Android does not support DHCPv6 and Google ‘Won’t Fix’ that

Android does not support DHCPv6 and Google 'Won't Fix' that

Since 2012 there has been a ticket open on Google's public 'Issue Tracker' requesting Android support DHCPv6. On 6th November the status of the issue was changed to 'Won't Fix (Intended Behavior)'.

The fact that Android does not support DHCPv6 may come as something of a surprise to those network engineers more familiar with IPv4. DHCP is a keystone of IP networks, one piece of network automation that has been widely adopted for years, and an important source of auditing by storing the IP and MAC address combination at the server.

Autoconfig baked-in

But hang on you 32-bit wranglers, we are talking v6 here and that protocol has host address generation baked in, in the form of Stateless Address Autoconfiguration, or SLAAC. In the v6 world, the local gateway acts as vital source of information for the attached end clients, issuing periodic Router Advertisements, or RAs. These advertisements can contain the local prefix, and if that is a /64 with the 'A' flag set, the end client can generate its own address; using the /64 as the network portion and making up the other 64 bits itself. Moreover, it allows clients to generate multiple, temporary prefixes to help prevent attacks Continue reading

We Won’t Save the Internet by Breaking It

On the anniversary of the armistice ending the First World War, more than 40 countries stood together for security online by signing the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. The call, which sets out a list of challenges the world needs to tackle, seems to be promising on paper. From hacking to harming the public core – all of this needs to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed urgently.

Others signed the call too. The Internet Society signed because we believe it is a continuation of calls we have made before. It maintains that solutions to Internet issues must be developed together with other Internet stakeholders – each performing its role, and all working collaboratively.

This approach is what allows the Internet to thrive and is key to the ultimate success of this call. Open, decentralized, and distributed. It’s not the traditional multilateral way of doing things, but it is the Internet way – the only one that can work.

There are real and pressing Internet security concerns. It’s critical that signatories to the call do not imagine they can address the concerns alone. The Internet depends, as a technical fact, on cooperative voluntary action, so Continue reading

BrandPost: Top Ten Reasons to Think Outside the Router #8: Garbled VoIP Calls and Pixelated Video

How often have you been on a VoIP call only to experience dropouts or garbled sound? Or endured a video conference with pixelated images or even a frozen screen? The expanding use of Unified Communications (UC) applications has placed increased pressure on IT to deliver an exceptional user experience to employees. But when user experience deteriorates enough, it results in a flood of calls to the IT help desk. Delivering consistent, high quality real-time communications is difficult, if not impossible, with a traditional router-centric wide area network architecture.Why? Because conventional routers can’t overcome inevitable packet loss that negatively impacts quality voice and video communication quality and the user’s experience and productivity. WAN architectures based on traditional routers typically backhaul all traffic to a headquarters-based data center, adding latency or delay that contribute to poor quality.To read this article in full, please click here

Troubleshooting NGINX Ingress Rewrites in Kubernetes

When deploying an application to Kubernetes, you almost certainly will want to create a Service to represent that application. Rather than relying on direct connectivity to Pods, which may be ephemeral, Services by contrast are long-living resources that sit on top of one or more Pods. They are also the bare minimum for allowing those pods to communicate outside the cluster. While Services are a nice abstraction so we don’t have to worry about individual Pods, they are also fairly dumb.

What is Network Observability?

If you have ambitions to improve reliability through experimention you MUST have observability. You cannot know if you’re getting better without thi. https://twitter.com/tammybutow/status/1067135822204329984 If you don’t set the SLOs for your network, someone else will, and you probably won’t like it. Basically, if we don’t go up the stack and quantify success using application-specific metrics, someone else will do it for us, and we’ll be left out of the loop.

Troubleshooting NGINX Ingress Rewrites in Kubernetes

When deploying an application to Kubernetes, you almost certainly will want to create a Service to represent that application. Rather than relying on direct connectivity to Pods, which may be ephemeral, Services by contrast are long-living resources that sit on top of one or more Pods. They are also the bare minimum for allowing those pods to communicate outside the cluster. While Services are a nice abstraction so we don’t have to worry about individual Pods, they are also fairly dumb.

