Experimenting with Azure

I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Azure recently, and I thought it might be useful to share a quick post on using some of my favorite tools with Azure. I’ve found it useful to try to leverage existing tools whenever I can, and so as I’ve been experimenting with Azure I’ve been leveraging familiar tools like Docker Machine and Vagrant.

The information here isn’t revolutionary or unique, but hopefully it will still be useful to others, even if only as a “quick reference”-type of post.

Launching an Instance on Azure Using Docker Machine

To launch an instance on Azure and provision it with Docker using docker-machine:

docker-machine create -d azure \
--azure-subscription-id $(az account show --query "id" -o tsv) \
--azure-ssh-user azureuser \
--azure-size "Standard_B1ms" azure-test

The first time you run this you’ll probably need to allow Docker Machine access to your Azure subscription (you’ll get prompted to log in via a browser and allow access). This will create a service principal that is visible via az ad sp list. Note that you may be prompted for authentication for future uses, although it will re-use the existing service principal once it is created.

Launching an Instance Using the Azure Provider Continue reading

Event-Driven Automation on Building Network Automation Solutions Online Course

Most engineers talking about network automation focus on configuration management: keeping track of configuration changes, generating device configurations from data models and templates, and deploying configuration changes.

There’s another extremely important aspect of network automation that’s oft forgotten: automatic response to internal or external events. You could wait for self-driving networks to see it implemented, or learn how to do it yourself.

On March 20th live session of Building Network Automation Solutions online course David Gee will dive deeper into event-driven network automation. As he explains the challenge:

When it comes to running infrastructure and infrastructure services, a lot of the decision making is human based. Someone reads a ticket, someone decides what to do. Someone gets alerted to an event and that someone does something about it. This involvement causes friction in the smooth-running nature of automated processes. Fear not! Something can be done about it.

We all know the stories of ITIL and rigid process management and David will show you how event-driven automation could be made reality even with strict and rigid controls, resulting in an environment that reacts automatically to stimuli from your services and infrastructure. We will discuss what events are, when they're important, how Continue reading

The Overoptimization Meltdown

In simple terms Meltdown and Spectre are simple vulnerabilities to understand. Imagine a gang of thieves waiting for a stage coach carrying a month’s worth of payroll.

There are two roads the coach could take, and a fork, or a branch, where the driver decides which one to take. The driver could take either one. What is the solution? Station robbers along both sides of the branch, and wait to see which one the driver chooses. When you know, pull the resources from one branch to the other, so you can effectively rob the stage. This is much the same as a modern processor handling a branch—the user could have put anything into some field, or retreived anything from a database, that might cause the software to run one of two sets of instructions. There is no way for the processor to know, so it runs both of them.

To run both sets of instructions, the processor will pull in the contents of specific memory locations, and begin exexuting code across these memory locations. Some of these memory locations might not be pieces of memory the currently running software is supposed to be able to access, but this is not Continue reading

Worth Reading: When writing code is a waste of time

I have spent many years architecting and developing enterprise software. I cut my teeth with an internship at HP and survived a harrowing stint at an imploding start-up before moving on to a more stable career track. I spent several years working at Stanford University and have since become the Assistant Director of Architecture at UCLA Research Information Systems. —Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton @ Free Code Camp

Can IPv4 Networks Be Compromised via IPv6?

The Fox-IT International Blog recently published an article on how IPv4 networks can be compromised via IPv6. The attack vector relies on the default IPv6 configuration in the Windows operating system to spoof DNS replies by acting as a malicious DNS server to redirect traffic to an attacker-specified endpoint. The Windows Proxy Auto Discovery (WPAD) feature can also be exploited in order to relay credentials and authenticate to various services within the network, using a tool called called mitm6 created by Fox-IT.

Fox-IT is recommending that IPv6 is disabled when it is not being used, as disabling Proxy Auto Detection. This of course means that Windows-based hosts are unable to switch preference to IPv6 when it is available (which all versions since Windows Vista will do), and that IPv6 would need to be explicitly re-enabled on hosts.

