How Does Your Organization Value Technology?

Just a quick thought here today. Thinking about the organization you work for or the organizations you work with, how would you say they view technology?

  1. Key to Success – Technology is an enabler AND a primary differentiator
  2. Important – The core business requires a commitment to technology to succeed
  3. Just Another Budget Item – Technology is a necessary evil

It is important to realize how valuable technology is to your organization or organizations we work with. If the business views our skills as key differentiators, work will be much more rewarding. If technology is just a necessary evil, it will be cut with everyone else’s budget.

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.

 

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MPLS, L3VPN, Multicast, and mVPN Fun in the Lab: Building a MPLS L3VPN Unicast and Multicast Cloud (6 Part Blog Series)

I needed to build a MPLS cloud for something.  Thought I’d invite you along for the fun in the lab.  Party on!**

big_picture_party_fun

Ultimately what I want to do is have a multicast source up in the upper left in Headquarters and multicast receivers down in Site11 and Site 12 joining those groups.

For this blog series that will mean 6 blogs, plus zip files of the varying configs as we build them, plus sniffer traces for you to download and refer to.

MPLS Fun in the Lab: Building the MPLS Cloud – Part 1 of 6

Create the MPLS cloud and prep it for MPLS L3VPN Unicast for One L3VPN Customer

  • OSPF area 0
  • MPLS LDP neighbors between the PEs and the P
  • BGP VPNv4 peers from all PEs to the VPNv4 Route Reflector

MPLS Fun in the Lab: Connect a Customer – Part 2 of 6

  • Create a VRF in each PE.
  • Apply the VRF and IP addresses on the interfaces in each PE towards the CEs.
  • Create the BGP neighbors in the PEs towards the CEs.
  • Ping from HQ to Site 11
  • Look at the sniffer trace of the above Ping

MPLS Fun in the Continue reading

OPL2LPT: an AdLib sound card for the parallel port

The AdLib sound card was the first popular sound card for IBM PC—prior to that, we were pampered by the sound of the PC speaker. Connected to an 8-bit ISA slot, it is powered by a Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2. This chip can drive 9 sound channels whose characteristics can be fine tuned through 244 write-only registers.

AdLib sound card

I had one but I am unable to locate it anymore. Models on eBay are quite rare and expensive. It is possible to build one yourself (either Sergey’s one or this faithful reproduction). However, you still need an ISA port. The limitless imagination of some hackers can still help here. For example, you can combine Sergey’s Xi 8088 processor board, with his ISA 8-bit backplane, his Super VGA card and his XT-CF-Lite card to get your very own modernish IBM PC compatible. Alternatively, you can look at the AdLib sound card on a parallel port from Raphaël Assénat.

The OPL2LPT sound card?

Recently, the 8-Bit Guy released a video about an AdLib sound card for the parallel port, the OPL2LPT. While current motherboards don’t have a parallel port anymore, it’s easy to Continue reading

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

It takes a village to raise a child. Or so the old saying goes. Creating a product is the same. It takes more than small group of developers (or parents) to raise a product. There’s a lot more to creating a product than writing an application. Don’t mistake a feature or application for a product.

Look, Six Engineers Created a Product!

People hear about new applications or protocols, or small companies selling for millions. They then leap to conclusions:

“Why is it that big vendors like Cisco need thousands of people to create a product? Facebook can put 6 engineers on a project and produce something like Open/R. It’s easy, right? We don’t need big vendors any more!”

“Look at Instagram - they only had a dozen people and they sold their company for $1 billion dollars! You don’t need any more people than that.”

Let’s look a bit closer at Instagram. How much revenue did they have? Zero.

How long were they in business for? A couple of years. So how many generations of product were they supporting? One. And did they have complete support structures for users? No. How many products had gone through end of Continue reading

Technology Short Take 95

Welcome to Technology Short Take 95! This Short Take was a bit more challenging than normal to compile, given that I spent the week leading up to its publication visiting customers in Europe. (My travel schedule in Europe is also why it didn’t get published until Saturday instead of the typical Friday.) Nevertheless, I have persevered in order to deliver you this list of links and articles. I hope it proves useful!

Networking

  • Larry Smith Jr. has a nice write-up on Cisco XR stemming from a presentation at NFD 17.
  • VMware recently released a reference design guide for NSX-T; see here for more details.
  • The engineering team at Lyft recently discussed a new overlay-free networking approach they’ve been working on for Kubernetes: IPVLAN-based CNI stack for running within VPCs on AWS. This is pretty cool, but does introduce some potential design considerations for deploying Kubernetes on AWS. (For those that may be unfamiliar: CNI, or Container Network Interface, is the means whereby network mechanisms “plug into” Kubernetes. IPVLAN is a low-latency means of providing IP connectivity to containers. VPCs, or Virtual Private Clouds, are Amazon’s software-defined networking mechanism for workloads running on AWS.)
  • Viktor van den Berg writes Continue reading

Peak DNSSEC?

Has the adoption of DNSSEC already peaked well before any level of complete deployment? If so that what might that mean for the way in which we manage security and resilience on the Internet?

