Don’t Reply To Everything

I recently came across a simple idea that is having a positive impact on productivity. That idea is to not reply to everything. While this can be applied to social media broadly, I’m focused on email management here.

For me, not replying is more difficult than it sounds. I am a personality type that doesn’t like loose ends. I like to meet other’s expectations, and have them think cuddly, happy thoughts about what a swell person I am. I know that when I send an email, I hope to get a response. Therefore, when I receive an e-mail, my natural inclination is to respond.

Too cuddly?

Now, I don’t feel I overly waste time on replying to email. I’ve improved my response technique over the years. I bring an e-mail thread to a conclusion as rapidly as possible by anticipating and proactively answering questions. That’s more time-consuming than a quick, lazy “back to you” response, but saves time in the long run.

However, an advance on the proactive reply is never replying at all. Not responding is the ultimate way to bring an email thread to a conclusion.

You’re So Rude

On the surface, ignoring inbox messages seems rude. However, Continue reading

The Enterprise of Thing’s troubling lack of security

When it comes to security and manageability, Enterprise of Things (EoT) devices must have far more stringent requirements than consumer IoT devices, which often have virtually no built-in security. Indeed, enterprise use of consumer-grade IoT is highly risky.Making the matter even more urgent is the growing number of deployed EoT devices, which is expected to increase significantly over the next two to three years. (I estimate there will be more “things” in an enterprise than PC and mobile phone clients combined within three to four years.)To read this article in full, please click here

The Enterprise of Thing’s troubling lack of security

When it comes to security and manageability, Enterprise of Things (EoT) devices must have far more stringent requirements than consumer IoT devices, which often have virtually no built-in security. Indeed, enterprise use of consumer-grade IoT is highly risky.Making the matter even more urgent is the growing number of deployed EoT devices, which is expected to increase significantly over the next two to three years. (I estimate there will be more “things” in an enterprise than PC and mobile phone clients combined within three to four years.)To read this article in full, please click here

Innovative Licensing Approaches: Enabling Access in Hard-to-Reach Places Through Collaborative Partnerships

In the Republic of Georgia, high in the mountains of the Tusheti region, a community network has been built to bring faster Internet connectivity to those that did not have it. The story is compelling, not only for the determination of people to make sure that the Internet is available in one of the remotest places in the world, but also for their strong belief of what connecting to the Internet could bring to the people of Tusheti. “Tourism is a beacon of hope for us,” said Ia Buchaidze, who owns a local bakery, “and the Internet is very important for that.”

The project was a true collaborative partnership involving many parties: the Georgian Government, the Internet Society and its Georgia Chapter, the Small and Medium Telecom Operators Association of Georgia, LTD Freenet, and the Tusheti Development Fund (TDF). This network did not need a license, but it did need an authorization from the Georgian Government for it to be built and for the spectrum to be used. The objective was to provide access to a remote region through a locally-built and developed community network.

Similarly, in Mexico, a community network has been built in a remote and Continue reading

Research: Bridging the Air Gap

Way back in the old days, the unit I worked at in the US Air Force had a room with a lot of equipment used for processing classified information. Among this equipment was a Zenith Z-250 with an odd sort of keyboard and a very low resolution screen. A fine metal mesh embedded in a semi-clear substrate was glued to the surface of the monitor. This was our TEMPEST rated computer, on which we could type up classified memos, read classified email, and the like. We normally connected it to the STU-3 through a modem (remember those) to send and receive various kinds of classified information.

Elovici, Mordechai Guri, Yuval. “Bridgeware: The Air-Gap Malware.” Accessed May 13, 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226377-bridgeware/abstract.

The idea of TEMPEST begins way back in 1985, when a Dutch researcher demonstrated “reading” the screen of a computer using some relatively cheap, and easy to assemble, equipment, from several feet away. The paper I’m looking at today provides a good overview of the many ways which have been discovered since this initial demonstration to transfer data from one computer to another across what should be an “air gap.” For instance, the TEMPEST rated computer described Continue reading

Don’t get left behind: SDN, programmable networks change how network engineers work

The rise of programmable networks has changed the role of the network engineer, and accepting those changes is key to career advancement. Network engineers need to become software fluent and embrace automation, according to a panel of network professionals brought together by Cisco to discuss the future of networking careers.[ For more on SDN see where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “The whole concept of engineer re-skilling has become a pretty hot topic over the last four or five years. What’s notable to me is that the engineers themselves are now embracing it,” says Zeus Kerravala, founder of ZK Research, who moderated the panel. To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 184: Arista’s Core Switch Challenges Cisco; Qualcomm Reconsiders Servers

Take a Network Break! Arista challenges Cisco in the campus with a new a new core switch, Qualcomm is reportedly considering backing away from data center server processors, and a security survey shows woeful patching habits.

