Rough Guide to IETF 102: Internet Infrastructure Resilience

As usual, in this post I’ll focus on important work the IETF is doing that helps improve the security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure.

At IETF 102 there are a lot of new ideas being brought to the community in the form of Internet Drafts aimed at improving the security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure, and I’d like to introduce some of them to you. But keep in mind – an Internet Draft does not indicate IETF endorsement, is not a standard, and may not result in any further work at the IETF.

So, let us look at what is happening in the domain of BGP, the routing protocol that connects the Internet.

Route leaks

There has been slow progress in the work on mitigating route leaks in the IDR Working Group (WG). One of the reasons for the slowness was that the group was considering two proposals addressing the route leak problem and both are IDR WG documents:  “Methods for Detection and Mitigation of BGP Route Leaks”, and “Route Leak Prevention using Roles in Update and Open Messages”. Plus, there is a third submission “Route Leak Detection and Filtering using Roles Continue reading

BrandPost: CTO Notes from the Road: 3 take-aways from customers in 6 countries across Asia Pacific

Ciena Anup Changaroth, of Ciena’s CTO Office in APAC, highlights a few insights from Ciena’s recent six-country roadshow he participated in across the Asia-Pacific region. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been on the road supporting our annual Ciena Drive Roadshows in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and finishing up with Hong Kong. We had the opportunity to share Ciena’s Adaptive Network vision with both customers and partners, as well as an opportunity to discuss with them their top priorities, challenges and investment plans.To read this article in full, please click here

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with ASA

As networks begin leveraging intelligent DNS products, there is often a need to do some magic at the Internet edge to redirect to the target provider. Some products actually have this capability embedded. Even though the ASA doesn’t specifically have a defined configuration to do this, we can achieve the same outcome with a few simple NAT rules.

An initial thought would be to build a NAT policy as follows

//define the objects
object network obj_any
 subnet 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0
object network Umbrella1
 host 208.67.220.220
object network Umbrella2
 host 208.67.222.222
object service UDP-53
 service udp destination eq domain

//define the nat rules
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella1 service UDP-53 UDP-53
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella2 service UDP-53 UDP-53

This will sort of work. However, there are two words of caution I would share with this approach. First, DNS sometimes leverages TCP. Second, the last NAT rule will never be used. In this case, even requests to 208.67.222.222 would match the first rule and be re-written to the destination 208.67.220.220.

My recommendation would be Continue reading

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with ASA

As networks begin leveraging intelligent DNS products, there is often a need to do some magic at the Internet edge to redirect to the target provider. Some products actually have this capability embedded. Even though the ASA doesn’t specifically have a defined configuration to do this, we can achieve the same outcome with a few simple NAT rules.

An initial thought would be to build a NAT policy as follows

//define the objects
object network obj_any
 subnet 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0
object network Umbrella1
 host 208.67.220.220
object network Umbrella2
 host 208.67.222.222
object service UDP-53
 service udp destination eq domain

//define the nat rules
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella1 service UDP-53 UDP-53
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella2 service UDP-53 UDP-53

This will sort of work. However, there are two words of caution I would share with this approach. First, DNS sometimes leverages TCP. Second, the last NAT rule will never be used. In this case, even requests to 208.67.222.222 would match the first rule and be re-written to the destination 208.67.220.220.

My recommendation would be Continue reading

Comments on Vendor Optics – Listen Here

I recently listened to Packet Pushers show 395 recently. It is a great discussion on optical networking. One thing I wanted to make everyone aware of was a series of comments on the varying quality of optics and some justification around the premium prices often found on vendor branded optics. While the entire episode is worth a listen, the discussion around vendor optics begins at about 35:20 into the recording.

I work for a vendor and it is doubtful that people would view my opinion as unbiased. I encourage everyone to take a listen below and form their own opinions.

If you are a tech guy or girl, the Packet Pushers Podcast is a perfect addition to the podcatcher.
.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Citizens of Tech 001 – Knuckle Cracking Felt Animals
  2. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  3. My Podcasts
  4. Risky Business #349 <-- Wow, a LOT Happened in 2014
  5. Back In The Future

Comments on Vendor Optics – Listen Here

I recently listened to Packet Pushers show 395 recently. It is a great discussion on optical networking. One thing I wanted to make everyone aware of was a series of comments on the varying quality of optics and some justification around the premium prices often found on vendor branded optics. While the entire episode is worth a listen, the discussion around vendor optics begins at about 35:20 into the recording.

I work for a vendor and it is doubtful that people would view my opinion as unbiased. I encourage everyone to take a listen below and form their own opinions.

