Extreme faces challenges, girds for future networking battles

Extreme Networks is contending for greater influence from the data center to the network edge, but it has some obstacles to overcome.The company is still grappling with how to best integrate, use and effectively sell the technologies it has acquired from Avaya and Brocade in the past year, as well as incorporate and develop its own products to do battle in the cloud, mobile and edge computing environments of the future. Remember, too, that Extreme bought wireless player Zebra Technologies in 2016 for $55 million.[ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it.] In terms of results that Wall Street watches, Extreme Networks grew revenue 76% to $262 million in its recent fiscal third quarter. According to Extreme, those gains were fueled mostly by growth from its acquisitions and around an 8% growth in its own products. To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme faces challenges, girds for future networking battles

Extreme Networks is contending for greater influence from the data center to the network edge, but it has some obstacles to overcome.The company is still grappling with how to best integrate, use and effectively sell the technologies it has acquired from Avaya and Brocade in the past year, as well as incorporate and develop its own products to do battle in the cloud, mobile and edge computing environments of the future. Remember, too, that Extreme bought wireless player Zebra Technologies in 2016 for $55 million.[ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it.] In terms of results that Wall Street watches, Extreme Networks grew revenue 76% to $262 million in its recent fiscal third quarter. According to Extreme, those gains were fueled mostly by growth from its acquisitions and around an 8% growth in its own products. To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme faces challenges, girds for future networking battles

Extreme Networks is contending for greater influence from the data center to the network edge, but it has some obstacles to overcome.The company is still grappling with how to best integrate, use and effectively sell the technologies it has acquired from Avaya and Brocade in the past year, as well as incorporate and develop its own products to do battle in the cloud, mobile and edge computing environments of the future. Remember, too, that Extreme bought wireless player Zebra Technologies in 2016 for $55 million.[ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it.] In terms of results that Wall Street watches, Extreme Networks grew revenue 76% to $262 million in its recent fiscal third quarter. According to Extreme, those gains were fueled mostly by growth from its acquisitions and around an 8% growth in its own products. To read this article in full, please click here

IETF 102, Day 1: IETF arrive à Montréal

Tomorrow sees kickoff of the Working Groups sessions at IETF 102 in Montreal, Canada, we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting the topics of interest to us in the ISOC Internet Technology Team. Monday is an important day, with meetings of the TLS, 6MAN and SIDROPS Working Groups, along with two other IoT related groups.

6MAN commences at 09.30 EDT/UTC-4, and has six new drafts up for discussion covering IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Extensions for Prefix Delegation, IPv6 VPNs, ICMPv6, OAM in Segment Routing Networks with an IPv6 Data plane, allowing low or zero valid lifetimes to be accepted in Router Advertisement Prefix Information Options where it’s known that there can only be one router on the link; as well as introducing a new IPv6 ‘unrecognised’ option for ICMPv6 that conveys whether an underlying network can transmit IPv6 packets.

There are also three working group sponsored drafts, adopted from the last meeting. Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6 describes an extension that causes nodes to generate global scope addresses from interface identifiers that change over time; IPv6 Segment Routing Header specifies how a node can steer a packet through a controlled set of instructions (segments) by prepending an SR header Continue reading

Cerberus For Schema Validation

Cerberus is a lightweight python library that can be used to validate the correct data is being supplied to configuration management tools such as Ansible and Salt or perhaps even Jinja directly. Along with having many useful built in features, Cerberus also makes it relatively straight...

DNS-Over-TLS Built-In & Enforced – 1.1.1.1 and the GL.iNet GL-AR750S

DNS-Over-TLS Built-In & Enforced - 1.1.1.1 and the GL.iNet GL-AR750S

DNS-Over-TLS Built-In & Enforced - 1.1.1.1 and the GL.iNet GL-AR750SGL.iNet GL-AR750S in black, same form-factor as the prior white GL.iNet GL-AR750. Credit card for comparison.

Back in April, I wrote about how it was possible to modify a router to encrypt DNS queries over TLS using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS Resolver. For this, I used the GL.iNet GL-AR750 because it was pre-installed with OpenWRT (LEDE). The folks at GL.iNet read that blog post and decided to bake DNS-Over-TLS support into their new router using the 1.1.1.1 resolver, they sent me one to take a look at before it's available for pre-release. Their new router can also be configured to force DNS traffic to be encrypted before leaving your local network, which is particularly useful for any IoT or mobile device with hard-coded DNS settings that would ordinarily ignore your routers DNS settings and send DNS queries in plain-text.

DNS-Over-TLS Built-In & Enforced - 1.1.1.1 and the GL.iNet GL-AR750S

In my previous blog post I discussed how DNS was often the weakest link in the chain when it came to browsing privacy; whilst HTTP traffic is increasingly encrypted, this is seldom the case for DNS traffic. This makes it relatively trivial for an intermediary to work out what site you're sending Continue reading

Crypto Energy Consumption Overtakes

I am more than happy to publish the new infographic " Crypto Energy Consumption Overtakes" with the help of my friends from btxchange.io. As we know, cryptocurrency mining is very popular nowadays but it comes with huge drawback in form of huge electricity consumption. The infographic finds out the most surprising numbers for crypto energy volumes. Enjoy reading.

Crypto Energy Consumption Overtakes

I am more than happy to publish the new infographic " Crypto Energy Consumption Overtakes" with the help of my friends from btxchange.io. As we know, cryptocurrency mining is very popular nowadays but it comes with huge drawback in form of huge electricity consumption. The infographic finds out the most surprising numbers for crypto energy volumes. Enjoy reading.

