Sponsored Post: Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL, InMemory.Net, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• On-demand Webinar. Fast & Frictionless - The Decision Engine for Seamless Digital Business. In this session, guest speakers Michele Goetz, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Matthias Baumhof, VP Worldwide Engineering at ThreatMetrix, discuss: How risk-based authentication leveraging digital identities is key to empowering customer transactions; How real-time customer trust decisions can reduce fraud and improve customer satisfaction; How a high performance Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA) database helps continuously evaluate across a multitude of factors to drive decisioning at the lowest operational cost. View now. 


• Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services

• .NET developers dealing with Errors in Production: You know the pain of troubleshooting errors with limited time, limited information, and limited tools. Managers want to know what’s wrong right away, users don’t want to provide log data, and you spend more time gathering information than you do fixing the problem. To fix all that, Loupe was built specifically as a .NET logging and monitoring solution. Loupe notifies you about any errors and tells you all the information you need to fix them. It tracks performance metrics, identifies which errors cause Continue reading

Former AppDynamics Founder Launches Harness to Do Continuous Delivery

The company secured $20 million in Series A funding.

Worth Reading: TLS and Data Center Monitoring

Over the course of four years, Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 has been designed to be more secure in order to prevent the interception of sessions over the Internet. It has a more secure key exchange, based on the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman algorithm, formally deprecating the use of RSA static keys to ensure forward secrecy (FS). The end user and privacy were top-of-mind with this and other TLS working group consensus decisions when the zero round trip time (0-RTT) option is not in use. —Kathleen Moriarty @APNIC

The post Worth Reading: TLS and Data Center Monitoring appeared first on rule 11 reader.

What is Notary and why is it important to CNCF?

As you may have heard, the Notary project has been invited to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Much like its real world namesake, Notary is a platform for establishing trust over pieces of content.

In life, certain important events such as buying a house are facilitated by a trusted third party called a “notary.” When buying a house, this person is typically employed by the lender to verify your identity and serve as a witness to your signatures on the mortgage agreement. The notary carries a special stamp and will also sign the documents as an affirmation that a notary was present and verified all the required information relating to the borrowers.

In a similar manner, the Notary project, initially sponsored by Docker, is designed to provide high levels of trust  over digital content using strong cryptographic signatures. In addition to ensuring the provenance of the software, it also provides guarantees that the content is not modified without approval of the author anywhere in the supply chain.  This then allows higher level systems like Docker Enterprise Edition (EE)  with Docker Content Trust (which uses Notary) to establish clear policy on the usage of content.  For instance, a Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Technology helps first responders fight California fires

Fires have laid to waste huge swaths of Northern California. The deadly blazes have burned through more than nearly 400 square miles forcing 100,000 people to evacuate, and destroying over 8,400 structures.How do firefighters respond to such a disaster? Where are they dispatched? When and where are evacuations ordered? How can a fire being propelled by 78mph gusts of wind be contained? How do planes know where and when to deploy fire retardant?Sensors, drones, fire-cams, crowdsourcing and geographical information systems all help minimize damage and deaths.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Connecting The Dots With Graph Databases

Graph querying of data housed in massive data lakes and data warehouses has been part of the big data and analytics scene for many years, but it hasn’t always been a particularly easy process. Understanding with graphs has in many ways been a highly manual process, and not all data scientists have had access to the Cypher graph database query language. Executives at graph company Neo4j are looking to change that.

At the GraphConnect New York show this week, Neo4j announced it has donated an early version of its Cypher for Apache Spark language toolkit to the openCypher project, a …

Connecting The Dots With Graph Databases was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: 7 ways IoT is reshaping the internet

Two decades ago, the Internet was the shiny new object in the room. The Worldwide Web was just emerging as a new paradigm for communication and commerce, and the world brimmed with possibilities. Today, not only has the Internet fulfilled those nascent dreams, it has become the undisputed foundation of the digital age.But now there’s a new paradigm in town—the Internet of Things (IoT).For years, IoT has been growing up inside factories and oil platforms, in ships, trucks, and trains—quietly changing long-standing industrial processes. It has made its way into virtually every industry—agriculture, aviation, mining, healthcare, energy, transportation, smart cities, and on and on. IoT is no longer just the next phase of the Internet—it’s fundamentally reshaping the Internet as we know it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple iOS 11 Cripples WLAN Troubleshooting Apps

