Prioritizing Indigenous Connectivity in North America

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly technology evolves. In 2007, the iPhone was released and dramatically transformed the way we communicate. Then, less than three years later, the first iPad hit consumer shelves and revolutionized personal computing. Now, Internet service providers around the world are racing to deploy the infrastructure needed to fuel our transition into smart cities of increasingly connected homes and driverless cars.

While some major U.S. cities are set to get home access to 5G broadband speeds as soon as this month, there are still many people living in rural and remote Indigenous communities across North America that struggle to open an email.

It’s time to get our priorities straight. The Internet is a powerful tool transforming virtually every aspect of our lives. But we can’t move forward if anyone is left behind. Indigenous voices must count in our digital future.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) recently made an important step in the right direction when it released details of its $750 million Broadband Fund to improve connectivity in underserved and remote regions of Canada.

The fund makes an important commitment to ensure applicants consult with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis and Continue reading

Worth Reading: iptables tips and tricks

The iptables userspace command-line tool builds upon this functionality to provide a powerful firewall, which you can configure by adding rules to form a firewall policy. iptables can be very daunting with its rich set of capabilities and baroque command syntax. —Gary Smith @opensource.com

SD-WAN Adolescence Is About Interoperability and Scalability

European test lab EANTC tested several SD-WAN vendors solutions and compared their scalability and performance.

Graceful upgrades in Go

The idea behind graceful upgrades is to swap out the configuration and code of a process while it is running, without anyone noticing it. If this sounds error prone, dangerous, undesirable and in general a bad idea – I’m with you. However, sometimes you really need them. Usually this happens in an environment where there is no load balancing layer. We have these at Cloudflare, which led to us investigating and implementing various solutions to this problem.

Coincidentally, implementing graceful upgrades involves some fun low-level systems programming, which is probably why there are already a bajillion options out there. Read on to learn what trade-offs there are, and why you should really really use the Go library we are about to open source. For the impatient, the code is on github  and you can read the documentation on godoc.

The basics

So what does it mean for a process to perform a graceful upgrade? Let’s use a web server as an example: we want to be able to fire HTTP requests at it, and never see an error because a graceful upgrade is happening.

We know that HTTP uses TCP under the Continue reading

What’s More Beneficial to CIOs: Containers or the Container Management System?

Perhaps the biggest benefit of containers is that they can be managed by Kubernetes, which is a pre-defined operational model.

BrandPost: Goals and Key Features of 802.11ax

As WLAN access point and device vendors work toward product launches at the end of 2018, we will publish a series of blogs covering all aspects of 802.11ax technology. This first one introduces the motivation and main features of 802.11ax.Download our 802.11ax technical white paper.How to Improve Today’s Wi-Fi?When deciding how to improve Wi-Fi beyond the current release, 802.11ac, the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance surveyed Wi-Fi deployments and behavior in order to identify obstacles to wider use and causes of dissatisfaction among user communities. The conclusion was to focus more on performance under “typical” field conditions, a departure from previous upgrades that advanced peak data rates under “excellent” field conditions. With 802.11ax, peak performance and average and worst-case performance under real-world conditions will see improvements.To read this article in full, please click here

Is there a white-box server in your data center’s future?

The stagnant server market has heated up over the last few years, due in no small part to the advent of “white box” server vendors grabbing an increasing share of the cloud business.Enterprises have been reluctant to follow the lead of hyperscale data center vendors to off-brand server competitors, largely because of a lack of enterprise-grade service and maintenance options. But the economics are compelling. More data center stories: Efficient container use in data centers Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment How cloud providers' data-migration appliances stack up Why NVMe? Users weigh benefits of NVMe-accelerated flash storage “White box” is a reference to the off-brand PCs built by independent PC vendors, which used to dot the landscape and appeal to buyers who built their own PCs with a plain beige tower and no vendor label on the box. In the server market, “white box” refers to vendors that are not the big three: Dell EMC, HP Enterprise and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper advances network automation community, skillsets

Juniper is positioning the company to be an evangelist for network automation by announcing applications, tools, labs and libraries that it says will hasten adoption the technology for businesses and network professionals.The inherent role of automation is to reduce the daily toil of repetitive tasks that lead to mistakes. It also provides guardrails to ensure service-level agreement guarantees. SLAs and reliability are not left to caffeine-powered individual heroics, but are achieved through well-trained automation heroes, also known as network reliability engineers (NRE), wrote Juniper's CTO and vice president, Bikash Koley, in a blog about the announcement. To read this article in full, please click here

Is there a white-box server in your data center’s future?