If you are a tech guy or girl, the Packet Pushers Podcast is a perfect addition to the podcatcher.
.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Citizens of Tech 001 – Knuckle Cracking Felt Animals
  2. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  3. My Podcasts
  4. Risky Business #349 <-- Wow, a LOT Happened in 2014
  5. Back In The Future

Most Enterprise of Things initiatives are a waste of money

The Internet of Things (IoT) has captured much attention recently as more devices like wearables, AR/VR headsets and sensor-based products make their way to market. But off-the-shelf consumer-oriented devices are not always what enterprises need. Rather, most companies need a more specialized approach than just deploying things all over the place.As a result, the more specialized Enterprise of Things (EoT) is becoming a significant part of nearly all companies' plans for the next three to five years. Indeed, we expect EoT to become a top 3 item on most organizations' strategic initiatives in the coming two to three years. EoT will partner with ongoing enterprise cloud and security initiatives as organizations look to transform how they do business and run more efficient and user-responsive operations. But research shows that for many companies currently deploying or planning deployments of EoT, it’s a waste of money.To read this article in full, please click here

Jabil Enables a Global Software Supply Chain with Docker Enterprise Edition

Jabil, one of world’s most technologically advanced manufacturing solutions provider with over 100 sites in 29 countries is embarking on a digital journey to modernize their technology infrastructure so the company is better able to deliver the right solutions at the right time to their global customer base.

 

Starting the Digital Journey By Modernizing .NET Apps 

As Jabil embarked on their digital journey with a cloud-first approach in mind, they investigated how to best migrate their applications to the cloud. Jabil partnered with Docker and Microsoft to leverage Docker Enterprise Edition with Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft Azure for this initiative through Docker’s Modernize Traditional Application (MTA) Program – starting with  a .NET 4.5 monitoring application to containerize.

Since completing the initial POC, Jabil has continued containerizing more applications and has started scaling their Docker Enterprise usage globally. Sujay Pillai, a Senior DevOps Engineer at Jabil, participated at DockerCon SF 2018 in June and shared with the attendees insights on how Jabil is scaling Docker Enterprise Edition.

Improving Application Security while Reducing Costs at the Edge

One growing use case for Jabil is monitoring of the manufacturing floors. Jabil uses lightweight edge devices to run the monitoring Continue reading

Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software

In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks — many now decades overdue for replacement — were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers.  Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend.  But these aging networks are completely ill-suited to fight today’s data-oriented guerilla warfare, where hackers, DevOps, IoT, mobile, open source, and cloud services clamor for attention and have NetOps IT people desperately trying to manage an environment that feels more like a third-world airport terminal flooded with people fleeing a coup than a predictable business utility.

To be fair, Cisco was able to successfully weaponize account control far better than Juniper, Extreme, et al, so they ended up “winning” – and keeping — the large enterprise business to the tune of some 80 percent market share.  But this business stranglehold can no longer be defended by the moral equivalent of a proprietary Maginot Line.  The new name of the networking guerilla warfare game is software.  The new “best practice?” — disaggregated Linux-based open white box switching with a full enterprise feature set – one that is future-proofed with Continue reading

Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software

In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks — many now decades overdue for replacement — were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers.  Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend.  But these aging networks are completely ill-suited to fight today’s data-oriented guerilla warfare, where hackers, DevOps, IoT, mobile, open source, and cloud services clamor for attention and have NetOps IT people desperately trying to manage an environment that feels more like a third-world airport terminal flooded with people fleeing a coup than a predictable business utility.

To be fair, Cisco was able to successfully weaponize account control far better than Juniper, Extreme, et al, so they ended up “winning” – and keeping — the large enterprise business to the tune of some 80 percent market share.  But this business stranglehold can no longer be defended by the moral equivalent of a proprietary Maginot Line.  The new name of the networking guerilla warfare game is software.  The new “best practice?” — disaggregated Linux-based open white box switching with a full enterprise feature set – one that is future-proofed with Continue reading

Recent BGP Peering Enhancements

BGP is one of the foundational protocols that make the Internet “go;” as such, it is a complex intertwined system of different kinds of functionality bundled into a single set of TLVs, attributes, and other functionality. Because it is so widely used, however, BGP tends to gain new capabilities on a regular basis, making the Interdomain Routing (IDR) working group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) one of the consistently busiest, and hence one of the hardest to keep up with. In this post, I’m going to spend a little time talking about one area in which a lot of work has been taking place, the building and maintenance of peering relationships between BGP speakers.

The first draft to consider is Mitigating the Negative Impact of Maintenance through BGP Session Culling, which is a draft in an operations working group, rather than the IDR working group, and does not make any changes to the operation of BGP. Rather, this draft considers how BGP sessions should be torn down so traffic is properly drained, and the peering shutdown has the minimal effect possible. The normal way of shutting down a link for maintenance would be to for administrators to shut Continue reading

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