How EVPN saved SDN from the brink of death

In 2010 and 2011, Software Defined Networking (SDN) was the hot new way of looking at architecture, and everyone had high hopes that it would reduce the stress of highly manual and complex operations. That was then, but now we’re in 2018 and it appears that SDN hasn’t quite fulfilled what it advertised, as many networks remain expensive, complex and proprietary. Some may claim that SDN is dead, but perhaps that’s not the case; maybe SDN has changed from its previous understanding and taken on a new definition. With solutions like EVPN and freedom from proprietary controllers bringing it back to life, SDN has risen like a phoenix from the ashes to finish the mission it started. How did we get here and what’s changed? You can check out our white paper for a more in-depth, technical look at SDN’s journey, or you can keep reading here for a CliffsNotes version of the information.

A link to the past: what SDN promised us

SDN promised to enable the network to behave like the server world, where resources could be virtualized and new environments could be deployed or decommissioned almost instantaneously. SDN sought to break-up the vertical stack by moving the Continue reading

Weekend Reads 022318: Copyright, walls, and botnets

Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability. —Daniel Nazer @EFF

Security advances throughout the centuries have been mostly technical adjustments in response to evolving weaponry. Fortification — the art and science of protecting a place by imposing a barrier between you and an enemy — is as ancient as humanity. From the standpoint of theory, however, there is very little about modern network or airport security that could not be learned from a 17th century artillery manual. That should trouble us more than it does. —Jack Anderson

Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet, was released today in which it states that the analysis of more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month has found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious. Additionally, the report warns DDoS attacks Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The massive role of tiny antennas

The Shannon-Hartley theorem expresses “the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.”Translation: wireless data can only travel so fast. But if data rates are finite, how can we support the rollout of Gigabit LTE, and one billion new 5G connections by 2025?Over the next few years, wireless connections will become ubiquitous – not only in our phones, tablets and PCs – but in our home, car and cities, thanks to an unglamorous and often-forgotten RF enabler: the antenna. Far from the laughably chunky antennas of early mobile phones, today’s nearly-invisible antenna systems make high-speed networking possible. They’re evolving as new wireless technologies emerge to satisfy our demand for content on the move.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The massive role of tiny antennas

The Shannon-Hartley theorem expresses “the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.”Translation: wireless data can only travel so fast. But if data rates are finite, how can we support the rollout of Gigabit LTE, and one billion new 5G connections by 2025?Over the next few years, wireless connections will become ubiquitous – not only in our phones, tablets and PCs – but in our home, car and cities, thanks to an unglamorous and often-forgotten RF enabler: the antenna. Far from the laughably chunky antennas of early mobile phones, today’s nearly-invisible antenna systems make high-speed networking possible. They’re evolving as new wireless technologies emerge to satisfy our demand for content on the move.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s Your #TechConfession?

 

 

Think back to the first moment you fell in love with technology. Was it love at first deployment? What about developing code to trick your school’s bell system into letting your class out early? If you love all things technology, or you’re a technologist, then you should definitely put #TechConfessions, the podcast and YouTube playlist, on your radar.

#TechConfessions is a weekly podcast and web series that uncovers the deep, dark tech secrets of some of high tech’s finest minds. The series looks to expose the inner thoughts and forgotten stories of tech professionals. Hear from top tech pros as they divulge the early beginnings of their tech careers and proclaim their favorite software-defined moments. Get insights into what makes these tech leaders tick, and discover their long-burning passion for all things tech.

Director of Influence Marketing at VMware, Amy Lewis, one of the hosts of #TechConfessions, gives a voice to the professionals witnessing industry changes. Going from a hardware to a software state of mind happens differently for everyone. As the host of #TechConfessions, Amy digs deep to get the real backstory behind each individual’s transition into the world of software.

 

So far, season one Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Why is tape declining in the backup world?

The numbers don’t look good My favorite source of numbers for the tape industry used to be the Santa Clara Consulting Group.  They’d been tracking the use of tape in the backup and recovery industry since 2008 and had been a great go-to for such data. They showed a steady decline in number of units shipped, both in terms of drives and media.  Unfortunately, it looks like they stopped doing these services in 2014.Gartner’s most recent report on what media types people are using to do their backups is a pretty solid source of data, though. They’ve got data going back to 2009 that shows the percentage of people that are backing up directly to tape (D2T), backing up to disk then copying to tape (D2D2T), backing up to disk with no tape component (D2D/D2D2D), or backing up to the cloud (D2C/D2D2C).  While tape is used in most datacenters in one way or another, the percentage of companies using tape in any way is steadily declining. Companies are clearly moving to D2D or D2C techniques.  What are the reasons behind this trend?To read this article in full, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 23rd, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

What does a bubble look like before it bursts? The image shows a brief period of stability before succumbing to molecular forces that pinch the film together and cause the bubble to burst.  (Mr Li Shen - Imperial College London)

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

 

  • 20 million: daily DuckDuckGo searches, 55% growth; 38.3 billion: WeChat messages sent per day; 500 million: database of pwned passwords to check against; 38%: China's consumption of world IC production; 92%: Fortune 500 traffic is from bots; $2: Blue Pill: A 72MHz 32-Bit Computer; 5,000: Martian days of operation for the Opportunity Rover; 30.72 terabytes: Samsung SSD; 185%: Golden State Warriors drive up ticket prices; $1.3 billion: loss that happens when Kylie Jenner tweets about your new UI; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
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