Technology Short Take 89

Welcome to Technology Short Take 89! I have a collection of newer materials and some older materials this time around, but hopefully all of them are still useful. (I needed to do some housekeeping on my Instapaper account, which is where I bookmark stuff that frequently lands here.) Enjoy!

Networking

  • This is a slightly older post providing an overview of container networking, but still quite relevant. Julia has a very conversational style that works well when explaining new topics to readers, I think.
  • Russell Bryant has a post on Open Virtual Network (OVN), a project within the Open vSwitch (OVS) community. If you’re not familiar with OVN, this is a good post with which to start.

Servers/Hardware

Hmm…I didn’t find anything again this time around. Perhaps I should remove this section?

Security

  • This blog post discusses some of the new network security functionality available in vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) version 1.2; specifically, the new container network firewall functionality.
  • The NIST and DHS have teamed up on some efforts to secure BGP; more information is available in this article.
  • When I was using Fedora, I needed some useful information on firewall-cmd, and found this article to Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Don’t keep squandering one of your greatest storage assets: metadata

Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Don’t keep squandering one of your greatest storage assets: metadata

Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Service Provider MPLS : Inter-AS MPLS Options

Today I am going to talk about the Inter-AS MPLS or you can say that Inter-provider MPLS option. So in this case i am taking the example on the Cisco devices. To maintain the continuity of MPLS VPN services across multiple service providers, mainly for customers who span world wide on different service providers, IETF described 3 types of options. These options are 
  • Option A
  • Option B 
  • Option C
 Inter-AS or Inter-Provider MPLS VPN solutions, while Cisco implemented three options (1, 2 and 3) with Cisco IOS (these options are also known in Cisco documents as 10A, 10B and 10C).

Lets start with all these option one by one. The first option is called as VRF to VRF connection between two different AS border routers and the explanation is as below.

Option A: VRF-to-VRF connections at the AS (Autonomous System) border routers
In this procedure, a PE router in one AS attaches directly to a PE router in another. The two PE routers will be attached by multiple sub-interfaces, at least one for each of the VPNs whose routes need to be passed from AS to AS. 
Fig 1.1- Inter-AS option A

Each PE will treat the other Continue reading

LLDP Information Now Available via the Administration Portal

In oVirt 4.2 we have introduced support for the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). It is used by network devices for advertising the identity and capabilities to neighbors on a LAN. The information gathered by the protocol can be used for better network configuration.Learn more about LLDP.

Why do you need LLDP?

When adding a host into oVirt cluster, the network administrator usually needs to attach various networks to it. However, a modern host can have multiple interfaces, each with its non-descriptive name.

Examples

In the screenshot below, taken from the Administration Portal, a network administrator has to know to which interface to attach the network named m2 with VLAN_ID 162. Should it be interface enp4s0, ens2f0 or even ens2f1? With oVirt 4.2, the administrator can hover over enp4s0 and see that this interface is connected to peer switch rack01-sw03-lab4, and learn that this peer switch does not support VLAN 162 on this interface. By looking at every interface, the administrator can choose which interface is the right option for networkm2.

screen

A similar situation arises with the configuration of mode 4 bonding (LACP). Configurating LACP usually starts with network administrator defining a port group Continue reading

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived?

Seymour Cray loved vector supercomputers, and made the second part of that term a household word because of it. NEC, the last of the pure vector supercomputer makers, is so excited about its new “Aurora” SX-10+ vector processor and the “Tsubasa” supercomputer that will use it that it forgot to announce the processor to the world when it previewed the system this week.

Here at The Next Platform, we easily forgive such putting of carts before horses – so long as someone eventually explains the horse to us before the cart starts shipping for real. NEC is expected to …

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

WPA2 and Infineon

The recent bug in WPA2 has a worst case outcome that is the same as using a wifi without a password: People can sniff, maybe inject… it’s not great but you connect to open wifi at Starbucks anyway, and you’re fine with that because you visit sites with HTTPS and SSH. Eventually your client will get a fix too, so the whole thing is pretty “meh”.

But there’s a reason I call it “WPA2 bug” and I call the recent issue with Infineon key generation “the Infineon disaster”. It’s much bigger. It seems like the whole of Estonia needs to re-issue ID cards, and several years worth of PC-, smartcard-, Yubikey, and other production have been generating bad keys. And these keys will stick around.

From now until forever when you generate, use, or accept RSA keys you have to check for these weak keys. I assume OpenSSH will if it hasn’t already.

But then what? It’s not like servers can just reject these keys, or it’ll lock people out. And it’s not clear that an adversary even has your public key for SSH. And you can’t crack the key if you don’t have the public half. Maybe a Continue reading

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud

It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others.

For any new, and usually constrained, kind of capacity, such as shiny new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel or “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia, it has to be a hard call for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to …

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM cranks up flash storage for greater capacity and speed

All-flash storage has become increasingly popular in data centers as a means of much faster data access than traditional hard disk, but its growth has been impeded by cost and storage density. There was too much of the former and too little of the latter.Every memory, storage and server vendor is working full out to address that issue, and it has turned into quite an arms race, which benefits the customer. So much so that Gartner predicts that within the next 12 months, solid-state arrays will improve in performance by a factor of 10 while doubling in density and cost-effectiveness.Also on Network World: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? IBM has just made its contribution to that growth. It has announced advances in flash storage that it claims will provide a three-fold increase in density in the same physical space for its FlashSystem 900 flash arrays, while reducing data capacity costs by 60 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Google Cloud Platform to Analyze Cloudflare Logs

We’re excited to announce that we now offer deep insights into your domain’s web traffic, working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While Cloudflare Enterprise customers always have had access to their logs, they previously had to rely on their own tools to process them, adding extra complexity and cost.

Cloudflare logs provide real time insight into traffic, malicious activity, attack incidents, and infrastructure health checks. The output is used to help customers adjust their settings, manage costs and resources, and plan for expansion.

Working with Google, we created an end-to-end solution that allows customers to retrieve Cloudflare access logs, store and process data in a simple way. GCP components such as Google Storage, Cloud Function, BigQuery and Data Studio come together to make this possible.

One of the biggest challenges of data analysis is to store and process large volume of data within a short time period while avoiding high costs. GCP Storage and BigQuery easily address these challenges.

Cloudflare customers can decide if they wish to obtain and process data from Cloudflare access logs on demand or on a regular basis. The full solution is described in this Knowledge Base article. Initial setup takes no more than 30 minutes Continue reading

Several on KRACK

Three articles of interest on the new WiFi KRACK—

This is not a crypto bug but a protocol bug (a pretty obvious and trivial protocol bug). When a client connects to the network, the access-point will at some point send a random “key” data to use for encryption. Because this packet may be lost in transmission, it can be repeated many times. What the hacker does is just repeatedly sends this packet, potentially hours later. Each time it does so, it resets the “keystream” back to the starting conditions. The obvious patch that device vendors will make is to only accept the first such packet it receives, ignore all the duplicates. —Robert Graham @Errata Security

So this is essentially a replay attack—something that is not taken seriously enough in the security world, by and large.

Researchers this week published information about a newfound, serious weakness in WPA2 — the security standard that protects all modern Wi-Fi networks. What follows is a short rundown on what exactly is at stake here, who’s most at-risk from this vulnerability, and what organizations and individuals can do about it. —Krebs on Security

And, finally, an article on protecting your network from KRACK—

Wi-Fi is Continue reading

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