A Wireless Brick In The Wall

I had a very interesting conversation today with some friends about predictive wireless surveys. The question was really more of a confirmation: Do you need to draw your walls in the survey plan when deciding where to put your access points? Now, before you all run screaming to the comments to remind me that “YES YOU DO!!!”, there were some other interesting things that were offered that I wanted to expound upon here.

Don’t Trust, Verify

One of the most important parts of the wall question is material. Rather than just assuming that every wall in the building is made from gypsum or from wood, you need to actually go to the site or have someone go and tell you what the building material is made from. Don’t guess about the construction material.

Why? Because not everyone uses the same framing for buildings. Wood beams may be popular in one type of building, but steel reinforcement is used in other kinds. And you don’t want to base your predictive survey on one only to find out it’s the other.

Likewise, you need to make sure that the wall itself is actually made of what you think it is. Find Continue reading

A Quadruple-Provider Vagrant Environment

In October 2016 I wrote about a triple-provider Vagrant environment I’d created that worked with VirtualBox, AWS, and the VMware provider (tested with VMware Fusion). Since that time, I’ve incorporated Linux (Fedora, specifically) into my computing landscape, and I started using the Libvirt provider for Vagrant (see my write-up here). With that in mind, I updated the triple-provider environment to add support for Libvirt and make it a quadruple-provider environment.

To set expectations, I’ll start out by saying there isn’t a whole lot here that is dramatically different than the triple-provider setup that I shared back in October 2016. Obviously, it supports more providers, and I’ve improved the setup so that no changes to the Vagrantfile are needed (everything is parameterized).

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look. First, let’s look at the Vagrantfile itself:

# Specify minimum Vagrant version and Vagrant API version
Vagrant.require_version '>= 1.6.0'
VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = '2'

# Require 'yaml' module
require 'yaml'

# Read YAML file with VM details (box, CPU, and RAM)
machines = YAML.load_file(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'machines.yml'))

# Create and configure the VMs
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|

  # Always use Vagrant's  Continue reading

Hackathon@AIS: Testimonies of the Fellows

The Hackathon@AIS is a yearly event, in its second year, aimed at exposing engineers from the Africa region to Open Internet Standards Development. This year, the event was held in Dakar Senegal at the Radisson Blu Hotel, from 9-10 May 2018, during the Africa Internet Summit (AIS-2018).

The event was attended by more than 75 engineers from 15 countries including 11 fellows who were supported to attend the event.

We are happy to share the testimonies of  the fellows who attended the Hackathon@AIS.

Adama Assiongbon

Hackathon@AIS has been a very good and enriching experience for me because it is a meeting of ICT sharing especially with the IPWAVE workshop which is a technology of the near future where we will be ready on the African continent to implement this technology and bring more to the development of the continent. It is up to us the beneficiaries of Hackathon@AIS to bring a plus to our communities. The idea of Hackathon is very beneficial for the development of Africa. Thank you AFRINIC and ISOC.

Abdeldjalil Bachar Bong

Coming from Chad, I have found the Hackathon@AIS to be a wonderful  and collaborative meeting that I have never seen before. It has allowed me Continue reading

Technology Short Take 101

Welcome to Technology Short Take #101! I have (hopefully) crafted an interesting and varied collection of links for you today, spanning all the major areas of modern data center technology. Now you have some reading material for this weekend!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

  • AWS adds local NVMe storage to the M5 instance family; more details here. What I found interesting Continue reading

Future Thinking: Arnaud Castaignet on Estonia’s e-citizenship

In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. In May 2018, we interviewed Arnaud Castaignet, head of public relations for Estonia’s e-Residency programme.

Mr Arnaud Castaignet is the head of public relations for the Republic of Estonia’s e-Residency programme, a government-issued digital ID offering the freedom to join a community of digitally empowered citizens and open and run a global EU company fully online from anywhere in the world. Previously, he worked for the French President François Hollande as a digital strategist. Arnaud is also a Board Member of Open Diplomacy, a Paris-based think tank established in 2010, and a member of the Young Transatlantic Network of Future Leaders, a flagship initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States specifically geared toward young professionals 35 years old and younger. Estonia not only became the first country to say that Internet access was a human right, but has given their citizens free public WiFi, enabled them to vote online since 2005, and are protecting them with strong privacy, transparency Continue reading

Snabb Switch Update on Software Gone Wild

In 2014, we did a series of podcasts on Snabb Switch (Snabb Switch and OpenStack, Deep Dive), a software-only switch delivering 10-20 Gbps of forwarded bandwidth per x86 core. In the meantime, Snabb community slowly expanded, optimized the switching code, built a number of solutions on top of the packet forwarding core, and even forked a just-in-time Lua compiler to get better performance.

