, and whether all the resources such as images, stylesheets and scripts load correctly. It also compares responsiveness using the different protocols, therefore  allowing network and system administrators to easily identify anything is ‘broken’, to pinpoint where any non-IPv6 compatible elements need to be fixed.

The original version of NAT64Check though, ran on two separate servers at Go6 and the IPv6 Lab which each had a limited view of the Internet Continue reading

2019 Goals

2019 Goals

How to Transition to DevOps in Less Than 30 Days

On Thinking About Infrastructure as Code

I just finished reading Cindy Sridharan’s excellent post titled “Effective Mental Models for Code and Systems,” and some of the points Sridharan makes immediately jumped out to me—not for “traditional” code development, but for the development of infrastructure as code. Take a few minutes to go read the post—seriously, it’s really good. Done reading it? Good, now we can proceed.

Some of these thoughts I was going to share in a planned presentation at Interop ITX in May 2019, but since I’m unable to speak at the conference this year due to schedule conflicts (my son’s graduation from college and a major anniversary trip for me and Crystal), I figured now was as good a time as any, especially given the timing of Sridharan’s post. Also, a lot of these thoughts stem from a discussion with a colleague at work, which in turn led to this Full Stack Journey podcast on practical infrastructure as code.

Anyway, let me get back to Sridharan’s post. One of the things that jumped out to me right away was Sridharan’s proposed hierarchy of needs for code:

As you can see in the image (full credit for which belongs to Sridharan, as far Continue reading

7 Enterprise Infrastructure Predictions for 2019

The Linux Migration: December 2018 Progress Report

In December 2016, I kicked off a migration from macOS to Linux as my primary laptop OS. Throughout 2017, I chronicled my progress and challenges along the way; links to all those posts are found here. Although I stopped the migration in August 2017, I restarted it in April 2018 when I left VMware to join Heptio. In this post, I’d like to recap where things stand as of December 2018, after 8 months of full-time use of Linux as my primary laptop OS.

I’ll structure this post roughly as a blend of the formats I used in my April 2017 and July 2017 progress reports.

Hardware

Readers may recall that I was using a Dell Latitude E7370 (see my E7370 hardware review) up until August 2017, when I put the Linux migration on hold indefinitely due to productivity concerns. Upon moving to Heptio, I switched to a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (see here for my review of the X1 Carbon—the “TL;DR” is that I love it). In my home office, the X1 Carbon connects to a USB-C expansion hub that provides connectivity to a 34” 21:9 ultrawide curved monitor, external HD webcam, and a USB headset for Zoom Continue reading