BGP leaks and cryptocurrencies

Over the few last hours, a dozen news stories have broken about how an attacker attempted (and perhaps managed) to steal cryptocurrencies using a BGP leak.

CC BY 2.0 image by elhombredenegro

What is BGP?

The Internet is composed of routes. For our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 , we tell the world that all the IPs in the range 1.1.1.0 to 1.1.1.255 can be accessed at any Cloudflare PoP.

For the people who do not have a direct link to our routers, they receive the route via transit providers, who will deliver packets to those addresses as they are connected to Cloudflare and the rest of the Internet.

This is the normal way the Internet operates.

There are authorities (Regional Internet Registries, or RIRs) in charge of distributing IP addresses in order to avoid people using the same address space. Those are IANA, RIPE, ARIN, LACNIC, APNIC and AFRINIC.

What is a BGP leak?

CC BY 2.0 image by Magnus D

The broad definition of a BGP leak would be IP space that is announced by somebody not allowed by the owner of the Continue reading

5G is overhyped and expectations need reining in

5G is nearly here. The next generation of wireless connectivity promises superfast speeds, ultra-low latency and more network capacity than ever. 5G auctions have or are due to take place in the US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Australia and host of other countries.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

5G is overhyped and expectations need reining in

5G is nearly here. The next generation of wireless connectivity promises superfast speeds, ultra-low latency and more network capacity than ever. 5G auctions have or are due to take place in the US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Australia and host of other countries.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

5G is over-hyped and expectations need reigning in

5G is nearly here. The next generation of wireless connectivity promises superfast speeds, ultra-low latency and more network capacity than ever. 5G auctions have or are due to take place in the US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Australia and host of other countries.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

5G is over-hyped and expectations need reigning in

5G is nearly here. The next generation of wireless connectivity promises superfast speeds, ultra-low latency and more network capacity than ever. 5G auctions have or are due to take place in the US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Australia and host of other countries.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Lagging In AI? Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early

Without splitting a lot of hairs on definitions, it is safe to say that machine learning in its myriad forms is absolutely shaking up data processing. The techniques for training neural networks to chew through mountains of labeled data and make inferences against new data are set to transform every aspect of computation and automation. There is a mad dash to do something, as there always is at the beginning of every technology hype cycle.

Enterprises need to breathe. The hyperscalers are perfecting these technologies, which are changing fast, and by the time things settle out and the software …

Lagging In AI? Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Celebrating ECMP in Linux — part one

ECMP in Linux: A brief history

Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routes are a big component of all the super-trendy data center network designs that are en vogue right now. Clos networks and the ECMP that underpins those designs are the best tools we have today to deliver high bandwidth, highly fault-tolerant networks. Clos networks are rich with multiple equal cost paths to get from Server A to Server B.

2 Paths from Host to ToR * 8 Paths from ToR to Leaf * 16 Paths from Leaf to Spine * 8 Paths from Spine to Leaf * 2 Paths from Leaf to ToR
= 4096 Possible Unique Paths between Server A and Server B

FYI: The above is an actual customer network. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and colors have been added because a rainbow of links is more fun!

Cumulus has been working to improve the behavior of ECMP routes in the Linux kernel over the last several kernel releases. Now, with kernel v4.17, we have achieved the milestone we set out to attain. As of Linux kernel v4.17, Linux hosts can now leverage the “5-Tuple” style hashing used inside traditional network devices for Continue reading

Virtual Instruments Integrates With Cisco SAN Telemetry, AppDynamics

The performance management company released a new version of its platform that integrates with Cisco’s new SAN telemetry streaming and AppDynamics.

Connecting to a Windows Host

Welcome to the first installment of our Windows-specific Getting Started series!

Would you like to automate some of your Windows hosts with Red Hat Ansible Tower, but don’t know how to set everything up? Are you worried that Red Hat Ansible Engine won’t be able to communicate with your Windows servers without installing a bunch of extra software? Do you want to easily automate everyone’s best friend, Clippy?

Image source: aguyiknow.com.au

We can’t help with the last thing, but if you said yes to the other two questions, you've come to the right place. In this post, we’ll walk you through all the steps you need to take in order to set up and connect to your Windows hosts with Ansible Engine.

Why Automate Windows Hosts?

A few of the many things you can do for your Windows hosts with Ansible Engine include:

• Starting, stopping and managing services
• Pushing and executing custom PowerShell scripts
• Managing packages with the Chocolatey package manager

In addition to connecting to and automating Windows hosts using local or domain users, you’ll also be able to use runas to execute actions as the Administrator (the Windows alternative to Linux’s sudo or su), so Continue reading

Worth Reading: Intel Thread Detection and the GPU

Intel announced some new innovations in anti-virus technology that leverage GPUs and AI to enhance malware protection. —Leon Chan @Tom’s Hardware

Interested in Virtualization? Check Out Our Newest Addition to the INE Library: Virtualization – Introduction to Hypervisor (KVM)

Virtualization is a key skillset for any Linux Administrator or Engineer. Not all workloads are useful in the cloud, and companies are quickly realizing this in terms of increasing cloud bills. You can bring those workloads in house, but what about licensing? KVM is a favorite of home labs because of the low cost of entry (free). KVM is also a favorite of shops that know how powerful open source is. Gain a greater understanding of how any virtualization platform works by utilizing common linux tools to manage and orchestrate your virtual machines. KVM forms the basis for upstream virtualization projects like oVirt and RHEV as well. Learn how to setup a virtualized environment only armed with an install usb from your favorite linux distribution.

