Juniper Nxtwork 2018 – Recap
The other week I had the privilege of attending Juniper Nxtwork 2018 in Las Vegas, NV. I have attended the …
The post Juniper Nxtwork 2018 – Recap appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.
Cloudflare Peering Portal – Beta
It can be a big deal for Internet users when Cloudflare rolls into town. After our recent Mongolia launch, we received lots of feedback from happy customers that all of a sudden, Internet performance noticeably improved.
As a result, it's not a surprising that we regularly receive requests from all over the world to either peer with our network, or to host a node. However, potential partners are always keen to know just how much traffic will be served over that link. What performance benefits can end-users expect? How much upstream traffic will the ISP save? What new bandwidth will they have available for traffic management?
Starting today, ISPs and hosting providers can request a login to the Cloudflare Peering Portal to find the answers to these questions. After validating ownership of your ASN, the Cloudflare network team will provide a login to the newly launched Peering Portal - Beta. You can find more information at: cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/
What problem does peering solve?
If you're new to the core infrastructure of the Internet, the best way to understand peering is to frame the problems it solves:
- Bandwidth costs money
- Internet users don't like slow websites
- Network operators have limited Continue reading
Highest Recommended SIP Trunk Providers, Friend to Friend
Would you recommend your SIP trunking provider to a friend? See which providers came out on top in the Eastern Management Group's customer satisfaction study that surveyed more than 3,000 IT managers.
Automation Win: Configure Cisco ACI with an Ansible Playbook
This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my mailing list. Subscribe here.
Following on his previous work with Cisco ACI Dirk Feldhaus decided to create an Ansible playbook that would create and configure a new tenant and provision a vSRX firewall for the tenant when working on the Create Network Services hands-on exercise in the Building Network Automation Solutions online course.
Read more ...LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation
LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation Shan et al., OSDI’18
One of the interesting trends in hardware is the proliferation and importance of dedicated accelerators as general purposes CPUs stopped benefitting from Moore’s law. At the same time we’ve seen networking getting faster and faster, causing us to rethink some of the trade-offs between local I/O and network access. The monolithic server as the unit of packaging for collections of such devices is starting to look less attractive:
- It leads to inefficient resource utilisation, since CPU and memory for a job have to be allocated from the same machine. This can lead to eviction even when utilisation is overall low (e.g. 50%).
- It is difficult to add, move, remove, or reconfigure hardware components after they have been installed in a server, leading to long up-front planning cycles for hardware rollouts at odds with the fast-moving rate of change in requirements.
- It creates a coarse failure domain – when any hardware component within a server fails, the whole server is often unusable.
- It doesn’t work well with heterogeneous devices and their rollout: e.g. GPGPUs, TPUs, DPUs, FGPAs, NVM, and NVMe-based SSDs.
To fully support the Continue reading
Test Driving Inter Regional VPC peering in AWS
Connect AWS VPCs hosted in different regions. AWS Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) provides a way to isolate a tenant’s cloud infrastructure. To a tenant a VPCs provide a view of his own virtual infrastructure in the cloud that is completely isolated, has its own compute, storage, network connectivity, security settings etc. In the physical world, Amazon’s … Continue reading Test Driving Inter Regional VPC peering in AWSCustom VPC and Internet Access in AWS
Create your VPC, launch EC2 instances and get internet access with Public IP. With a Virtual Private Cloud(VPC), tenants can create his own cloud based infrastructure in AWS. While AWS provides a default VPC for a new tenant, there are always use cases that need creation of custom VPC. While exploring custom VPC, I found … Continue reading Custom VPC and Internet Access in AWSTCP/IP, Sockets, and SIGPIPE
There is a spectre haunting the Internet -- the spectre of SIGPIPE errors. It's a bug in the original design of Unix networking from 1981 that is perpetuated by college textbooks, which teach students to ignore it. As a consequence, sometimes software unexpectedly crashes. This is particularly acute on industrial and medical networks, where security professionals can't run port/security scans for fear of crashing critical devices.
An example of why this bug persists is the well-known college textbook "Unix Network Programming" by Richard Stevens. In section 5.13, he correctly describes the problem.
An example of why this bug persists is the well-known college textbook "Unix Network Programming" by Richard Stevens. In section 5.13, he correctly describes the problem.
When a process writes to a socket that has received an RST, the SIGPIPE signal is sent to the process. The default action of this signal is to terminate the process, so the process must catch the signal to avoid being involuntarily terminated.
