“Keep those eyebrows up!” – Cybersecurity at the Global Women’s Forum

News of cyberattacks is slowly becoming a new normal. We are still at a stage where high-profile cases, like the recent attack against the American credit reporting company Equifax, in which 145.5 million users had their personal information compromised, raise eyebrows. But we need those eyebrows to stay up because we should never accept cyber threats as the new normal.

This week in Paris, hundreds of leaders met at the Women’s Forum to discuss some of the key issues that will shape the future of a world in transition, including cybersecurity. But this topic is not just a concern for the experts – it’s a concern to all men and women leading any business today.

New risks on the horizon

A recent report by the Internet Society, “Paths to Our Digital Future”, points out that now is a big moment for the Internet. The revolution we already see could accelerate in the coming years, not only due to the increasing digitalization of services and businesses, but also through the expansion of objects being connected to the Internet – the Internet of Things (IoT). By 2020 more than 20 billion “things” could be connected.

Suddenly it’s not only Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Data or metadata? For the IoT they’re both important

Think about the most successful, widely scaled networks that let us function in today's world. No I’m not talking about internet service providers, I mean the Really, Really Big Networks. The ones that without which modern civilization would be very different. The telephone system. Intermodal containerized shipping. Air traffic control. And they all have one vitally important enabling element that made them all scalable: a Control Layer that is not intrinsic to the electronic or physical streams that make up the network traffic. For phones, it’s Signalling System 7, which has managed to run the world of voice calls for decades. For intermodal shipping, it’s container manifests. For aviation, it’s ATC. And they truly do, run the globe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Traceroute Lies! A Typical Misinterpretation Of Output

Sometimes a user with performance issues will proudly present me with a traceroute and point to a particular hop in the network and accuse it of being the problem because of high latency on the link. About 1 time in 1000 they are correct and the link is totally saturated. The other 999 times, well, let me explain.

Traceroute

Traceroute Output

Here’s a typical traceroute I might be sent by a user (IPs and hostnames are altered to protect the innocent):

$ traceroute www-europe
traceroute to www-europe (18.9.4.17), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  gateway (57.239.196.133)          11.447 ms   18.371ms    25.057 ms
 2  us-atl-edge (137.16.151.202)      13.338 ms   20.070 ms   19.119 ms
 3  us-ga-core (57.239.129.37)       103.789 ms  105.998 ms  103.696 ms
 4  us-nyc-core (57.239.128.189)     107.601 ms  103.116 ms  103.934 ms
 5  us-east-core (57.239.13.42)     103.099 ms  104.215 ms  109.042 ms
 6  us-east-bb1 (57.239.111.58)      107.824 ms  104.463 ms  103.482 ms
 7  uk-south-bb1 (57.240.117.81)     106.439 ms  111.156 ms  104.761 ms
  Continue reading

Fumbling Through Networking

Ansible Fumbling Through Networking Blog

This blog post is written by a systems person who has always dodged networking ... until now. I gave Ansible networking modules a try with a vyos Vagrant image. This blog describes how I fumbled through the process of writing my first Ansible playbook to successfully gather facts from a running vyos virtual machine.

First things first, I need a network thingy to run commands on. I don’t have a physical networking thingy so let’s go searching for a virtual one. After some googling for a Cisco IOS virtual machine I found and started to download an ISO. While that was going on I pinged my co-worker Ben on Slack. Ben’s a networking guy within Ansible. I asked him what virtual device he uses. He pointed me at a vyos Vagrant image. So I canceled the Cisco IOS ISO download and ran the needed vagrant commands.

vagrant init higebu/vyos
vagrant up

Ok, that did something but what did it do? Let me try the old vagrant ssh. Nope, that didn’t work. Oh, I got another message from Ben on slack. He mentions I’m going to need a plugin to make this work smoothly with Vagrant and to run:

vagrant plugin install  Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 6th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

LiDAR sees an enchanted world. (Luminar)

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

 

  • 14TB: Western Digital Hard Drive; 3B: Yahoo's perfidy; ~80%: companies traded on U.S. stock market 1950-2009 were gone by 2009; 21%: conversion increase with AI-enabled site personalisation; $1 billion: US Air Force jets off the cloud; 1 billion: iOS devices in use; 1000x: new DeepMind WaveNet model produces 20 seconds of higher quality audio in 1 second; 96: vCPUs on new GCE machine type, with 624GB of memory; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • fusiongyro: The amount of incipient complexity in programming has been growing, not going down. What's more complex, "hello, world" to the console in Python, or "hello world" in a browser with the best and newest web stack? Mobility and microservices create lots of new edge cases and complexity—do non-programmers seem particularly well-equipped to handle edge cases to you? The problem has never really been the syntax—if it were, non-programmers would have made great strides with Applescript and SQL, and we'd all be building PowerBuilder libraries for a living. The problem is Continue reading

Back In The Saddle Of A Horse Of A Different Color

I’ve been asked a few times in the past year if I missed being behind a CLI screen or I ever got a hankering to configure some networking gear. The answer is a guarded “yes”, but not for the reason that you think.

