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Let’s face it – things are different now than when we were kids.

I grew up with technology. My weekends consisted of frantically switching out floppy disks while on 13-inch-green-screen missions to destroy cubism-esque dragons, orcs and whatever else I could with my wizard powers. It taught me critical reasoning, innovative thinking, and gave me the courage to try new things.

Now that I’m a mom, I’m an advocate for my kids to use tech. But today’s tech is different. Now the Internet is everywhere and it’s a part of our everyday lives, in everyday things. Coffeemakers, toothbrushes, toasters, televisions and, yes – even teeth.

Did you ever think we’d have connected homes, let alone bras that might detect breast cancer?

These everyday things are known as the Internet of Things – IoT for short. It’s already everywhere.

Manufacturers are building connected things faster than most of us can keep up. While that means there’s lots of cool things hitting the shelves, many haven’t been built with our security or privacy in mind. That’s why we hear stories ranging from the somewhat humorous to the terrifying.

But we’re hungry for IoT devices – buying them as fast as manufacturers can Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 13 debts of tunnel networks

Tunnels for networking are not good. We see a real-life example taking place with the twelve Thai boys that were stuck at the end of a tunnel with a very narrow section under water preventing passage. The tunnel offered them only one way out, and the particular path was not passable. This is what happens in networks. We’re thankful for the heroic rescue of these brave boys, but networks don’t always fare as well.You will hear others speak about how a tunnel-based virtual network is the next amazing trend in networking. In fact, an analyst recently told me tunnels are great. And they are, when used for the purpose they were intended. But, using tunnels to get aggregates of packets to go where they wouldn’t go otherwise is dangerous, and will lead to the accumulation of technical debts.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 13 debts of tunnel networks

Tunnels for networking are not good. We see a real-life example taking place with the twelve Thai boys that were stuck at the end of a tunnel with a very narrow section under water preventing passage. The tunnel offered them only one way out, and the particular path was not passable. This is what happens in networks. We’re thankful for the heroic rescue of these brave boys, but networks don’t always fare as well.You will hear others speak about how a tunnel-based virtual network is the next amazing trend in networking. In fact, an analyst recently told me tunnels are great. And they are, when used for the purpose they were intended. But, using tunnels to get aggregates of packets to go where they wouldn’t go otherwise is dangerous, and will lead to the accumulation of technical debts.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What are the best practices when cabling for Wi-Fi?

An infrastructure design consideration that arguably frustrates users, and creates a never-ending headache for network administrators, is the quality of Wi-Fi service in a building. Typically, a poor user experience is one where users have either no signal on their wireless device or see “full bars” but cannot connect to the network.In an office environment poor Wi-Fi performance is undoubtedly an annoyance, but in a hospital, it could prevent medical staff from delivering care in a timely manner. Waiting for a mobile terminal to retrieve the medical history of a seriously ill patient can literally be a matter of life and death.Proper cabling is the foundation of Wi-Fi performance Configuring a wireless access point system (AP) is a complex project and is not the subject of this post, although Aps or AP systems of course plays an important role in Wi-Fi network best practice. To provide network integrators with the best chances of success, the cabling infrastructure must be available to support optimal installation and placement of AP.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What are the best practices when cabling for Wi-Fi?

An infrastructure design consideration that arguably frustrates users, and creates a never-ending headache for network administrators, is the quality of Wi-Fi service in a building. Typically, a poor user experience is one where users have either no signal on their wireless device or see “full bars” but cannot connect to the network.In an office environment poor Wi-Fi performance is undoubtedly an annoyance, but in a hospital, it could prevent medical staff from delivering care in a timely manner. Waiting for a mobile terminal to retrieve the medical history of a seriously ill patient can literally be a matter of life and death.Proper cabling is the foundation of Wi-Fi performance Configuring a wireless access point system (AP) is a complex project and is not the subject of this post, although Aps or AP systems of course plays an important role in Wi-Fi network best practice. To provide network integrators with the best chances of success, the cabling infrastructure must be available to support optimal installation and placement of AP.To read this article in full, please click here

Visualizing real-time network traffic flows at scale

Particle has been released on GitHub, https://github.com/sflow-rt/particle. The application is a real-time visualization of network traffic in which particles flow between hosts arranged around the edges of the screen. Particle colors represent different types of traffic.