The article makes some important points, but IPv4 and IPv6 are fundamentally incompatible on a wire level and it needs to be understood they can’t communicate with each other except through translation devices. There are a number of known issues (including this one) with the security of automatic configuration mechanisms running on Local Area Networks, both under IPv6 and IPv4, but these require physical access to Continue reading

SYN packet handling in the wild

SYN packet handling in the wild

Here at Cloudflare, we have a lot of experience of operating servers on the wild Internet. But we are always improving our mastery of this black art. On this very blog we have touched on multiple dark corners of the Internet protocols: like understanding FIN-WAIT-2 or receive buffer tuning.

SYN packet handling in the wild
CC BY 2.0 image by Isaí Moreno

One subject hasn't had enough attention though - SYN floods. We use Linux and it turns out that SYN packet handling in Linux is truly complex. In this post we'll shine some light on this subject.

The tale of two queues

SYN packet handling in the wild

First we must understand that each bound socket, in the "LISTENING" TCP state has two separate queues:

  • The SYN Queue
  • The Accept Queue

In the literature these queues are often given other names such as "reqsk_queue", "ACK backlog", "listen backlog" or even "TCP backlog", but I'll stick to the names above to avoid confusion.

SYN Queue

The SYN Queue stores inbound SYN packets[1] (specifically: struct inet_request_sock). It's responsible for sending out SYN+ACK packets and retrying them on timeout. On Linux the number of retries is configured with:

$ sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries
net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 5

The docs describe Continue reading

IoT security needs a white knight

Thanks to the Mirai botnet attacks, few people in the world of tech need a reminder that IoT devices remain a serious threat to enterprise networks. Still, more than a year after the botnet made headlines worldwide, IoT security remains mostly an idea, rather than a reality.Such is the scope of the problem that Frost and Sullivan IoT research director Dilip Sarangan argues for governmental intervention. Sarangan says that, because the responsibility for IoT security is diffused across device manufacturers, network providers, software developers and many others, it’s difficult for the industry to make progress on all-encompassing standards.To read this article in full, please click here

Facebook and Amazon are causing a memory shortage

If you’ve noticed a considerable increase in the price of memory in the last few months, you can thank (or blame) Amazon, Facebook, and Google. The explosion in growth among hyperscale data centers is great if you are a supplier of components to these companies, not so great if you are buying those same components.According to DRAMeXchange, a division of market researcher TrendForce, the price of server DRAM will continue to rise as the supply remains tight in the first quarter of this year. The server DRAM market has seen tight supply since the third quarter of last year due to massive construction projects by the data center market, especially the hyperscale data centers, data centers that are bigger than a football field.To read this article in full, please click here

Facebook and Amazon are causing a memory shortage

If you’ve noticed a considerable increase in the price of memory in the last few months, you can thank (or blame) Amazon, Facebook, and Google. The explosion in growth among hyperscale data centers is great if you are a supplier of components to these companies, not so great if you are buying those same components.According to DRAMeXchange, a division of market researcher TrendForce, the price of server DRAM will continue to rise as the supply remains tight in the first quarter of this year. The server DRAM market has seen tight supply since the third quarter of last year due to massive construction projects by the data center market, especially the hyperscale data centers, data centers that are bigger than a football field.To read this article in full, please click here

Meltdown and Its Networking Equivalents

One of my readers sent me this question:

Do you have any thoughts on this meltdown HPTI thing? How does a hardware issue/feature become a software vulnerability? Hasn't there always been an appropriate level of separation between kernel and user space?

There’s always been privilege-level separation between kernel and user space, but not the address space separation - kernel has been permanently mapped into the high-end addresses of user space (but not visible from the user-space code on systems that had decent virtual memory management hardware) since the days of OS/360, CP/M and VAX/VMS (RSX-11M was an exception since it ran on 16-bit CPU architecture and its designers wanted to support programs up to 64K byte in size).

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