Show 397: The Future Of Networking With Peter Wohlers

Our next installment of the Future Of Networking series brings Peter Wohlers to the podcast.

Way back in the early history of Packet Pushers, we received a presentation from Peter when he worked at Force10 as part of a Tech Field Day event. It was blunt, knowledgeable, cynical and nerd-funny.

Today Peter is VP of Engineering at a large CDN. I invited him to come on talk about the current and future state of the industry.

We discuss the effect of cloud computing on the networking industry and its impact on skills and careers, the early hype around SDN and where it stands today, how much skill you really need in coding, the rise of APIs in networking, and a passionate debate about whether different networks are actually all that unique.

Show Links:

TFD Bonus 3 Peter Wohlers of Force10 Presents to Tech Field Day San Jose 09/16/2010 – Packet Pushers

The post Show 397: The Future Of Networking With Peter Wohlers appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Leading Uruguayan Students to Thrive in the Future Economy

Current researches show that children are exposed to both increased risks and increased opportunities when accessing  the Internet and using apps and social media. The UNICEF’s “Children in a Digital World” 2017 report takes a comprehensive look at the different ways digital technology affects children. It is critical that children have necessary training in digital literacy to acquire the skills to minimize risks and to confidently navigate the web to maximize their opportunities. Evidence suggests that technology has benefits where positive human forces for learning are already in place.

The University of the Republic in partnership with the Internet Society Uruguay Chapter and the financial support of the Beyond the Net Funding Programme has taken significant steps to help children and teenagers to develop digital skills in a creative and innovative way in three of the nineteen segments in which Uruguay is politically divided, Paysandú, Rivera, and Salto. Their project  Flor de Ceibo Conecta2 aims to train young people from disadvantaged communities using digital resources in creative and challenging learning classes to help them improve their everyday lives and expand their chances for a better future.

María Julia Morales González, project manager and professor at the Department of Sociology and Continue reading

How to drop 10 million packets per second

How to drop 10 million packets per second

Internally our DDoS mitigation team is sometimes called "the packet droppers". When other teams build exciting products to do smart things with the traffic that passes through our network, we take joy in discovering novel ways of discarding it.

How to drop 10 million packets per second
CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Brian Evans

Being able to quickly discard packets is very important to withstand DDoS attacks.

Dropping packets hitting our servers, as simple as it sounds, can be done on multiple layers. Each technique has its advantages and limitations. In this blog post we'll review all the techniques we tried thus far.

Test bench

To illustrate the relative performance of the methods we'll show some numbers. The benchmarks are synthetic, so take the numbers with a grain of salt. We'll use one of our Intel servers, with a 10Gbps network card. The hardware details aren't too important, since the tests are prepared to show the operating system, not hardware, limitations.

Our testing setup is prepared as follows:

  • We transmit a large number of tiny UDP packets, reaching 14Mpps (millions packets per second).

  • This traffic is directed towards a single CPU on a target server.

  • We measure the number of packets handled by the kernel on that Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Identifying the Internet of Things – one device at a time

As IoT movement pervades every facet of our lives, the pace of innovation in this field continues to grow. We are seeing novel uses of this technology that are very cool – we are also seeing a lot of implementations that are downright silly! However, most if not all, of these are very impactful. As we have seen in the past with agriculture or healthcare, IoT is moving fast and is here to stay. However, this being a classic case of trying to run before we’ve learned how to walk, IoT device developers often leave out the core component of any connected service in today’s world – security.To read this article in full, please click here

초당 천만개의 패킷을 버리는 방법

초당 천만개의 패킷을 버리는 방법

This is a Korean translation of a prior post by Marek Majkowski.

사내에서 DDoS 대응팀은 종종 "패킷 버리는 사람들"이라 불립니다. 다른 팀이 우리 네트워크를 통해 지나가는 트래픽으로 스마트한 일을 하며 신나할 때 우리는 그걸 버리는 여러가지 방법을 찾아가며 즐거워 합니다.

초당 천만개의 패킷을 버리는 방법

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Brian Evans

DDoS 공격을 견뎌내기 위해서는 빠르게 패킷을 버릴 수 있는 능력이 매우 중요합니다.