Another security survey reveals that three quarters of respondents have been breached at least once in 2017, Apple abandons a planned data center site in Ireland, and ZTE halts major operations because of a US export ban on parts and software from American companies.

Finally, Google acquires cloud onboarding startup VeloStrata, while Google’s Duplex voice assistant raises hackles.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Sponsor: Cisco Systems

Find out how Cisco and its trusted partners Equilibrium Security and ePlus/IGX can help your organization tackle the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Tune into Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode 147 to get practical insights on how to get your arms around these wide-ranging rules.

Coffee Continue reading

Worth Reading: Back to Basics?

We, as the stewards of networking, need to help this process along. We need to spend more time talking about design and theory. We need to dissect protocols and help people understand how to use the tools they have rather than hoping someone will build the best mousetrap ever to solve each piece of a complicated puzzle. We need to teach people to be thinkers and problem solvers. And, yes, that does mean a bit less complaining about things like vendor code quality and VAR behavior. —Tom @The Networking Nerd

Tracking CDN Usage Through Historical DNS Data

With Mother’s Day having just passed, some e-commerce sites likely saw an associated boost in traffic. While not as significant as the increased traffic levels seen around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these additional visitors can potentially impact the site’s performance if it has not planned appropriately.  Some sites have extra infrastructure headroom and can absorb increased traffic without issue, but others turn to CDN providers to ensure that their sites remain fast and available, especially during holiday shopping periods.

To that end, I thought that it would be interesting to use historical Internet Intelligence data (going back to 2010) collected from Oracle Dyn’s Internet Guide recursive DNS service, to examine CDN usage. As a sample set, I chose the top 50 “shopping” sites listed on Alexa, and looked at which sites are being delivered through CDNs, which CDN providers are most popular, and whether sites change or add providers over time. Although not all of the listed sites would commonly be considered “shopping” sites, as a free and publicly available list from a well-known source, it was acceptable for the purposes of this post.

The historical research was done on the www hostname of the listed Continue reading

Windows Package Management

Ansible-Get-Started-Windows

Welcome to the third installment of our Windows-centric Getting Started Series!

In the previous post we covered how you can use Ansible and Ansible Tower to help manage your Active Directory environment. This post will go into how you can configure some of those machines on your domain. Most of this post is going to be dominated by specific modules. Ansible has a plethora of Windows modules that can be found here. As time is not a flat circle, I can’t discuss all of them today but only a few that are widely used.

MSIs and the win_package Module

So you got your domain up, you have machines added to it, now let’s install some stuff on those machines. I do have a few notes before moving forward in regards to the modules we’ll be discussing. The module win_msi is deprecated and will be removed in Ansible 2.8 (current version as of this post is 2.5). In its place you can use win_package which I will be using throughout this post.

Alright, back to installing stuff. The win_package module is the place to be. It is used specifically for .msi and .exe files that need to be installed Continue reading

Chewing A Billion By Billion Matrix Crammed Into Gigabytes Of Memory

Sometimes, to appreciate a new technology or technique, we have to get into the weeds a bit. As such, this article is somewhat more technical than usual. But the key message that new libraries called ExaFMM and HiCMA gives researchers the ability to operate on billion by billion matrices using machines containing only gigabytes of memory, which gives scientists a rather extraordinary new ability to run on really big data problems.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has been enhancing the ecosystem of numerical tools for multi-core and many-core processors. The effort, which is a collaboration between KAUST, …

Chewing A Billion By Billion Matrix Crammed Into Gigabytes Of Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

End-to-End Segmentation with NSX SD-WAN and NSX Data Center

As you may have read earlier this month, NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud are part of the expanded VMware NSX portfolio to enable virtual cloud networking.  A Virtual Cloud Network provides end-to-end connectivity for applications and data, whether they reside in the data center, cloud or at the edge. I wanted to follow up, and walk through an example using NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN of how one could build an end to end segmentation model from the data center to the branch.

NSX SD-WAN Segmentation

Beyond lowering cost and increasing agility and simplicity of branch connectivity, one of the key values provided by NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud is enterprise segmentation, which provides isolated network segments across the entire enterprise, enabling data isolation or separation by user or line of business, support for overlapping IP addresses between VLANs and support for multiple tenants. NSX SD-WAN provides this segmentation using a VRF-like concept with simplified, per-segment topology insertion. This is accomplished by inserting a “Segment ID” into the SD-WAN Overlay header as traffic is carried from one NSX SD-WAN Edge device to another Edge. Networks on the LAN-side of an NSX SD-WAN Edge with different Continue reading

1 … 1,598 1,599 1,600 1,601 1,602 … 3,832