CRTC Fund Makes Important Commitment to Indigenous Connectivity Solutions

While a new fund by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has disappointed some Internet advocacy groups, we believe it could be critical to bringing Indigenous and northern communities online and closing Canada’s digital divide.

The Broadband Fund is slated to provide $750 million over five years, in addition to $500 million in funding by Innovation, Science & Economic Development Canada (ISED) to help Canada meet its universal service objective.

The CRTC is catching heat for halving project eligibility speeds, from 50 Mbps downloads to 25 Mbps (with a plan to scale to the original target), that were laid out in 2016 as part of a declaration that all Canadians should have broadband Internet as a basic telecommunications service. Because of this, some are saying it may give applicants less incentive to achieve the universal service target.

While speed is an important measure of Internet quality, it is not the only measure of success.

What I believe many are overlooking is that eligible applicants not only must outline how they’re going to consult communities as part of their plan, they must commit to respecting treaty and land claim rights if the project impacts Indigenous communities.

That makes it an unprecedented Continue reading

A rough guide to your next (or first) fog computing deployment

Like any kind of large-scale computing system deployment ever, the short answer to the question “what should my fog compute deployment look like” is going to be “it varies.” But since that’s not a particularly useful piece of information, Cisco principal engineer and systems architect Chuck Byers gave an overview on Wednesday at the 2018 Fog World Congress of the many variables, both technical and organizational, that go into the design, care and feeding of a fog computing setup.Byers offered both general tips about the architecture of fog computing systems, as well as slightly deeper dives into the specific areas that all fog computing deployments will have to address, including different types of hardware, networking protocols, and security.To read this article in full, please click here

Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Myths (Part 1)

Apart from the “they have no clue what they’re talking about” observation, Evil CCIE left a long list of leaf-and-spine fabric myths he encountered in the wild in a comment on one of my blog posts. He started with:

Clos fabric (aka Leaf And Spine fabric) is a non-blocking fabric

That was obviously true in the days when Mr. Clos designed the voice switching solution that still bears his name. In the original Clos network every voice call would get a dedicated path across the fabric, and the number of voice calls supported by the fabric equaled the number of alternate end-to-end paths.

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Woz takes a broad but hopeful view on AI, IoT

In a wide-ranging, free-form chat on Tuesday night in San Francisco at the 2018 Fog World Congress, legendary computing figure Steve Wozniak discussed the future of technology and its role in making the world a better place.Taking the stage alongside the senior director of Cisco’s corporate strategic innovation group, Helder Antunes, Wozniak took the audience through his personal history with technology, from phone hacking in the late 1970s, through his up-and-down relationship with Steve Jobs and Apple, to his current role as a sort of ambassador for the good that technology can do for the world.To read this article in full, please click here

Kernel of Truth episode 8: Network agility

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On this week’s Kernel of Truth episode, we’re breaking down network agility and why it’s important to you. The networking world loves a good acronym, but have no fear, this episode will also begin to unscramble the alphabet soup that comes with the technology. For this episode we brought in Attilla de Groot and Scott Edwards to discuss why agile networks are changing the tech world, how we got here, and what’s next.

If you’re interested in learning about the virtualization of IT, new innovations, and how that’s helping computing power become greater and faster than ever, this episode is for you. We discuss how Cumulus is making design methods and network architecture that’s easier for our customers to use and how we’re working to design a simpler, more freeing approach to networking and much more. So grab your headphones and sit back for 25 minutes of networking goodness!

 

Guest Bios

Attilla de Groot: Cumulus Networks; Attilla has spent the last 15 years at the cutting edge of Continue reading

Announcing Firewall Rules

Announcing Firewall Rules
Announcing Firewall Rules

Threat landscapes change every second. As attackers evolve, becoming more dynamic and devious, vulnerabilities materialize faster than engineers can patch their applications. Part of Cloudflare’s mission is to keep you and your applications safe. Today, Cloudflare is launching a new feature, giving customers what they have been requesting - fine-grained control over their incoming requests.

Cloudflare already offers a number of powerful firewall tools such as IP rules, CIDR rules, ASN rules, country rules, HTTP user-agent blocking, Zone Lockdown (for these URIs only allow traffic from those IPs), and our comprehensive managed rules within our WAF (Web Application Firewall). But sometimes, you need to combine the power of these to fully mitigate an attack, and to express a block rule that breaks the boundaries of the existing tools, to be able to “block traffic to this URI when the request comes from that IP and the user-agent matches one of these”.

Flexibility and Control

Announcing Firewall Rules

© Stefano Kocka : Source Wikipedia

Common themes arose when we spoke to customers about their needs and also reviewed feature requests that our customer support team had seen, and we categorised the top pieces of feedback and feature requests into three core needs:

  1. More flexibility Continue reading

Spray-on antennas will revolutionize the Internet of Things

In what could be a giant leap for Internet of Things (IoT) form factors, scientists say they have invented a spray-on antenna. And the bug-spray-like application will outperform traditional metal antennas, they claim.If it indeed does outperform traditional antennas, the clear, ink-like radiators will transform physical mediums used in constructing networks. Flexible substrates, windows, or data center walls even could be made into antennas, which would then drastically alter the data-collecting landscape.“Installing an antenna [could be] as easy as applying some bug spray,” an article on Drexel University’s website says.To read this article in full, please click here

Spray-on antennas will revolutionize the Internet of Things

In what could be a giant leap for Internet of Things (IoT) form factors, scientists say they have invented a spray-on antenna. And the bug-spray-like application will outperform traditional metal antennas, they claim.If it indeed does outperform traditional antennas, the clear, ink-like radiators will transform physical mediums used in constructing networks. Flexible substrates, windows, or data center walls even could be made into antennas, which would then drastically alter the data-collecting landscape.“Installing an antenna [could be] as easy as applying some bug spray,” an article on Drexel University’s website says.To read this article in full, please click here

Ryu measurement based control

ONOS measurement based control describes how real-time streaming telemetry can be used to automatically trigger SDN controller actions. The article uses DDoS mitigation as an example.

This article recreates the demonstration using the Ryu SDN framework and emulating a network using Mininet. Install both pieces of software on a Linux server or virtual machine in order to follow this example.

Start Ryu with the simple_switch_13 and ryu.app.ofctl_rest applications loaded:
ryu-manager $RYU_APP/simple_switch_13.py,$RYU_APP/ofctl_rest.py
Note: The simple_switch_13.py and ofctl_rest.py scripts are part of a standard Ryu installation. The $RYU_APP variable has been set to point to the Ryu app directory.
This demonstration uses the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine to process standard sFlow streaming telemetry from the network switches.

Download sFlow-RT:
wget https://inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/sflow-rt.tar.gz
tar -xvzf sflow-rt.tar.gz
Install the Mininet Dashboard application: 
sflow-rt/get-app.sh sflow-rt mininet-dashboard
The following script, ryu.js, implements the DDoS mitigation function described in the previous article: 
var ryu = '127.0.0.1';
var controls = {};

setFlow('udp_reflection',
 {keys:'ipdestination,udpsourceport',value:'frames'});
setThreshold('udp_reflection_attack',
 {metric:'udp_reflection',value:100,byFlow:true,timeout:2});

setEventHandler(function(evt) {
 // don't consider inter-switch links
 var link = topologyInterfaceToLink(evt.agent,evt.dataSource);
 if(link) return;

 // get port information
 var port = topologyInterfaceToPort(evt.agent,evt.dataSource);
 if(! Continue reading
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