Tale From The Trenches: The Debug Of Damocles

My good friend and colleague Rich Stroffolino (@MrAnthropology) is collecting Tales from the Trenches about times when we did things that we didn’t expect to cause problems. I wanted to share one of my own here about the time I knocked a school offline with a debug command.

I Got Your Number

The setup for this is pretty simple. I was deploying a CallManager setup for a multi-site school system deployment. I was using local gateways at every site to hook up fax lines and fire alarms with FXS/FXO ports for those systems to dial out. Everything else got backhauled to a voice gateway at the high school with a PRI running MGCP.

I was trying to figure out why the station IDs that were being send by the sites weren’t going out over caller ID. Everything was showing up as the high school number. I needed to figure out what was being sent. I was at the middle school location across town and trying to debug via telnet. I logged into the router and figured I would make a change, dial my cell phone from the VoIP phone next to me, and see what happened. Simple troubleshooting, Continue reading

Announcing the Internet Society’s New President and Chief Executive Officer

Today is an exciting day for the Internet Society. It gives me great pleasure to announce, on behalf of the Internet Society’s Board of Trustees, that Andrew Sullivan has been selected as the Internet Society’s new President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He will formally take up his position on September 1, 2018.

This selection now successfully concludes the CEO search process we began last November.

The CEO selection process involved extensive work on the part of the Board but gave us much food for thought. We received a wealth of extremely impressive applications from more than a hundred internal and external candidates covering a huge range of talent and experience. We had some thought-provoking conversations as part of the process and I would like to express my sincere appreciation to everybody who applied for the position.

I believe Andrew’s success in being selected for this crucial role represents an enormous opportunity for the Internet Society and the global Internet.

Andrew brings a wealth of Internet industry and technology experience with him. He has served in a number of past roles, including time at Dyn, now a Global Business Unit of the Oracle Corporation, managing Domain Name System (DNS) development Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For June 29th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Rockets. They're big. You won't believe how really really big they are. (Corridor Crew)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

• 200TB: GitLab Git data; $100 Billion: Instagram; ~250k: Walmart peak events per second; 10x: data from upgraded Large Hadron Collider; .3mm: smallest computer; 9.9 million: spam or automated accounts identified by Twitter per week; 1 million: facial image training set; 1/3: industrial robots installed in China; 24%: never backup; 7 billion: BuzzFeed monthly page views; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @jason: would love to do a https://www.founder.university/  for Immigrants -- but we might need to do it in Canada or Mexico, so that, umm.... potential immigrants can actually attend! #america 
  • @kellabyte: LOL at racking up an AWS bill of $140,000 in 4 hours of compute Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Using a hybrid cloud file system to meet your storage needs

An increasing number of businesses are moving their data to the cloud to take advantage of the cost, scalability and efficiency benefits associated with not having to procure or maintain significant amounts of hardware. And indeed, cloud data storage can certainly help organizations achieve superior ROI; however, oftentimes when choosing a cloud-only file system such as Box or Dropbox, these organizations encounter significant problems – some of which can actually outweigh the benefits. These problems include: Due to inherent limitations in cloud protocols, accessing files from the cloud is rife with latency. This is particularly prevalent when accessing large files or simultaneously accessing a large number of files. Active directory access permission control. The permission schemes for cloud-based file systems are often different than your on-premises environment, causing Active Directory permissions to become an issue for both user and administrator levels. User interface. Losing the familiar file server interface, especially the mapped letter drive interface for a network share, forces users to learn and entirely new user interface. In addition to the increased stress, it can also reduce user efficiency in the short term. Shadow IT. Since the files are no longer located within the company’s infrastructure, IT Managers lose Continue reading

SD-WAN is Happening in India, Fast

Following the precedent set by other modern technologies in India, SD-WAN will render MPLS obsolete before it even gets a foothold.