Apple iOS 11 Cripples WLAN Troubleshooting Apps

IDG Contributor Network: Why edge computing is critical for the IoT

While many of today’s always-connected tech devices take advantage of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) manufacturers and application developers are starting to discover the benefits of doing more compute and analytics on the devices themselves.This on-device approach helps reduce latency for critical applications, lower dependence on the cloud, and better manage the massive deluge of data being generated by the IoT. An example of this trend is the recently announced Nest Cam IQ indoor security camera, which uses on-device vision processing to watch for motion, distinguish family members, and send alerts only if someone is not recognized or doesn’t fit pre-defined parameters. By performing computer vision tasks within the camera, Nest reduces the amount of bandwidth, cloud processing, and cloud storage used versus the alternative of sending raw streams of video over the network. In addition, on-device processing improves the speed of alerts while reducing chances of annoying, recurrent false alarms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Industrial IoT will give us self-healing machinery

Production downtime’s days are limited thanks to the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). Machine-embedded, network-connected sensors along with the collection of massive amounts of data will allow for self-healing manufacturing, scientists say.That’s the concept behind an enthusiastic research project called SelSus currently being explored by multiple European academic institutions and manufacturers, including Ford.Also on Network World: How industrial IoT is making steel production smarter The idea that the team proposes is to not just detect weaknesses during production, but to also fix the potential issues automatically through a kind of mathematically calculated self-healing. The scientists say diagnostics should supply recommendations before a piece of equipment has failed. That self-healing aspect would take equipment monitoring to the next level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fidelity Investment’s key to hybrid cloud: Application flexibility

From an infrastructure perspective, Fidelity Investments uses a combination of private cloud hosted in company data centers plus multiple public cloud platforms, leading to the question, how to manage this hybrid infrastructure?One key is being flexible, say Maria Azua Himmel, senior vice president of distributed systems at the 71-year old multi-national with $2.13 trillion in assets under management.Azua is attempting to implement strategies among Fidelity’s application developers to ensure that when new apps are built they can be run in almost any environment, whether it be one of the public clouds the company uses or inside its own data centers. To do this Azua is advocating for the use of application containers and software-defined infrastructure that can be controlled via application programming interfaces (APIs).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fidelity Investment’s key to hybrid cloud: Application flexibility

From an infrastructure perspective, Fidelity Investments uses a combination of private cloud hosted in company data centers plus multiple public cloud platforms, leading to the question, how to manage this hybrid infrastructure?One key is being flexible, say Maria Azua Himmel, senior vice president of distributed systems at the 71-year old multi-national with $2.13 trillion in assets under management.Azua is attempting to implement strategies among Fidelity’s application developers to ensure that when new apps are built they can be run in almost any environment, whether it be one of the public clouds the company uses or inside its own data centers. To do this Azua is advocating for the use of application containers and software-defined infrastructure that can be controlled via application programming interfaces (APIs).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hello IPv6, Goodbye CGNs – Recent Discussions at a EU/Europol Meeting

Jan Zorz was recently invited to speak at a workshop held by the Estonian Presidency of the Council of the EU and Europol. Jan gave a well-received talk about how Slovenia widely deployed IPv6 and encouraged EU policymakers and law enforcement officials to do the same across Europe.

Per the press release, the workshop was “to address the increasing problem of non-crime attribution associated with the widespread use of Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGN) technologies by companies that provide access to the internet.”

With IPv4 address space depleting, CGNs have been widely implemented to conserve public IPv4 address space. In other words, many customers are sharing a single public IPv4 address that often also changes over time. Problems with sharing IP addresses (and therefore CGNs) are well outlined in RFC 6269: “Such issues include application failures, additional service monitoring complexity, new security vulnerabilities, and so on.”

CGNs also present a problem for law enforcement agencies looking to investigate and prosecute crimes online, as it’s much more difficult to narrow down the culprit. This workshop had several IPv6 experts speak of their experiences, partially on the assertion that IPv6 deployment would eliminate CGNs and once again Continue reading

CLI or API… Again (and Again and Again…)

Got this comment on one of my blog posts:

When looking at some of the CLIs just front-ending RESTAPIs, I wonder if "survival" of CLI isn't just in the eyes of the beholder.

