On today's Priority Queue, wireless engineer Lee Badman shares a real-world detective tale about a troubleshooting problem that took him into dark places involving wires.
The post PQ 156: Wires Matter – A Wireless Engineer’s Detective Story appeared first on Packet Pushers.
As part of our work in the University of Washington’s Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, we recently spent four weeks in Bokondini, a village in the Papuan Highlands. During our time in Bokondini, we helped some community members extend Internet access throughout the village via a community LTE network, using a technology stack that we call CoLTE (for Community LTE).
The Area and Background
Bokondini is a small village (population ~1,500) in the Baliem Valley, a mountainous region located in the highlands of Indonesian Papua. The Papuan Highlands are a famously rugged, remote, and hard-to-cover area, and many inhabitants of the region live without any form of telecommunications whatsoever. Infrastructure in Bokondini is a remarkably ad-hoc process; for example, electricity comes from a small set of solar panels and a micro hydro generator, and tends to shut off between the hours of 9pm and 6am.
Bokondini’s current relationship to the Internet revolves primarily around the local school. The community pays for a small (1Mbps) satellite Internet connection that terminates at the local elementary school, where it’s used to provide WiFi coverage to teachers on the school campus. Coverage is extended to a few other houses in Continue reading
“I love my domain registrar.” Has anyone ever said this? From before Cloudflare even launched in September 2010, our early beta customers were literally begging us: "Will you please launch a registrar too?!" Today we're doing just that, launching the first registrar we hope you’ll be able to say you love. It's built around three principles: trust, security, and always-fair pricing. And it’s available to all Cloudflare customers.
Cloudflare has actually run a registrar for some time. Like many of our best products, it started by solving an internal issue we had. Cloudflare has several mission-critical domains. If the registration of these domains were ever compromised, it would be, in a word, bad.
For years, we worked with our original domain registrar to ensure these domains were as locked down as possible. Unfortunately, in 2013, a hacker was able to compromise several of the systems of the registrar we used and come perilously close to taking over some of our domains.
That began a process of us looking for a better registrar. Unfortunately, even the registrars that charge hefty premiums and promise to be very secure turn out to have pretty lousy security. Continue reading
Every website, large or small, started with an idea, rapidly followed by registering a domain. Most registrars offer promotions for your initial domain registration and then quietly hike the price with each renewal. What they don’t tell customers is that the price they pay to a registry, for your registration, is set by the registry. In some cases, we’ve found registrars charging eight times the wholesale price for a domain renewal.
Today, we’re launching Cloudflare Registrar, the first domain registrar you can love. Cloudflare Registrar will never charge you more than what we pay to the registry for your domain. No markup and no surprise fees. For eight years Cloudflare has built products that make the internet faster and safer. It's time for us to start where your internet journey starts, your domain.
When you register a domain, you become the owner, or registrant, for that domain for a set period of time. Now that you are the registrant, you can create an authoritative record that tells the world the nameservers for your domain. The domain name system, or DNS, uses those nameservers to direct traffic to the IP address of your server.
In May of last year I wrote about using a Makefile with Markdown documents, in which I described how I use make and a Makefile along with CLI tools like multimarkdown (the binary, not the format) and Pandoc. At that time, I’d figured out how to use combinations of the various CLI tools to create various formats from the source Markdown document. The one format I hadn’t gotten right at that time was PDF. Pandoc can create PDFs, but only if LaTeX is installed. This article describes a method I found that allows me to create PDFs from my Markdown documents without using LaTeX.
Two tools are involved in this new conversion process: Pandoc, which I’ve discussed on this site before; and wkhtmltopdf, a new tool I just recently discovered. Basically, I use Pandoc to go from Markdown (MultiMarkdown, specifically) to HTML, and then use wkhtmltopdf to generate a PDF file from the HTML.
The first step in the process is to use Pandoc to convert from Markdown to HTML, including the use of CSS to include custom formatting. The command looks something like this:
pandoc --from=markdown_mmd+yaml_metadata_block+smart --standalone \
--to=html -V css=/home/slowe/Documents/std-styles.css \
--output=<destination-html-filename> <source-md-filename>
This generates Continue reading
The fleet of servers in the enterprise datacenters of the world – distinct from hyperscalers, cloud builders, and HPC centers – are getting a bit long in the tooth. …
Virtualization Is The Real Opportunity For Epyc was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Choosing the right cloud computing architecture depends on your business and technology service requirements. This excerpt from Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions explains the different cloud models including baseline cloud architectures, complex architectures, and hybrid clouds.
As I explained in a previous blog post, most leaf-and-spine best-practices (as in: what to do if you have no clue) use BGP as the IGP routing protocol (regardless of whether it’s needed) with the same AS number shared across all spine switches to implement valley-free routing.
This design has an interesting consequence: when a link between a leaf and a spine switch fails, they can no longer communicate.
For example, when the link between L1 and C1 in the following diagram fails, there’s no connectivity between L1 and C1 as there’s no valley-free path between them.
Read more ...Who’s ready for another Cumulus content roundup? This month we kept busy with step-by-step guides, tips and tricks, and even kicked off a new series, Tales from the field! Grab a seat and settle in to learn more about everything from EVPN to ZTP, and how they benefit you. Happy reading!
From Cumulus Networks:
We stand with open source: We’ve come a long way from where we began as a company. Find out why we’re passionate about open source networking, what we’ve brought to the table in the last couple of years, and our goals for the future.
5 tips for transitioning to 100G networking: Are you ready to increase your networking speed and pack more computing into the same space? You’re going to want to read these 5 tips on making the transition to 100G networking as smooth as possible.
EVPN behind the curtains: Confused about EVPN? Read this blog post for a step-by-step understanding of EVPN and what it means to you.
Tales from the field: Best practices for initial provisioning (Part 1): Let’s dive into ZTP! Read part one of “Tales from the field,” a series, and find out how to use automation tools to Continue reading
The company provides DevOps automation tools focused on AWS and Azure public cloud environments but expects to announce some work with Google Cloud later this year.
After a hot, dry June day in Richmond I boarded an empty train. It being just myself and a couple opposite we struck up a conversation, awaiting the train’s departure. Over the next twenty minutes, as the train slowly worked through a procession of sun-baked stations, I discovered that my companions worked in IT, but in a much earlier time. The white-haired gent confessed to be a C programmer back in the 60s. We talked about software, home lab specs, and genial conversation flowed from mutual interests. However, when I idly announced ‘Microsoft have really changed, Windows has greatly improved’ the C gent gave my comments short shrift and cut them down with:
‘They can’t change, they’re too big.’
No matter, it was a serendipitous meeting that enriched a dull train journey.
That encounter stuck with me, especially the rejection of Microsoft, and I was reminded of it last week in a brief exchange with David Bombal on twitter. The #netdevops guys put together a video about using Windows as a developer environment and David mentioned some negative comments they had received Continue reading
As one of the first hyperscalers in the world, Yahoo, part of the Oath conglomerate that also includes AOL and that is owned by telecom giant Verizon, knows a thing or two about running applications at extreme scale. …
How OpenStack Lassoes Yahoo’s 4 Million Server Cores was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Both cloud-native and traditional organizations must implement a security practice that offers automation, abstraction, flexibility, visibility, and is application-aware.
RingCentral deployed ThousandEyes monitoring platform last quarter to add an additional layer of visibility over its global network and services.