DockerCon Updates on Containerd, BuildKit, and a Reflection about the Enduring Value of Docker Engine

Two weeks ago was our eighth DockerCon in just four years. Our community of contributors, developers, IT users, enterprises and ecosystem partners has grown exponentially into the millions,  anchored on our founder Solomon Hykes’ simple premise of democratizing the use of the software container. Today as was from the beginning, Docker creates simple tooling and a universal packaging approach that bundles up all application dependencies inside the container.  Docker Engine enables applications to run anywhere consistently on any infrastructure, solving “dependency hell” for developers and operations teams, and eliminating the “it works on my laptop!” problem.

In the past 2 years, Docker Engine’s codebase has been refactored into several reusable components, the most important being containerd, the core container runtime, and BuildKit, the part of Docker Engine used to build images. In the contribute and collaborate track at DockerCon, Michael Crosby and Tonis Tiigli gave an update on these two projects (video, slides)

Docker platform internals from Docker, Inc.

containerd, the core container runtime in Docker Engine has been leveraged by millions of users and is run in production by tens of thousands of organizations. Eighteen months ago, Docker spun out containerd from Docker Engine; donated Continue reading

Short Take – Culture and Technology

Russ White

The post Short Take – Culture and Technology appeared first on Network Collective.

Is implementing and managing Linux applications becoming a snap?

Quick to install, safe to run, easy to update, and dramatically easier to maintain and support, snaps represent a big step forward in Linux software development and distribution. Starting with Ubuntu and now available for Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo Linux and openSUSE, snaps offer a number of significant advantages over traditional application packaging. Compared to traditional packages, snaps are: easier for developers to build faster to install automatically updated autonomous isolated from other apps more secure non-disruptive (they don't interfere with other applications) So what are snaps? Snaps were originally designed and built by Canonical for use on Ubuntu. The service might be referred to as “snappy”, the technology “snapcraft”, the daemon “snapd” and the packages “snaps”, but they all refer to a new way that Linux apps are prepared and installed. Does the name “snap” imply some simplification of the development and installation process? You bet it does!To read this article in full, please click here

The Lustre HPC file system has another new home — and it’s the right one

After years of bouncing from one company to another, the Lustre file system that is so popular in high-performance computing (HPC) has been sold yet again. This time it went to an enterprise storage vendor. Finally, it’s in the hands of a company that makes sense.DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced it purchased the Lustre File System from Intel this week as Intel looks to pare down non-essential products. DDN got all assets and the Lustre development team, who are undoubtedly relieved. The announcement was made at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights, sign up for Network World newsletters. ] Lustre's history Lustre (which is a portmanteau of Linux and cluster) is a parallel distributed file system that supports multiple computer clusters with thousands of nodes. It started out as an academic research project and was later acquired by Sun Microsystems, which was in turn acquired by Oracle.To read this article in full, please click here

Cryptocurrency API Gateway using Typescript+Workers

export interface IRouter {
  route(req: RequestContextBase): IRouteHandler;
}

/**
 * A route
 */
export interface IRoute  Continue reading

List of EVPN and DC-related IETF drafts (as of 1H 2018)

Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) solution is becoming pervasive for Network Virtualization Overlay (NVO) services in data center (DC) networks and as the next generation VPN services in service provider (SP) networks. As a result of this popularity a lot of work is going on in IETF in this area. In this post I collect links to some of the interesting IETF drafts in this area.
All this information is relevant for 1H 2018 timeframe. Keep in mind to pay attention to which version of draft you’re reading – this drafts are frequently updated.

Service Chaining using Virtual Networks with BGP VPNs

This document describes how service function chains (SFC) can be applied to traffic flows using routing in a virtual (overlay) network to steer traffic between service nodes. Chains can include services running in routers, on physical appliances or in virtual machines. Two techniques are described: in one the service chain is implemented as a sequence of distinct VPNs between sets of service nodes that apply each service function; in the other, the routes within a VPN are modified through the use of special route targets and modified next-hop resolution to achieve the desired result.