It made me really sad because I wrote about this exact topic several times… obviously in vain. Or as one of my network automation friends said when I asked him to look at the draft of this blog post:

Is my TPM affected by the Infineon disaster?

I made a tool to check if your TPM chip is bad. Well, it extracts the SRK public key and you can then use marcan’s tool to easily check if the key is good or bad.

Example use:

$ g++ -o check-srk -std=gnu++11 check-srk.cc -ltspi -lssl -lcrypto 2>&1 && ./check-srk
Size: 2048
Outputting modulus…
8490234823904890234823904823904890238490238490238490238490[…]893428490823904231
$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/marcan/fc87aa78085c2b6f979aefc73fdc381f/raw/526bc2f2249a2e3f5d4450c7c412e0dbf57b2288/roca_test.py
[…]
$ python roca_test.py 8490234823904890234823904823904890238490238490238490238490[…]893428490823904231
Vuln!

(use -s if you have an SRK PIN)

If the SRK is weak then not only are very likely anything else you generated in the TPM weak, but also anything generated outside the TPM and imported is crackable, since your blobs are encrypted using this crackable SRK key.

How to Monkey-Patch the Linux Kernel

I have a weird setup. I type in Dvorak. But, when I hold ctrl or alt, my keyboard reverts to Qwerty.

You see, the classic text-editing hotkeys, ctrl+Z, ctrl+X, ctrl+C, and ctrl+V are all located optimally for a Qwerty layout: next to the control key, easy to reach with your left hand while mousing with your right. In Dvorak, unfortunately, these hotkeys are scattered around mostly on the right half of the keyboard, making them much less convenient. Using Dvorak for typing but Qwerty for hotkeys turns out to be a nice compromise.

But, the only way I could find to make this work on Linux / X was to write a program that uses X "grabs" to intercept key events and rewrite them. That was mostly fine, until recently, when my machine, unannounced, updated to Wayland. Remarkably, I didn't even notice at first! But at some point, I realized my hotkeys weren't working right. You see, Wayland, unlike X, actually has some sensible security rules, and as a result, random programs can't just man-in-the-middle all keyboard events anymore. Which broke my setup.

Yes, that's right, I'm that guy:

Source: xkcd 1172

So what was I to do? I began Continue reading

Denver Network Programmability User Group Meeting

If you live (or will be) in Denver next week—specifically, on Wednesday, November 1—I’ll be joining the Denver Network Programmability User Group (NPUG) to talk about network programmability and my recent book with Jason Edelman and Matt Oswalt around network programmability and automation. We’d love to have you join us!

Here are the meeting details:

When: Wednesday, November 1, at 4:00 Mountain Time
Where: GTRI, 990 S Broadway, Suite 300, Denver CO (free parking in and around GTRI)
What: Me joining the NPUG to share some thoughts on network programmability
Why: Because there will be food and drinks, and because you love talking about network programmability and automation
Who: You!

As I mentioned, there will be food and beverages provided for attendees so please take a few moments to RSVP (so that we can plan on how much food and drink to provide).

I’d love to see you there!

HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customers

A few weeks back I told you how white box vendors, those Chinese-made, unbranded server vendors that compete with HP Enterprise and Dell EMC, were taking a sizable chunk of the business from the brand-name vendors.Well, now HPE has made it official and announced it will no longer try to sell commodity hardware — the cheap, low-end servers used in abundance in public-facing data centers — to tier 1 customers like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Also on Network World: How HPE plans to spin out its software assets HPE president Antonio Neri made the announcement at HPE’s analyst day event last week. He added that HPE would continue to sell higher-end servers to those vendors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customers

A few weeks back I told you how white box vendors, those Chinese-made, unbranded server vendors that compete with HP Enterprise and Dell EMC, were taking a sizable chunk of the business from the brand-name vendors.Well, now HPE has made it official and announced it will no longer try to sell commodity hardware — the cheap, low-end servers used in abundance in public-facing data centers — to tier 1 customers like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Also on Network World: How HPE plans to spin out its software assets HPE president Antonio Neri made the announcement at HPE’s analyst day event last week. He added that HPE would continue to sell higher-end servers to those vendors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here