쉽게 들리겠지만 서버에 도달한 패킷을 버리는 것은 여러 단계에서 가능합니다. 각 기법은 장점과 한계점이 있습니다. 이 블로그 글에서는 지금까지 시도해 본 기법들을 모두 정리해 보도록 하겠습니다.

테스트 벤치마크

각 기법의 상대적인 성능을 시각화하기 위해서 먼저 숫자를 볼 것입니다. 벤치마크는 합성 테스트이므로 실제 숫자와는 일부 차이가 있을 수 있습니다. 테스트를 위해서는 10Gbps 네트워크 카드가 달린 인텔 서버를 사용할 것입니다. 하드웨어가 아니라 운영체제의 한계를 보여주기 위한 테스트이므로 하드웨어의 상세 사항은 적지 않겠습니다.

테스트 설정은 다음과 같습니다:

  • 작은 크기의 UDP 패킷을 14Mpps (Mpps = 초당 백만 패킷) 에 도달하도록 대량으로 전송
  • 이 트래픽은 테스트 서버의 단일 CPU에 전달되도록 함
  • 단일 CPU에서 커널에 의해 처리되는 패킷의 개수를 측정

테스트는 사용자 공간 어플리케이션의 속도나 패킷 처리 속도를 최대화하려는 것이 아니라 커널의 병목 지점을 알고자 하는 것입니다.

합성 트래픽은 conntrack에 최대한의 부하를 주도록 준비되었습니다 - 임의의 소스 IP와 포트 필드를 사용합니다. tcpdump는 다음과 같이 Continue reading

Openswitch OPX Installation on Linux

We have recently covered installation of Openswitch OPS on Linux. Since the version 2.0, Openswitch OPS has transformed into to a completely new project, called Openswitch OPX Base. Similar to its predecessor, OpenSwitch OPX Base system also provides an abstraction of hardware devices of network switch platforms in a Linux OS environment. However, original Yocto OS has been replaced by an unmodified Linux kernel based on Debian Jessie distribution.

We can install OPX Base on a virtual machine, similar to installing OpenSwitch on hardware platforms. A virtual machine (VM) uses the same software binaries as those executed on S6000-ON devices. The main difference is that the low-level device drivers for the SAI and SDI libraries are replaced with the packages that support hardware simulation, and interact with the hardware simulation infrastructure.

A host machine running Openswitch OPX VM might be Windows, or Mac OS X with at least 8GB of RAM and 100GB available disk space, and Virtual Box installed. The virtual machine needs to have one network interface configured for the Management interface (eth0). The network adapter eth0 corresponds to the first adapter attached to the VM, e101-001-0 to the second adapter and so on, and e101-00N-1 to Continue reading

Openswitch OPX Installation on Linux

We have recently covered installation of Openswitch OPS on Linux. Since the version 2.0, Openswitch OPS has transformed into to a completely new project, called Openswitch OPX Base. Similar to its predecessor, OpenSwitch OPX Base system also provides an abstraction of hardware devices of network switch platforms in a Linux OS environment. However, original Yocto OS has been replaced by an unmodified Linux kernel based on Debian Jessie distribution.

We can install OPX Base on a virtual machine, similar to installing OpenSwitch on hardware platforms. A virtual machine (VM) uses the same software binaries as those executed on S6000-ON devices. The main difference is that the low-level device drivers for the SAI and SDI libraries are replaced with the packages that support hardware simulation, and interact with the hardware simulation infrastructure.

A host machine running Openswitch OPX VM might be Windows, or Mac OS X with at least 8GB of RAM and 100GB available disk space, and Virtual Box installed. The virtual machine needs to have one network interface configured for the Management interface (eth0). The network adapter eth0 corresponds to the first adapter attached to the VM, e101-001-0 to the second adapter and so on, and e101-00N-1 to Continue reading

Openswitch OPX Appliances

OpenSwitch OPX Base is an innovative operating system for network systems. It uses an unmodified Linux kernel and standard distribution to take advantage of rich ecosystem, and also provide flexibility in customizing your system according to your network needs.

Note: Openswitch OPX images are customized with my after install script  and they are ready for use in GNS3.

