Episode 41 – The Value of Networking Labs for Production

If you’ve been in networking for any time, you’ve likely had to lab something up to learn a new technology or study for a certification, but labs can be so much more than learning tools. In today’s episode Jody Lemoine and Iain Leiter join Network Collective to talk about practical uses for labs outside of the classroom.

 

We would like to thank VIAVI Solutions for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. VIAVI Solutions is an application and network management industry leader focusing on end-user experience by providing products that optimize performance and speed problem resolution. Helping to ensure delivery of critical applications for businesses worldwide, Viavi offers an integrated line of precision-engineered software and hardware systems for effective network monitoring and analysis. Learn more at www.viavisolutions.com/networkcollective.

 

Jody Lemoine
Guest
Iain Leiter
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

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 Episode 41 – The Value of Networking Labs for Production appeared first on Network Collective.

Qualcomm makes it official; no more data center chip

A layoff of 269 people in a company of 33,000 usually isn’t noteworthy, but given where the layoffs hit, it’s notable. Qualcomm has signaled the end of the road for Centriq, its ARM-based server processor, which never got out of the starting gate.U.S. companies have to notify their state employment of layoffs 60 days before they happen, making these events less of a surprise as reporters get wind of them. A letter from Qualcomm to its home city of San Diego said 125 people would be let go on February 6, while a note to officials in Raleigh, North Carolina, says 144 people also will be cut loose.The news is a repeat of what happened last June, right down to the number of people let go and cities impacted. The cuts target several divisions, one of which is the company's data center division, which was barely staffed to begin with. The Information, which first reported on the layoffs, says the data center group will be down to just 50 people after a peak of more than 1,000. That includes the head of the group, Anand Chandrasekher, a former Intel executive.To read this article in full, please click here

Qualcomm makes it official; no more data center chip

A layoff of 269 people in a company of 33,000 usually isn’t noteworthy, but given where the layoffs hit, it’s notable. Qualcomm has signaled the end of the road for Centriq, its ARM-based server processor, which never got out of the starting gate.U.S. companies have to notify their state employment of layoffs 60 days before they happen, making these events less of a surprise as reporters get wind of them. A letter from Qualcomm to its home city of San Diego said 125 people would be let go on February 6, while a note to officials in Raleigh, North Carolina, says 144 people also will be cut loose.The news is a repeat of what happened last June, right down to the number of people let go and cities impacted. The cuts target several divisions, one of which is the company's data center division, which was barely staffed to begin with. The Information, which first reported on the layoffs, says the data center group will be down to just 50 people after a peak of more than 1,000. That includes the head of the group, Anand Chandrasekher, a former Intel executive.To read this article in full, please click here

More consistent LuaJIT performance

More consistent LuaJIT performance

This is a guest post by Laurence Tratt, who is a programmer and Reader in Software Development in the Department of Informatics at King's College London where he leads the Software Development Team. He is also an EPSRC Fellow.

A year ago I wrote about a project that Cloudflare were funding at King's College London to help improve LuaJIT. Our twelve months is now up. How did we do?

The first thing that happened is that I was lucky to employ a LuaJIT expert, Thomas Fransham, to work on the project. His deep knowledge about LuaJIT was crucial to getting things up and running – 12 months might sound like a long time, but it soon whizzes by!

The second thing that happened was that we realised that the current state of Lua benchmarking was not good enough for anyone to reliably tell if they'd improved LuaJIT performance or not. Different Lua implementations had different benchmark suites, mostly on the small side, and not easily compared. Although it wasn't part of our original plan, we thus put a lot of effort into creating a larger benchmark suite. This sounds like a trivial job, but it isn't. Many programs make Continue reading

KubeCon 2018 Day 2 Keynote

This is a liveblog of the day 2 (Wednesday) keynotes at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, WA. For additional KubeCon 2018 coverage, check out other articles tagged KubeCon2018.

Kicking off the day 2 keynotes, Liz Rice takes the stage at 9:02am (same time as yesterday, making me wonder if my clock is off by 2 minutes). Rice immediately brings out Janet Kuo, Software Engineer at Google and co-chair with Rice of the KubeCon/CloudNativeCon event program. Kuo will be delivering a Kubernetes project update.