To find out the details, listen to Episode 91 of Software Gone Wild in which Luke Gorrie explained how far the Snabb project has progressed in the last four years.

Listen to the podcast

BDS: A centralized near-optimal overlay network for inter-datacenter data replication

BDS: A centralized near-optimal overlay network for inter-datacenter data replication Zhang et al., EuroSys’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site).

This is the story of how inter-datacenter multicast transfers at Baidu were sped-up by a factor of 3-5x. That’s a big deal!

For large-scale online service providers, such as Google, Facebook, and Baidu, an important data communication pattern is inter-DC multicast of bulk data — replicating massive amounts of data (e.g., user logs, web search indexes, photo sharing, blog posts) from one DC to multiple DCs in geo-distributed locations.

To set the scene, the authors study inter-DC traffic at Baidu over a period of seven days. Nearly all inter-DC traffic is multicast (91.1%), highlighting the importance of optimising the multicast use case.

When looking at the individual transfers, there is great diversity in the source and destination DCs. Thus it’s not going to suffice to pre-configure a few select routes: “we need a system to automatically route and schedule any given inter-DC multicast transfers.”

60% of the transferred files are over 1TB Continue reading

Comparing files and directories with the diff and comm Linux commands

There are a number of ways to compare files and directories on Linux systems. The diff, colordiff, and wdiff commands are just a sampling of commands that you're likely to run into. Another is comm. The command (think "common") lets you compare files in side-by-side columns the contents of individual files.Where diff gives you a display like this showing the lines that are different and the location of the differences, comm offers some different options with a focus on common content. Let's look at the default output and then some other features.Here's some diff output — displaying the lines that are different in the two files and using < and > signs to indicate which file each line came from.To read this article in full, please click here

Comparing files and directories with diff and comm

There are a number of ways to compare files and directories on Linux systems. The diff, colordiff, and wdiff commands are just a sampling of commands that you're like to run into. Another is comm. The command (think "common") lets you compare files in side-by-side columns the contents of individual files.Where diff gives you a display like this showing the lines that are different and the location of the differences, comm offers some different options with a focus on common content. Let's look at the default output and then some other features.Here's some diff output -- displaying the lines that are different in the two files and using < and > signs to indicate which file each line came from.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-intelligence platforms, cloud fuel a run on faster Ethernet

2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for all things Ethernet.First of all, the ubiquitous networking technology is having a banner year already in the data center where in the first quarter alone, the switching market recorded its strongest year-over-year revenue growth in over five years, and 100G Ethernet port shipments more than doubled year-over-year, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group researchers.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] The 16-percent switching growth was, "driven by the large-tier cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook but also by enterprise customers,” said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-intelligence platforms, cloud fuel a run on faster Ethernet

2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for all things Ethernet.First of all, the ubiquitous networking technology is having a banner year already in the data center where in the first quarter alone, the switching market recorded its strongest year-over-year revenue growth in over five years, and 100G Ethernet port shipments more than doubled year-over-year, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group researchers.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] The 16-percent switching growth was, "driven by the large-tier cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook but also by enterprise customers,” said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-intelligence platforms, cloud fuel a run on faster Ethernet

2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for all things Ethernet.First of all, the ubiquitous networking technology is having a banner year already in the data center where in the first quarter alone, the switching market recorded its strongest year-over-year revenue growth in over five years, and 100G Ethernet port shipments more than doubled year-over-year, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group researchers.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] The 16-percent switching growth was, "driven by the large-tier cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook but also by enterprise customers,” said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro.To read this article in full, please click here

Register for the DockerCon San Francisco 2018 Livestream

For those of you who can’t make it to DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco, June 12-15, you don’t have to miss out on the exciting news coming live at the event. We are happy to share that the General Sessions on both Day 1 and Day 2, as well as Moby’s Cool Hacks on Day 2 at DockerCon will be live streamed from San Francisco. For those looking to attend DockerCon SF Live there are a few tickets left. Don’t miss your last chance to register.

Find out about the latest Docker announcements live from Steve Singh (CEO) and Scott Johnston (Chief Product Officer) and enjoy the highly technical demos the Docker team has prepared for you!

Livestream schedule:

  • General Session Day 1 – 6/13 – 9 to 10:30am PDT
  • General Session Day 2 – 6/14 – 9 to 10:30am PDT
  • Moby’s Cool Hack on Day 2 –  6/14 – 4 to 5pm PDT

The livestream player will be embedded on the DockerCon site a few hours prior to the event. Be sure to sign up here to receive an email with the link to the livestream before the general session starts!

Sign up for the DockerCon Livestream

We Continue reading

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