Any workload can be run on a KVM virtual machine platform. Docker/Kubernetes? No problem. Databases, front end web services, workloads requiring dedicated hardware such as GPU’s or HBA’s, KVM can run any of these workloads with near bare metal performance.

What You’ll Learn:

• Setting up the hypervisor machine
• Installing your first virtual machine
• managing network storage memory and cpu resources
• Virtual machine snapshots
  Virtual machine cloning

You can watch this course on our streaming Continue reading

BrandPost: What We Can Learn from IT in Education

Among the vertical industries most impacted by technological change in the past three to five years is K-12 education. This is often overlooked, but the move to becoming digital is truly changing the game for school districts. Changes wrought by extensive device use, distance learning, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality require that K-12 schools dramatically overhaul their approach to IT. In many ways, the IT need at schools has similar or greater demands for availability, reliability, and scalability to support new applications than what is seen in other industries. However, the rapid rate of change that has occurred in K-12 is exceptional. There are some important lessons that we can learn from the “high speed” that IT professionals and administrators are responding to.To read this article in full, please click here

Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers

There has been a lot of research and development devoted to bringing the Arm architecture to servers and storage in the datacenter, and a lot of that has focused on making beefier and usually custom Arm cores that look more like an X86 core than they do the kind of compute element we find in our smartphones and tablets. The other way to bring Arm to the datacenter is to use more modest processing elements and to gang a lot of them up together, cramming a lot more cores in a rack and making up the performance in volume.

This …

Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Cisco Digital Network Architecture: a prison of promises or the next big thing?

Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) promises to help companies in their digital transformation journey where new technologies can be used to accelerate business activities and processes to make them more competitive. It's also a big validation that network analytics is no longer a nice to have but a must have. Cisco DNA aims to provide a platform that companies can use as the foundation for digital transformation projects. The architecture's key tenants are virtualization, automation, analytics, a cloud-based service management layer, and open application programming interfaces (APIs). It’s a system that’s “designed for automation.” In other words, Cisco wants to make its products easier to deploy and manage. At the heart of that message is a move away from CLI. Sounds good so far.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cisco Digital Network Architecture: a prison of promises or the next big thing?

Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) promises to help companies in their digital transformation journey where new technologies can be used to accelerate business activities and processes to make them more competitive. It's also a big validation that network analytics is no longer a nice to have but a must have. Cisco DNA aims to provide a platform that companies can use as the foundation for digital transformation projects. The architecture's key tenants are virtualization, automation, analytics, a cloud-based service management layer, and open application programming interfaces (APIs). It’s a system that’s “designed for automation.” In other words, Cisco wants to make its products easier to deploy and manage. At the heart of that message is a move away from CLI. Sounds good so far.To read this article in full, please click here

Physics Be Damned! Nokia, DoCoMo Test 5G in 90 GHz mmWave Band

The tests could break new ground in terms of supporting 5G use cases using very high mmWave spectrum bands.

Verizon Shifts Focus From 5G Fixed Wireless Trials to Commercial Launch

The operator said it is on track to launch 5G in a handful of markets later this year but is still cagey about the details. Launch cities remain a mystery.   

On the Web: Openfabric at IPspace

I was over at ipspace to talk to Ivan and several other folks about openfabric. This is one of those situations where… Well, the algorithm openfabric uses to calculate fabric location has changed slightly in the last week. Welcome to the world of networking technology.

As always, we started with the “what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP” question, resulting in “BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet”. You can probably guess the next set of intro questions: “Do we need policies and traffic engineering in a high-speed data center fabric?” Finally, we got to discussing OpenFabric, starting with how OpenFabric uses link-state database to modify IS-IS flooding behavior and thus reduces the total amount of flooding in a data center fabric. Next step: how do you know where it’s safe to reduce flooding? You have to figure out whether you’re a leaf or spine, and there are two ways in OpenFabric to solve that challenge.

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• Datadog is a cloud-scale monitoring platform that combines infrastructure metrics, distributed traces, and logs all in one place. With out-of-the-box dashboards and seamless integrations with over 200 technologies, Datadog provides end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of modern applications at scale. Build your own rich dashboards, set alerts to identify anomalies, and collaborate with your team to troubleshoot and fix issues fast. Start a free trial and try it yourself.


• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net

• For heads of IT/Engineering responsible for building an analytics infrastructure, Etleap is an ETL solution for creating perfect data Continue reading

Fun, Games, and Cryptojacking at RSA Conference

Cyber warfare and cryptomining dominated RSA Conference keynotes and talks with technologists, who advocated a back-to-basics approach to network security.