IoT Offers Opportunity, But We Must Also Advocate for Privacy

Our world is evolving exceedingly fast these days. Within the last few years in what has been coined the fourth industrial revolution we have witnessed evolutionary developments. One of those fascinating advancements concerns the everyday things and devices now connected to the Internet, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT). However, while every invention brings brand new exciting opportunities, it also entails disadvantages and may result in possible adverse consequences, if the disadvantages are not taken notice of.

Certainly IoT first and foremost provides an opportunity for a more comfortable and organized life. People may enjoy the chance to not preoccupy themselves with, for instance, managing their morning routines that may include waking up at a specific time, preparing the breakfast, and so on. Nowadays when your alarm clock can be connected to the thermostat and the latter has the information about the heavy snowfall of the night, the alarm can automatically readjust itself to wake you up an hour earlier than planned so that you manage to get to work on time.

Other examples may include smart scheduling programs or fitness tracking watches. As a runner, I personally am at ease realizing that I do not have to Continue reading

Research: Measuring IP Liveness

Of the 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses available in the global space, how many are used—or rather, how many are “alive?” Given the increasing usage of IPv6, it might seem this is an unimportant question. Answering the question, however, resolves to another question that is actually more important: how can you determine whether or not an IP address is in use? This question might seem easy to answer: ping every address in the address space. This, however, turns out to be the wrong answer.

Scanning the Internet for Liveness. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 48, 2 (May 2018), 2-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3213232.3213234

This answer is wrong because a substantial number of systems do not respond to ICMP requests. According to this paper, in fact, some 16% of the hosts they discovered that would respond to a TCP SYN, and another 2% that would respond to a UDP packet shaped to connect to a service, do not respond to ICMP requests. There are a number of possible reasons for this situation, including hosts being placed behind devices that block ICMP packets, hosts being configured not to respond to ICMP requests, or a server sitting behind a PAT or CGNAT Continue reading

About Matt

My name is Matt Oswalt, and I have a fairly eclectic background. When I was 14, I created my first program - an alien shooter on my TI-82 calculator. Since then, I’ve enjoyed building new things and showing them to anyone who will listen. This passion continues to this day, as you’ll find with projects like ToDD and NRE Labs, I just really enjoy building cool stuff. You can explore these and all my other open source projects on my GitHub profile.

Stealthwatch: The “Network Detective Command Console”

Stealthwatch, to me, is like having a Network Detective working in my very own network!  I truly love Stealthwatch and I am playing with every chance I can get.

Disclaimer:   I do not get commissions from you buying Stealthwatch nor am I part of the Cisco Business Unit for Stealthwatch.  I just really honestly and for realsies super love it.

I tossed together a ~31 minute YouTube.  Obviously you can watch the entire thing.  Or… here you go for the big sections.

The Week in Internet News: China Wants Fairer Internet, More Control

China wants fairness: Chinese President Xi Jinping called for international cooperation to make the Internet more “fair and equitable,” while also asserting the Chinese government’s authority to shape it, Reuters reports. Xi has pushed for his country’s “cyber sovereignty” while promoting “core socialist values” online. Chinese officials also promoted the idea that each country should choose its own Internet “governance model,” The Star says.

Drones for broadband: A U.K. company has begun using drones to build fiber broadband networks in remote areas, reports Computer Weekly. Openreach is using drones to lay fiber in remote areas of the Scottish Highlands, where river gorges have previously presented a challenge.

Encrypted chat busted: Dutch police have found a way to infiltrate IronChat, an encrypted chat service running on proprietary hardware, Gizmodo says. The police were able to read 258,000 messages on the service, which costs about US$1,700 for a six-month subscription. News reports suggest the encryption wasn’t as strong as the vendor may have claimed.

Saving the Web: World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has been pushing a new Contract for the Web, in hopes of defining the responsibilities that governments, companies and citizens each have on the Web. Shortlist.com examines Continue reading

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