Particles provide an intuitive representation of network packets transiting the network from source to destination. The animation slows time so that the particle takes 10 seconds (instead of milliseconds) to transit the network. Groups of particles traveling the same path represent flows of packets between the hosts. Particle size and frequency are used to indicate the intensity of the traffic flowing on a path.

Particles don't follow straight lines, instead following quadratic Bézier curves around the center of the screen. Warping particle paths toward the center of the screen ensures that all paths are of similar length and visible - even if the start and end points are on the same axis.

The example above is from a site with over 500 network switches carrying hundreds of Gigabits of traffic. Internet, Customer, Site and Datacenter hosts have been assigned to the North, East, South and West sides respectively.
The screen is updated 60 times per second for smooth animation. Active Continue reading

On the ‘net: The Tradeoffs of Information Hiding

I recently joined Ethan Banks for a Packet Pushers episode around the trade offs of hiding information in the control plane. This was a terrific show; you can listen to it by clicking on the link below.

Today on the Priority Queue, we’re gonna hide some information. Oh, like route summarization? Sure, like route summarization. That’s an example of information hiding. But there’s much more to the story than that. Our guest is Russ White. Russ is a serial networking book author, network architect, RFC writer, patent holder, technical instructor, and much of the motive force behind the early iterations of the CCDE program.

BiB 047: Arrcus ArcOS Competes With Cisco, Juniper, Arista

Arrcus is a startup that’s built a modern network operating system for the disaggregated networking market. They are running on $15M of Series A funding, and as of 16-July-2018, they have emerged from stealth. In this briefing, Arrcus shared some of the details behind ArcOS, their core product offering.

The post BiB 047: Arrcus ArcOS Competes With Cisco, Juniper, Arista appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IDG Contributor Network: The 5 pillars of cloud data management

As more and more businesses adopt cloud services, seizing on the latest software tools and development methodologies, the lines between them are blurring. What really distinguishes one business from the next is its data.Much of the intrinsic value of a business resides in its data, but we’re not just talking about customer and product data, there’s also supply chain data, competitor data, and many other types of information that might fall under the big data umbrella. Beyond that there are a multitude of smaller pieces of data, from employee records to HVAC system logins, that are rarely considered, but are necessary for the smooth running of any organization. And don’t forget about source code. Your developers are using cloud-based repositories for version control of application code. It also needs to be protected.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 193: Broadcom Acquires CA; Intel Picks Up eASIC

Take a Network Break! Broadcom raised eyebrows with its $18.9 billion bid for CA Technologies, and Intel gets in the acquisition game by buying eASIC.

Viptela founders raise big bucks from VCs for a mysterious new venture, BP renews its interest in in-sourced IT, and ZTE moves closer to restarting major operations.

Tech support scammers leverage suspiciously accurate knowledge about Dell customers, PC sales are up, and Blue Origin says it will start taking customers to space in 2019.

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Show Links:

Broadcom Is Getting Desperate – Seeking Alpha

Broadcom: Crazy Like A Fox, Continue reading

Additive Loops with Ansible and Jinja2

I don’t know if “additive” is the right word, but it was the best word I could come up with to describe the sort of configuration I recently needed to address in Ansible. In retrospect, the solution seems pretty straightforward, but I’ll include it here just in case it proves useful to someone else. If nothing else, it will at least show some interesting things that can be done with Ansible and Jinja2 templates.

First, allow me to explain the problem I was trying to solve. As you may know, Kubernetes 1.11 was recently released, and along with it a new version of kubeadm, the tool for bootstrapping Kubernetes clusters. As part of the new release, the Kubernetes community released a new setup guide for using kubeadm to create a highly available cluster. This setup guide uses new functionality in kubeadm to allow you to create “stacked masters” (control plane nodes running both the Kubernetes components as well as the etcd key-value store). Because of the way etcd clusters work, and because of the way you create HA control plane members, the process requires that you start with a single etcd node, then add the second node, and Continue reading

Converting and manipulating image files on the Linux command line

Most of us probably know how wonderful a tool Gimp is for editing images, but have you ever thought about manipulating image files on the command line? If not, let me introduce you to the convert command. It easily coverts files from one image format to another and allows you to perform many other image manipulation tasks as well -- and in a lot less time than it would take to make these changes uses desktop tools. Let's look at some simple examples of how you can make it work for you.Converting files by image type Coverting an image from one format to another is extremely easy with the convert command. Just use a convert command like the one in this example:To read this article in full, please click here

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