Openswitch OPX 2.3.2
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vdpjoz53R7Rx1HYi8KcEuRuNvQnMMn0f/view?usp=sharing
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gns-3/files/VirtualBox%20Appliances/OpenswitchOPX-2.3.2.zip
https://www.4shared.com/s/fQu2DUd9dca

Openswitch OPX Appliances

OpenSwitch OPX Base is an innovative operating system for network systems. It uses an unmodified Linux kernel and standard distribution to take advantage of rich ecosystem, and also provide flexibility in customizing your system according to your network needs.

Note: Openswitch OPX images are customized with my after install script  and they are ready for use in GNS3.

Openswitch OPX 2.3.2
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vdpjoz53R7Rx1HYi8KcEuRuNvQnMMn0f/view?usp=sharing
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gns-3/files/VirtualBox%20Appliances/OpenswitchOPX-2.3.2.zip
https://www.4shared.com/s/fQu2DUd9dca

Oblix: an efficient oblivious search index

Oblix: an efficient oblivious search index Mishra et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2018

Unfortunately, many known schemes that enable search queries on encrypted data achieve efficiency at the expense of security, as they reveal access patterns to the encrypted data. In this paper we present Oblix, a search index for encrypted data that is oblivious (provably hides access patterns) is dynamic (supports inserts and deletes), and has good efficiency.

There’s a lot to this paper! Starting with a recap of existing work on Path ORAM (Oblivious RAM) and Oblivious Data Structures (ODS), Mishra introduce an extension for an Oblivious Sorted Multimap (OSM) (such that you can look up a key and find a set of associated values, handy for building indexes!). Then because their design runs a client-proxy process inside an enclave at the server, and enclaves still leak some information, they also design “doubly-oblivious” versions of all of the above that hide the client access patterns in addition to those at the server process. It’s all topped off with an implementation in Rust (nice to see Rust being used for systems research), and an evaluation with three prime use cases: private contact discovery in Signal, Continue reading

Linux Shell Tips and Tricks

A collection of useful tips and tricks for the linux shell that I have stumbled across over the years. I'll keep updating this post as I come across something of value. I use bash, so these apply to bash unless noted otherwise but my work in other shells. cat The cat command can be...

Cool Hacks Spotlight: Gloo Function Gateway

To close DockerCon Cool Hacks keynote, Idit Levine from Solo.io presented Gloo, a high-performance, plugin-extendable, platform-agnostic function Gateway built on top of Envoy.

Idit showed a demo that involved modernizing a traditional application; the classic Spring Pet Clinic sample app, by containerizing it and deploying it to Docker Enterprise Edition. She added functionality to the app by adding a microservice written in Go through a Gloo route. Then added more functionality by adding a Gloo route to an AWS Lambda function, creating a true hybrid cloud application combining legacy, microservices and serverless components.

She then provided a demo of Squash, that works with Gloo to live debug two microservices forming an application running in Kubernetes on Docker Enterprise Edition, one in Java from IntelliJ, one in Go from Visual Studio Code.

She finished her presentation by announcing and open sourcing Qloo, a GraphQL Server built on top of Gloo and the Envoy Proxy. This allows you to add GraphQL support without any coding to your existing application, and combining functions together in a workflow described as a graph.

See all these excellent demos in the video below, and view the presentation on SlideShare.

 #Docker Spotlights: @gloo a Continue reading

iNOG-10 & RIPE-Hackathon

In June 2018, I was lucky enough to attend the iNOG 10 session in Dublin, co-present a talk and also take part in the RIPE hackathon.

This post is a share on the experience. This isn’t because I’m running out of non-technical material, but this is to uncover both events for those that may want to attend, take part and experience what these kinds of sessions offer.

iNOG

The iNOG Irish Network Operators community surfaced briefly with events in 2005 (originally as the IENOG) but fell silent and was reborn in 2015 as the organisation
as it is today. Started by five returnees to Ireland and some economic migrants, the group has been seeing a high number of attendees to the events and over 700 members on Meetup! Not bad for something that came in on a started on a boat!!! (See below).

The group aims to deliver valuable content to the audience free of charge. Whilst ‘valuable’ has a variety of meanings depending on the audience, the general idea is to share experience of network based activities. As you can imagine, this is very wide ranging and just in the iNOG 10 session, talks were given on automation, data Continue reading

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