Kuo starts off by reiterating the announcement of the Kubernetes 1.13 release, and looking back on her very first commit to Kubernetes in 2015 (just prior to the 1.0 release and the formation of the CNCF). Kuo talks about how Kubernetes, as a software cycle, has matured through the cycle of first focusing on innovation, then expanding to include scale, and finally expanding again to include stability (critical for enterprise adopters).

Reviewing usage details, Kuo states that she believes Kubernetes has moved—in the context of the technology adoption curve—from early adopters to early majority, the first phase in the mainstream market (and, for those who think in these terms, has crossed the chasm). However, this also Continue reading

Juniper CTO talks cloud, high-speed networking

Cloud computing is changing everything – just ask Juniper CTO Bikash Koley.Along with that notion Koley says that there are a number of certainties about the future of building out large cloud infrastructures: Multicloud is a real inflection point for enterprises and service providers; there will be private clouds and that the way all infrastructure will be built going forward will be different from the way things are done today.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] juniper Bikash KoleyTo read this article in full, please click here

How we selected 10 hot data-center virtualization startups to watch

The selection process for our roundup of 10 data-center virtualization startups to watch began with 33 recommendations and nominations that were sent via HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, and subscribers to the Startup50 email newsletter.Several of those startups had to be eliminated right off the bat not because they wouldn’t be a good fit for this roundup – they would be – but because they had already been covered in previous roundups, including those focused on storage, hybrid cloud and business continuity.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper CTO talks cloud, high-speed networking

Cloud computing is changing everything – just ask Juniper CTO Bikash Koley.Along with that notion Koley says that there are a number of certainties about the future of building out large cloud infrastructures: Multicloud is a real inflection point for enterprises and service providers; there will be private cloud;s and that the way all infrastructure will be built going forward will be different from the way things are done today.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] juniper Bikash KoleyTo read this article in full, please click here

How we selected 10 hot data-center virtualization startups to watch

The selection process for our roundup of 10 data-center virtualization startups to watch began with 33 recommendations and nominations that were sent via HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, and subscribers to the Startup50 email newsletter.Several of those startups had to be eliminated right off the bat not because they wouldn’t be a good fit for this roundup – they would be – but because they had already been covered in previous roundups, including those focused on storage, hybrid cloud and business continuity.To read this article in full, please click here

GraphIt: A high-performance graph DSL

GraphIt: a high-performance graph DSL Zhang et al., OOPSLA’18

See also: http://graphit-lang.org/.

The problem with finding the optimal algorithm and data structures for a given problem is that so often it depends. This is especially true when it comes to graph algorithms.

It is difficult to implement high-performance graph algorithms. The performance bottlenecks of these algorithms depend not only on the algorithm and the underlying hardware, but also on the size and structure of the graph. As a result, different algorithms running on the same machine, or even the same algorithm running with different types of graph on the same machine, can exhibit different performance bottlenecks.

What we’d like therefore, is some way of expressing a graph algorithm at a high level such that we can map it into different implementations, each applying different optimisations as needed. For bonus points, we could then automate the search within the optimisation space to find the best performing combination for the circumstances at hand.

This is exactly what GraphIt does. GraphIt combines a DSL for specifying graph algorithms with a separate scheduling language that determines implementation policy. You can specify a schedule yourself, or use autotuning to discover optimal schedules for Continue reading

Notes about hacking with drop tools

In this report, Kasperky found Eastern European banks hacked with Raspberry Pis and "Bash Bunnies" (DarkVishnya). I thought I'd write up some more detailed notes on this.

Drop tools

A common hacking/pen-testing technique is to drop a box physically on the local network. On this blog, there are articles going back 10 years discussing this. In the old days, this was done with $200 "netbook" (cheap notebook computers). These days, it can be done with $50 "Raspberry Pi" computers, or even $25 consumer devices reflashed with Linux.

A "Raspberry Pi" is a $35 single board computer, for which you'll need to add about another $15 worth of stuff to get it running (power supply, flash drive, and cables). These are extremely popular hobbyist computers that are used everywhere from home servers, robotics, and hacking. They have spawned a large number of clones, like the ODROID, Orange Pi, NanoPi, and so on. With a quad-core, 1.4 GHz, single-issue processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and typically at least 8 gigs of flash, these are pretty powerful computers.

Typically what you'd do is install Kali Linux. This is a Linux "distro" that contains all the tools hackers want to Continue reading
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