The stagnant server market has heated up over the last few years, due in no small part to the advent of “white box” server vendors grabbing an increasing share of the cloud business.Enterprises have been reluctant to follow the lead of hyperscale data center vendors to off-brand server competitors, largely because of a lack of enterprise-grade service and maintenance options. But the economics are compelling. More data center stories: Efficient container use in data centers Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment How cloud providers' data-migration appliances stack up Why NVMe? Users weigh benefits of NVMe-accelerated flash storage “White box” is a reference to the off-brand PCs built by independent PC vendors, which used to dot the landscape and appeal to buyers who built their own PCs with a plain beige tower and no vendor label on the box. In the server market, “white box” refers to vendors that are not the big three: Dell EMC, HP Enterprise and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

9 Best Practices for Managing Infrastructure in a Containerized Environment

Mingis on Tech: Data breaches in a world of ‘surveillance capitalism’

Facebook and Google recently acknowledged data breaches affecting millions of users. This won't be the last time that happens. CSO's J.M. Porup and Computerworld's Ken Mingis examine what's really going.

Juniper advances network automation community, skillsets

Juniper is positioning the company to be an evangelist for network automation by announcing applications, tools, labs and libraries that it says will hasten adoption the technology for businesses and network professionals.The inherent role of automation is to reduce the daily toil of repetitive tasks that lead to mistakes. It also provides guardrails to ensure service-level agreement guarantees. SLAs and reliability are not left to caffeine-powered individual heroics, but are achieved through well-trained automation heroes, also known as network reliability engineers (NRE), wrote Juniper CTO and vice president, Bikash Koley in a blog about the announcement. To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Watching: Machine Learning in a Nutshell

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

What could be better than an SDN product to bring you closer to a networking nirvana? You guessed it – an SDN product using machine learning.

Want to have some fun? The next time your beloved $vendor rep drops by trying to boost his bonus by persuading you to buy the next-generation machine-learning tool his company just released, invite him to watch James Mickens’ Usenix Security Symposium keynote with you.

Training the next generation of network engineers in Kyrgyzstan

The Internet Society in conjunction with Packet Clearing House (PCH), our Kyrgyzstan Chapter (ISOC-KG) and the CAREN Project organised a BGP and Peering capacity building workshop on 3-7 September 2018 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. This five-day workshop was aimed at training engineers for the existing KG-IX Internet Exchange in the capital Bishkek, but also for the prospective Ferghana Valley Internet Exchange being established in the southern city of Osh.

The workshop was led by Nishal Goburdhan who’s an Internet Analyst at PCH, a non-profit organisation that builds and support IXPs around the world. He was assisted by myself (Kevin Meynell), with the workshop being hosted by the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan.

The workshop was comprised of a mix of lectures and hands-on lab work to teach the skills required for interconnecting networks on the Internet, and participating in an Internet Exchange. It commenced with Internet address planning using both IPv4 and IPv6, followed by setting-up OSPF on different internal networks, then interconnecting those using BGP and applying routing policy and filtering. The workshop concluded with how to set-up an IXP and discuss current best practices for peering.

Twelve participants attended the workshop, drawn from the incumbent Continue reading

Architecting Storage And Compute At Exascale

When IBM’s Summit supercomputer was officially unveiled in June, some hailed it as the first exascale system because of its peak performance in applications that made heavy use of GPU acceleration at low precision. …

Architecting Storage And Compute At Exascale was written by Daniel Robinson at .

6WIND Snags vRouter Contract With Publishing Platform Sovrn

6WIND has been gaining customers by offering a replacement to Brocade’s vRouter, which was purchased by AT&T and taken off the market.

SevOne SD-WAN Monitoring Tool Adds Support for Versa Networks

The monitoring tool already offers out-of-box support for VMware's and Cisco’s SD-WAN services.

Carbon Black Adds Threat Hunting to Its Security Cloud

The new service, called Cb ThreatHunter, is essentially a cloud-delivered version of the company’s on-premises endpoint detection and response device.

Worth Reading: eVPN on the host

Virtual machines in the Linux ecosystem are mostly KVM deployments and in many cases deployed in combination with Openstack. There are different multi tenant architectures, but the most common one is to build an overlay network with VXLAN between the hypervisors. To reach resources outside the specific tenant environment, dedicated network nodes are being used. —Attilla de Groot @Cumulus

BrandPost: Discover the Four Key Capabilities for Better IT Management

Management has always struggled how to optimize and oversee IT resources, tasks and operations. This challenge is becoming more complex due to “digital disruption”. As a result less tech-savvy companies are more likely to fall behind the competition and not able to attract top talent.Most of the times it is not that managers do not see the dangers of digital disruption coming. They do understand the challenges as well as the opportunities, and they know the competition sees them as well. Unfortunately, top management decisions often tend to focus on who is responsible for IT and where IT should be located, rather than the how.Generally, the assumption is that the right people will do the right work, either internally or in another company. However, this assumption is flawed. In that regard, an important reminder is that digital transformation is more about how companies do things, and less about who or where those tasks are performed. Digital disruption changes entire industries so fast that companies lack a structured process or the capabilities to handle it. IT management should offer not only the resources (people and equipment), but also the processes and capabilities to eliminate the risks, tackle the problems Continue reading