Technology Short Take 92

Welcome to Technology Short Take 92, the first Technology Short Take of 2018. This one was supposed to be the last Tech Short Take of 2017, but I didn’t get it published in time (I decided to spend time with my family instead—some things are just more important). In any case, hopefully the delay of one additional week hasn’t caused any undue stress—let’s jump right in!

Networking

  • Lindsay Hill walks through using Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana to monitor network statistics.
  • Via Ivan Pepelnjak, I found this article by Diane Patton at Cumulus Networks talking about container network designs. The article is a bit heavy on pushing the Host Pack (a Cumulus thing), but otherwise provides a good overview of several different possible container network designs, along with some of the criteria that might lead to each design.
  • Erik Hinderer takes a stab (based on his field experience) at estimating how long it takes to upgrade VMware NSX. Erik’s figures are just estimates, of course; actual values will be determined based on each customer’s specific environment.
  • This post is a bit older, but covers a challenge faced by cloud-native darling Netflix—how does one, exactly, identify which application used which IP address Continue reading

5 tips to learn Docker in 2018

As the holiday season ends, many of us are making New Year’s resolutions for 2018. Now is a great time to think about the new skills or technologies you’d like to learn. So much can change each year as technology progresses and companies are looking to innovate or modernize their legacy applications or infrastructure. At the same time the market for Docker jobs continues to grow as companies such as Visa, MetLife and Splunk adopt Docker Enterprise Edition ( EE) in production. So how about learning Docker in 2018 ? Here are a few tips to help you along the way.

 

1. Play With Docker: the Docker Playground and Training site

 

Play with Docker (PWD) is a Docker playground and training site which allows users to run Docker commands in a matter of seconds. It gives the experience of having a free Linux Virtual Machine in browser, where you can build and run Docker containers and even create clusters. Check out this video from DockerCon 2017 to learn more about this project. The training site is composed of a large set of Docker labs and quizzes from beginner to advanced level available for both Developers and IT pros at  training. Continue reading

Un-Nintendo Consequences: Protect Your Devices from Attacking Gaming Networks

This holiday season, we published a buying guide for “smart toys,” as well as steps you could take to secure them once they were home. As we start the new year, it’s a good time to revisit Holiday DDoS Attacks: Targeting Gamers (Plus Five Things You Can Do). Last year Ryan Polk wrote, “gaming networks are most often targeted by DDoS attacks, as the end of year holidays usually bring many users online who are eager to try out their new games and systems.” He included the following helpful tips.

Five actions to protect your devices from becoming bots:

  • Create and use strong passwords for all your devices. Do not use the default. This is especially important for smart devices, routers, and other devices with which you may not interact directly.
  • Update your devices! Software is often patched to remove known vulnerabilities, greatly strengthening your defenses.
  • Monitor your devices. If a device is acting strangely, investigate it. One example is bounced email messages. If email messages are not reaching their destination, your device could be infected and sending spam as a part of a botnet.
  • Run anti-virus scans and use other security tools to find and remove malicious software.
  • Continue reading

Link Aggregation – LACP Protocol

How Does Internet Work - We know what is networking

EtherChannel enables bundling multiple physical links connecting same devices into a single logical link. I will try to show you how it is configured and how it works. The issue with one uplink I made an example with 8 clients connected to two Cisco 3850 switches. For start, those two switches are connected together with 1G copper on Interface Ge1/23. The clients are also connected to 1G ports. In this case, when all of those four clients on the left side start simultaneously sending traffic at full speed to different computers on the right side, they will congest the uplink

Link Aggregation – LACP Protocol

Linux Routing On The Host With FRR

We've all been there, it's supposed to be a relatively simple change and then BOOM! Spanning tree topology change blows up the network :( There is a movement in the data centre space to push the layer 2 boundary down into the host to avoid the bandwidth waste of spanning tree link blocking and...

My DC Virtual Lab Setup – Insights

Hi,

I have been getting a lot of requests offline and online on the lab setup I use, I have to say I have tested many things and finally settled with Vmware ESXi 5.5. Eve-ng was good but not good enough when spawned with multiple instances of qemu, maybe because my host operating system might be slow enough for it.

I will cover the connectivity for two VMX devices but the logic Remains same for any device connectivity.

What I have Already

-> Vmware Esxi5.5

-> Dell R810

-> Insane amount of time to waste :), I hope you won’t fall into the same path.

 

You need to have the OVA files, all settings are straightforward, don’t even worry about Memory allocations yet, there is time for that and also the networking part, import the OVA

There will be two OVA images

Vfp – forwarding plane

VCP – Control Plane

General import – No Rocket science – Don’t worry about any settings as of now

 

This is how my VCP looks like – Again don’t worry about any networking here, catch here – VCP has only two networking Adapters – One for Fxp0 which is the Continue reading

Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD

There is lots of information circulating about the new exploits of computer chips from Intel and others announced in the past few days. Some of it has been accurate, and some has been sensationalist and overblown. There is much technical information with high level of details available for both Meltdown and Spectre, so I won’t get into a lot of technical detail here. Rather, I’ll focus on the higher-level issues affecting business and personal computer users.+RELATED: Intel’s processor flaw is a virtualization nightmare; Red Hat responds to the Intel processor flaw+To read this article in full, please click here

Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD

There is lots of information circulating about the new exploits of computer chips from Intel and others announced in the past few days. Some of it has been accurate, and some has been sensationalist and overblown. There is much technical information with high level of details available for both Meltdown and Spectre, so I won’t get into a lot of technical detail here. Rather, I’ll focus on the higher-level issues affecting business and personal computer users.+RELATED: Intel’s processor flaw is a virtualization nightmare; Red Hat responds to the Intel processor flaw+To read this article in full, please click here

Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD

There is lots of information circulating about the new exploits of computer chips from Intel and others announced in the past few days. Some of it has been accurate, and some has been sensationalist and overblown. There is much technical information with high level of details available for both Meltdown and Spectre, so I won’t get into a lot of technical detail here. Rather, I’ll focus on the higher-level issues affecting business and personal computer users.First, to be clear, these exploits affect all the major computer chip architectures. The major chip makers — AMD, ARM and Intel — have decided to work together to mitigate the potential effects of a common enemy that affects most modern computer chips — a good sign for future industry collaboration. And all the major software vendors of Linux, Microsoft for Windows, Apple for macOS, and virtualization software suppliers such as VMware and Citrix have all collaborated to mitigate this threat.To read this article in full, please click here

Meltdown and Spectre: Why We Need Vigilance, Upgradeability, and Collaborative Security

Today the tech media is focused on the announcement of two security vulnerabilities, nicknamed Meltdown and Spectre, that are found in almost all CPUs used in modern devices. Mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers, cloud services, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are all vulnerable.

There are many articles being published on this topic. The best source of information I’ve found is this site by the security researchers at the Graz University of Technology:

https://meltdownattack.com/

At the bottom of that page are links to the security blog posts, advisories, and other statements from companies and organizations across the industry. In an excellent example of the principles of Collaborative Security, the announcement was coordinated with the release of patches and updates for a wide range of operating systems and devices.

For readers wanting a deeper technical dive, the site from Graz University has links to multiple academic papers. Google’s Project Zero team also published a detailed technical analysis.

From our perspective, today’s news highlights a couple of points:

  • Keeping up to date on patches is critical. We each need to ensure that we upgrade our own systems and devices. If we work for organizations/companies, we need to ensure that processes are in place Continue reading

Understanding the architecture of the modern Linux operating system

Linux is cool and can do amazing things in the enterprise data center, whether it’s hosting a web app or acting as an Internet firewall. But what makes up the modern Linux OS? What are the many pieces and parts that make the Linux OS work? Before we answer those questions, let’s start by answering a few more basic questions about Linux architecture such as…

What is an operating system?

The short answer is that an operating system, or OS, is software that you load on your hardware to make it do things. Without an operating system, most hardware is useless. For example, you might have a Dell computer that runs the Windows 10 operating system from which you run your applications. You might have an iPhone that runs the iOS operating system. You may also have an Apple MacBook that runs the Apple macOS operating system. The operating systems on these hardware platforms are what enable them to run applications, as shown in the graphic.

Linux architecture

What is a kernel, and what does it do?

The kernel is the special piece of the operating system that controls the CPU hardware, allocates memory, accesses data, schedules processes, runs the applications and Continue reading

Worth Reading: Is Multi-Stakeholder Internet Governance Dying?

As a result, ICANN, although notionally multi-stakeholder, in practice fails to fulfil the criterion of balance. Its processes do not place a priority on the facilitation of understanding and consensus between warring stakeholder groups, and this feeds politicking and strategic behavior. Even many industry stakeholders acknowledge this shortcoming; for example Jonathan Matkowsky, who works for a digital threat management company, said in an ICANN mailing list post recently, “It’s very sad to see the open Internet breaking down as a result of the multistakeholder process failing to work.” —Jeremy Malcom @ The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Getting More Out Of NSX Webcast Series

 

Each episode in this Getting More Out of NSX webcast series has its own topic, so there is no need to watch each episode to understand the next one. The episodes cover a variety of NSX features and explain in detail how NSX is the solution to key challenges faced by IT professionals. With the use of product demos, our NSX experts will show you how NSX allows granular control on an application by application basis to achieve the dream of universal security across the network. You will learn about:

  • NSX optimization for performance – how NSX eliminates the need for agent management and overprovisioning, thus reducing costs
  • NSX automated ubiquitous deployment & enforcement
  • NSX simplified policy management & automation across services

 

Now Available On-Demand

Episode 1: Deep Dive into NSX Service Composer, covered the mapping of applications, adding context to your Security Policy, and the NSX Service Composer and Application Rule Manager. Episode 2: Micro-segmentation Preparation and Planning with vRNI, covered how to perform Plan Security around Applications, build rulesets from Recommendations from vRNI, and verify rules compliance.

There is no need to watch Episodes 1 and 2 to understand Episodes 3 and 4 as each episode has its own topic. Episodes 1 and 2 can be accessed here.

 

Upcoming

Continue reading

Red Hat responds to the Intel processor flaw

How are the Linux vendors addressing the recently-exposed Intel processor flaw? I asked Red Hat and got some solid answers.What is the nature of the problem? Discovered some time ago, but only just yesterday brought into public view, the CPU flaw allows an attacker to bypass restrictions to gain access to privileged memory (which should be inaccessible) -- possibly stealing sensitive information from computer systems, mobile devices, and cloud deployments. There are actually two problems and they've been dubbed "Meltdown" and "Spectre". They potentially affect 90% of computer servers and virtually every Intel microprocessor.The Meltdown flaw is specific to Intel while Spectre is a design flaw that has been used by many processor manufacturers for decades.To read this article in full, please click here

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