Type Casting

CCIEs are keyboard jockeys. Well, the R&S folks are for sure. Every exam has quirks, but the R&S folks have quirky QWERTY keyboard madness. We spend a lot of time not just learning commands but learning how to input them quickly without typos. So we spend a lot of time with keys and a lot less time with the mouse poking around in a GUI.

However, the trend in networking has been to move away from these kinds of input methods. Take the new Aruba 8400, for instance. The ArubaOS-CX platform that runs it seems to have been built to require the least amount of keyboard input possible. The whole system runs with an API backend and presents a GUI that is a series of API calls. There is a CLI, but anything that you can do there can easily be replicated elsewhere by some other function.

Why would a company do this? To Continue reading

A Fast, Secure Migration to Google Cloud Platform using Cloudflare

OnAir Video Presentation

Abstract

A Fast, Secure Migration to Google Cloud Platform using Cloudflare

Looking to host your website, application, or API in the cloud, or migrate to a new cloud provider while keeping your data secure? In this webinar, Trey Guinn, Head of Solutions Engineering at Cloudflare, will discuss how companies should approach security, during and after migration. We'll highlight the migration story of LUSH, one of the largest global e-Commerce cosmetic retailers, and how they took the right steps to migrate from their previous cloud provider to Google Cloud Platform, in less than 3 weeks. Trey will be performing a live demo on setting up Cloudflare load balancing across cloud providers, as well as

Speakers

Asad Baheri
Security & Networking Partner Manager
Google Cloud Platform

Trey Guinn
Head of Solutions Engineering
Cloudflare

Webinar Transcription and Load Balancing Demo

Asad Baheri
A Fast, Secure Migration to Google Cloud Platform using Cloudflare Today we're going to talk about LUSH's migration to Google Cloud and how Cloudflare, one of our top security and performance partners, can help you with your own cloud migration. Throughout our presentation, we'll be talking about security best practices, how CDNs and the CDN Interconnect program works, and we're also going to also give you a demo of Cloudflare's load balancing to start your migration.

A Fast, Secure Migration to Google Cloud Platform using Cloudflare

One of Continue reading

IPv6, DNSSEC, Security and More at ION Malta

The Deploy360 team is back from ION Malta, which took place on 18 September alongside an ICANN DNSSEC Training Workshop. We again thank our sponsor Afilias for making this possible, and are now working toward our final ION Conference of the year, ION Belgrade in November. All the presentations from ION Malta are available online.

I opened the event with an introduction to Deploy360 and an invitation for everyone to get involved with the Internet Society’s 25th anniversary the next day. We also heard from Jasper Schellekens, the president of the ISOC Malta Chapter about their activities and how to get more involved. They have a small but mighty presence in Malta and are looking forward to getting more members and increasing their activity.

Next, Nathalie Trenaman from RIPE NCC gave a fascinating presentation on the status of IPv6 in Malta. Unfortunately, IPv6 penetration in Malta is extremely low, but ISPs are transferring IPv4 address space around and, interestingly, have purchased over 30,000 IPv4 addresses from Romania. She encouraged ISPs to begin moving to IPv6 now, as RIPE NCC estimates that full transition takes about 2.5 years to complete.

Next up, Klaus Nieminen from the Finnish Communications Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How to shrink your data-migration schedule

If there’s one problem just about every IT professional can relate to, it is the pain of a storage migration. Aging is part of life not only for us IT veterans, but also the storage systems we manage. Despite the fact that we’ve been having to move data off old storage for decades, the challenge of moving data from one storage resource to another, without disrupting business, remains one of the most time consuming and stressful projects for an IT team.Many of the IT professionals I speak with tell me that their migrations are scheduled over months, and can even take a year to plan and execute. It’s no surprise then that IT professionals named migrations as the number two issue facing their departments in a recent survey. Only performance presents a bigger challenge for today’s IT professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Shrink your data migration schedule

If there’s one problem just about every IT professional can relate to, it is the pain of a storage migration. Aging is part of life not only for us IT veterans, but also the storage systems we manage. Despite the fact that we’ve been having to move data off old storage for decades, the challenge of moving data from one storage resource to another, without disrupting business, remains one of the most time consuming and stressful projects for an IT team.Many of the IT professionals I speak with tell me that their migrations are scheduled over months, and can even take a year to plan and execute. It’s no surprise then that IT professionals named migrations as the number two issue facing their departments in a recent survey. Only performance presents a bigger challenge for today’s IT professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Moving fast and making friends: the power of a tight-knit industry community

The internet is a smaller place than it seems. Despite the gigantic weight of the industries built on it, the near ubiquity of the internet in our lives, and the complexity and scale of modern online applications, at its core the internet operates atop a relatively small set of systems.Pockets of deep knowledge and operational expertise around these key systems have developed over the years. There are tight-knit and cooperative communities focused on network operations, infosec, email and HTTP, to name just a few.DNS—the entry point to nearly every online application and a key anchor of the internet —is no different. A relatively small community of deep experts and operators drives the protocol and its key operational aspects. Homes for this community include DNS-OARC, IETF/ICANN, email lists and regular small meetings of key operators.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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