Updated Design on blog.ipspace.net

I synced the CSS used on blog.ipspace.net with the one used on the main web site. There should be no visible changes apart from a few minor fixes in color scheme and the main column being a bit narrower, but if you spot any errors please let me know.

During the summer break, I’m doing much-needed web site maintenance. Regular blog posts will return in autumn.

ISOC’s Hot Topics at IETF 102

The 102nd meeting of the IETF starts tomorrow in Montreal, Canada. This is will be the third time that an IETF has been held in the city, and tenth time in Canada – the first being way back in 1990.

The ISOC Internet Technology Team is as always highlighting the latest IPv6, DNSSEC, Securing BGP, TLS and IoT related developments, and we discuss these in detail in our Rough Guide to IETF 102. But we’ll also be bringing you daily previews of what’s happening each day as the week progresses.

Below are the sessions that we’ll be covering in the coming week. Note this post was written in advance so please check the official IETF 102 agenda for any updates, room changes, or final details.

Monday, 16 July 2018

Tuesday, 17 July 2018

  • Distributed Mobility Management (dmm) – Van Horne @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4
  • Continue reading

New Ubuntu 18.04 Docker image – Python For Network Engineers

About one year ago I’ve created the Ubuntu 16.04 PFNE Docker image. It’s time for a new version of the Ubuntu PFNE Docker image to support Network engineers learn Python and test automation. Recently, Ubuntu announced that on the Ubuntu Docker Hub the 18.04 LTS version is using the minimal image. With this change when … Continue reading New Ubuntu 18.04 Docker image – Python For Network Engineers

Show 398: The Tradeoffs Of Information Hiding In The Control Plane

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.

The latest tome to flow from his keyboard (and mine, actually) is Computer Networking Problems and Solutions available on Amazon right now. While I wrote or contributed to several of the chapters in this book, Russ did the lion s share, and we re going to dive into one of his book chapters, devoted to the topic of information hiding.

We discuss the reasons for information hiding in the control plane, including resource conservation and reducing the failure domain; the pros and cons of dividing a network in multiple failure domains with information hiding; and the criticality of convergence.

We also talk about techniques for information hiding, including filtering reachability information and using overlays.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more Continue reading

How to operationalize Cumulus Linux

Thanks to the limitations of traditional networks, network operators are accustomed to doing everything manually and slowly. But they want to perform configuration, troubleshooting and upgrades faster and with fewer mistakes. They’re ready and willing to learn a new approach, but they want to know what their options are. More importantly, they want to do it right. The good news is, regardless of your organization’s specific goals, you can operationalize Cumulus Linux to meet those objectives faster and more consistently. This post will help you understand your options for developing agile, speed-of-business workflows for:

  • Configuration management
  • Backup and recovery
  • Troubleshooting

And if you’re looking for a deeper, more technical dive into how to implement these network operations, download this white paper.

Configuration management

Automation

The biggest disadvantage of manual configurations is that they simply don’t scale. Implementing BGP across dozens of switches is a copy-and-paste endeavor that’s time-consuming and prone to error. Not only that, checking that the configuration took effect and works as expected requires hop-by-hop verification in addition to testing route propagation and IP connectivity. However, In a small network, there’s no shame in at least starting out doing everything by hand.

Cumulus Linux lets you use a Continue reading

Weekend Reads 071318: Nice to Haves

I had about four hours of highway driving yesterday. Even though I probably could’ve navigated it on my own, I opted to use Apple Maps, which is integrated with my car’s Apple CarPlay “infotainment center.” It was nice. It told me how many miles I had remaining and my expected time of arrival. But it wasn’t a life changer. @The Old Reader

More than ever before Internet users are now interacting with people living/working in other economies. And as a result of these interactions, there are an increasing number of ‘legal contracts’ (intentional or not). Internet policy researchers and academics debate about the changing landscape and the boundaries of the international and domestic laws, without conclusive agreements. —Yeseul Kim @APNIC

The plague that is Spectre continues to evolve and adapt, showing up in two new variants this week dubbed Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2 that follow the original Spectre’s playbook while expanding on the ways they can do damage. —Curtis Franklin Jr. @Dark Reading

These vast routing events that are propagated globally already provide a hint that some ISPs do not set filters at all, or there are vastly malformed AS-SETs. We decided to measure the number Continue reading

Rough Guide to IETF 102: DNSSEC, DNS Security and Privacy

DNS privacy will receive a large focus in the latter half of the IETF 102 week with attention in the DPRIVE, DNSSD, and OPSEC working groups. In an interesting bit of scheduling (which is always challenging), most of the DNS sessions are Wednesday through Friday. As part of our Rough Guide to IETF 102, here’s a quick view on what’s happening in the world of DNS.

Given that IETF 102 is in Montreal, Canada, all times below are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), which is UTC-4.

IETF 102 Hackathon

The “DNS team” has become a regular feature of the IETF Hackathons and the Montreal meeting is no different. The IETF 102 Hackathon wiki outlines the work that will start tomorrow (scroll down to see it). Major security/privacy projects include:

Anyone is welcome to join the DNS team for part or all of that event.

DNS Operations (DNSOP)

The DNS sessions at IETF 102 start on Wednesday morning from 9:30am – 12noon with the DNS Operations (DNSOP) Working Group. Paul Wouters and Ondrej Sury Continue reading

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