This description is accurate. The "Sockets" network APIs was based on the "pipes" interprocess communication when TCP/IP was first added to the Unix operating system back in 1981. This made it straightforward and comprehensible to the programmers at the time. This SIGPIPE behavior made sense when piping the output of one program to another program on the command-line, as is typical under Unix: Continue reading
BGP LLGR: robust and reactive BGP sessions
On a BGP-routed network with multiple redundant paths, we seek to achieve two goals concerning reliability:
-
A failure on a path should quickly bring down the related BGP sessions. A common expectation is to recover in less than a second by diverting the traffic to the remaining paths.
-
As long as a path is operational, the related BGP sessions should stay up, even under duress.
Detecting failures fast: BFD⚓︎
To quickly detect a failure, BGP can be associated with BFD, a protocol to detect faults in bidirectional paths,1 defined in RFC 5880 and RFC 5882. BFD can use very low timers, like 100 ms.
However, when BFD runs in a process on top of a generic kernel,2 notably when running BGP on the host, it is not unexpected to loose a few BFD packets on adverse conditions: the daemon handling the BFD sessions may not get enough CPU to answer in a timely manner. In this scenario, it is not unlikely for all the BGP sessions to go down at the same time, creating an outage, as depicted in the last case in the diagram below.
Validating RAML Files Using Docker
Back in July of this year I introduced Polyglot, a project whose only purpose is to provide a means for me to learn more about software development and programming (areas where am I sorely lacking real knowledge). In the limited spare time I’ve had to work on Polyglot in the ensuing months, I’ve been building out an API specification using RAML, and in this post I’ll share how I use Docker and a Docker image to validate my RAML files.
Since I was (am) using Visual Studio Code as my primary text editor/development environment these days, I started out by looking for a RAML extension that would provide some sort of linting/validation functionality. I found an extension to do RAML syntax highlighting, which seemed like a reasonable first step.
After a bit more research, I found that there was a raml-cli NPM package that one could use to validate RAML files from the command line. I was a bit leery of installing an NPM package on my system, so I thought, “Why not use a Docker container for this?” It will keep my system clean of excess/unnecessary packages and dependencies, and it will provide some practice with Continue reading
Election interference from Uber and Lyft
Almost nothing can escape the taint of election interference. A good example is the announcements by Uber and Lyft that they'll provide free rides to the polls on election day. This well-meaning gesture nonetheless calls into question how this might influence the election."Free rides" to the polls is a common thing. Taxi companies have long offered such services for people in general. Political groups have long offered such services for their constituencies in particular. Political groups target retirement communities to get them to the polls, black churches have long had their "Souls to the Polls" program across the 37 states that allow early voting on Sundays.
But with Uber and Lyft getting into this we now have concerns about "big data", "algorithms", and "hacking".
As the various Facebook controversies have taught us, these companies have a lot of data on us that can reliably predict how we are going to vote. If their leaders wanted to, these companies could use this information in order to get those on one side of an issue to the polls. On hotly contested elections, it wouldn't take much to swing the result to one side.
Even if they don't do this consciously, their Continue reading
App Micro-segmentation How To’s: Informatica, Oracle and SAP
consolidated posts from the VMware on VMware blog
Are you someone that prefers a blank sheet of paper or an empty text pad screen? Do you get the time to have that thought process to create the words, images or code to fill that empty space? Yes to both — I’m impressed! Creating something from scratch is an absolutely magical feeling especially once it gets to a point of sharing or usefulness. However, many of us spend a bit more of our time editing, building upon or debugging. Fortunately, that can be pretty interesting as well.
In the case of setting up mico-segmentation with VMware NSX Data Center, you have a couple options on quickly getting started:
- NSX Micro-segmentation: Day 1 Guide
- NSX Micro-segmentation: Day 2 Guide
- (blog) Rapid Micro-segmentation using Application Rule Manager Recommendation Engine
- (blog) Securing Native Cloud Workloads with VMware NSX Cloud Blog Series – Part 1: Getting Started
Those resources and more are great jumping off points especially since you likely have more than just Informatica, Oracle and SAP apps in your environments.
Now, should you have those Informatica, Oracle and SAP apps, then here’s the next level of details. I’m Continue reading
Weekly Wrap Podcast: WikiLeaks Unmasks Amazon Data Center Locations
SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for October 19, 2018. Ericsson's third quarter results get overshadowed by an ongoing corruption scandal.
Cisco’s Viptela SD-WAN Is the First VNF on Bell Canada’s VNS
The platform allows enterprise customers to deploy and manage applications and services that reside in the carrier’s private cloud. It comes with a 99.9 percent SLA for uptime.