Applicability of Continue reading

Telecom Policy: What the US Can Learn from the EU

Want affordable SDN products? Check the secondary market

Frankly (no pun intended), I have to admit that I’m growing increasingly frustrated with certain trends in networking.For example, it’s not that I don’t like the dream or idea of software-defined networking (SDN) — it’s not that I don’t think it’s superior to the older way of setting up or monitoring a network. It’s just that I’m becoming increasingly concerned that small- to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) won’t be able to keep up. And the media that follows this trend isn’t really brining to light the extreme cost of some of these systems.Pricewise, many of the product lines are intended for large networks. There's no way that a smaller company could even begin to afford them. For example, one trainer told me that a certain SDN product was scaled to start at 500 site deployments!!To read this article in full, please click here

Want affordable SDN products? Check the secondary market

Frankly (no pun intended), I have to admit that I’m growing increasingly frustrated with certain trends in networking.For example, it’s not that I don’t like the dream or idea of software-defined networking (SDN) — it’s not that I don’t think it’s superior to the older way of setting up or monitoring a network. It’s just that I’m becoming increasingly concerned that small- to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) won’t be able to keep up. And the media that follows this trend isn’t really brining to light the extreme cost of some of these systems.Pricewise, many of the product lines are intended for large networks. There's no way that a smaller company could even begin to afford them. For example, one trainer told me that a certain SDN product was scaled to start at 500 site deployments!!To read this article in full, please click here

Google cloud storage gets a boost with managed NAS service

Google is adding to its cloud storage portfolio with the debut of a network attached storage (NAS) service.Google Cloud Filestore is managed file storage for applications that require a file system interface and shared file system for data. It lets users stand up managed NAS with their Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine instances, promising high throughput, low latency and high IOPS.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights sign up for Network World newsletters. ] The managed NAS option brings file storage capabilities to Google Cloud Platform for the first time. Google’s cloud storage portfolio already includes Persistent Disk, a network-attached block storage service, and Google Cloud Storage, a distributed system for object storage. Cloud Filestore fills the need for file workloads, says Dominic Preuss, director of product management at Google Cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

MTU and TCP MSS

The largest chunk of bytes that a transport protocol can forward across specific medium is called MTU – Maximum Transmission Unit. If we speak about Ethernet, which is today the most common, he has by default 1522 bytes MTU. The story about MTU is that the MTU of specific protocol basically defines how much payload (or highest protocols headers + their payload) it can carry in its biggest packet, not counting his own headers. Putting more payload into single packet than the MTU allows will result in fragmentation, the process of slicing the frame into more smaller frames so that

The post MTU and TCP MSS appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Debugging data flows in reactive programs

Debugging data flows in reactive programs Banken et al., ICSE’18

To round off our look at papers from ICSE, here’s a really interesting look at the challenges of debugging reactive applications (with a certain Erik Meijer credited among the authors).

… in recent years the use of Reactive Programming (RP) has exploded. Languages such as Elm and libraries such as Reactor, Akka, and Rx are being used by companies such as Netflix, Microsoft, and Google, to build highly responsive and scalable systems.

The rise of reactive programming fits well with the increasing need to process streams of data. In a reactive program, you set up a data processing pipeline and then wait for input to arrive.

Many RP implementations share a notion of a collection that abstracts over time, in contrast to space like standard collections. This collection comes in different flavors, such as Observable (Rx)… the implementations differ in the precise semantics of their collections, their execution model (push/pull) , and the set of available operators.

While in theory events and threads are duals, in practice the RP abstraction works very well for expressing streaming pipelines. If you have an abstraction over time though, Continue reading

Viptela SDWAN Overview

Viptela SDWAN Overview

Bharti Airtel’s Chairman Sees 5G Slicing as a Solution to Net Neutrality Debate

He promised on behalf of the “mobile operator fraternity” that they will never throttle speeds.