“The Internet is Home” – Youth voices on why we should keep the Internet on

Last year alone, the international digital rights advocacy organization Access Now recorded 56 Internet shutdowns worldwide. There's concern about this growing trend and worry that governments are blocking social media and communications tools, in particular.

Many private sector and civil society organizations have condemned the shutdowns, and there have been dialogues and campaigns held around the world to try and prevent this growing trend. But while most of these dialogues are filled with decision-makers, legislators, and civil society organizations, young voices have been left out.

Evelyn Namara

How to quicken your site’s webpage load time

If you run a website of any significant size, odds are you utilize some form of content management system (CMS). Wordpress, Drupal, or the like.And, if you don’t use such a system, you probably employ rather extensive use of some form of server-side, scripted, page generation. PHP, ASP, Ruby… the list goes on and on.There are many scenarios where such a system makes a great deal of sense. But I’m here to tell you, right now, that it is highly unlikely that you actually need them… at least for the majority of your page. And, what’s more, if you migrate away from a CMS system you can not only make your webpages smaller and faster-loading for your visitors… but you can save significantly on your server infrastructure costs as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Asymmetrical Traffic Flows and Complexity

One of my readers sent me a list of questions on asymmetrical traffic flows in IP networks, particularly in heavily meshed environments (where it’s really hard to ensure both directions use the same path) and in combination with stateful devices (firewalls in particular) in the forwarding path.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet (and the more I think about this problem, the more I feel it’s not worth solving).

Read more ...

Video storage leads to hyperconvergence for law enforcement agency

Hyperconvergence wasn’t on Philip Lisk’s mind a decade ago, when the Bergen County Sheriff's Office started using technology from Pivot3 to store data from video surveillance cameras.“We were trying to store video in an IP world. That’s how we got to know Pivot3,” says Lisk, director of IT at the largest law enforcement agency in New Jersey’s Bergen County, which sits across the Hudson River from New York City. A 12-year veteran of the BCSO, Lisk supervises its networks and serves as the technical consultant to the entire county for video and data security.Well before the term "hyperconverged infrastructure" was coined, BCSO chose Pivot3 for its converged server and SAN solutions, engineered specifically for storing petabyte-scale video workloads. Yet as the technology matured over the last several years, and BCSO kept up with upgrades, the deployment evolved from a tactical video-centric project into an enterprise HCI platform that’s set to handle many of the agency’s IT workloads going forward, including its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video storage leads to hyperconvergence for law enforcement agency

Hyperconvergence wasn’t on Philip Lisk’s mind a decade ago, when the Bergen County Sheriff's Office started using technology from Pivot3 to store data from video surveillance cameras.“We were trying to store video in an IP world. That’s how we got to know Pivot3,” says Lisk, director of IT at the largest law enforcement agency in New Jersey’s Bergen County, which sits across the Hudson River from New York City. A 12-year veteran of the BCSO, Lisk supervises its networks and serves as the technical consultant to the entire county for video and data security.Well before the term "hyperconverged infrastructure" was coined, BCSO chose Pivot3 for its converged server and SAN solutions, engineered specifically for storing petabyte-scale video workloads. Yet as the technology matured over the last several years, and BCSO kept up with upgrades, the deployment evolved from a tactical video-centric project into an enterprise HCI platform that’s set to handle many of the agency’s IT workloads going forward, including its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AMD Winds Up One-Two Compute Punch For Servers

While AMD voluntarily exited the server processor arena in the wake of Intel’s onslaught with the “Nehalem” Xeon processors during the Great Recession, it never stopped innovating with its graphics processors and it kept enough of a hand in smaller processors used in consumer and selected embedded devices to start making money again in PCs and to take the game console business away from IBM’s Power chip division.

Now, after five long years of investing, AMD is poised to get its act together and to storm the glass house with a new line of server processors based on its Zen …

AMD Winds Up One-Two Compute Punch For Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

OpenStack and Cumulus Linux: A match made in networking heaven

A few weeks ago, we attended the OpenStack Summit where we had a wonderful time connecting with customers, partners and several new faces. With the excitement of the event still lingering, we thought this was a great time to highlight how OpenStack and Cumulus Linux offer a unique, seamless solution for building a private cloud. But first, here are a few highlights from the conference.

OpenStack Summit 2017, Boston

  • Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director at OpenStack Foundation, opened the show talking about the substantial growth of OpenStack over the past several years and how they are just one part of the vibrant open infrastructure community. A large focus of the conference was how organizations are moving towards private cloud environments as they realize it’s a better long-term solution.
  • Throughout the conference, containers and Kubernetes were the hottest topics. Many sessions throughout the four days focused on these technologies and how organizations are looking to use them as an abstraction layer to make infrastructure less visible or locked-in.
  • Edward Snowden was one of the most favorited speakers. Presenting from Russia, Snowden focused on how IT professionals are in position to influence how cloud infrastructure is built, influence the future of the internet Continue reading

PCIe versus Ethernet in a Composable System

I posted a link to a worth reading story last week about Liqid’s composable hyperconverged system. A reader (Vova Moki) commented on the LinkedIn post with this question—

Although I don’t understand how much faster is the PCIe than regular NICs?

Excellent question! It certainly seems that 100g Ethernet should be much faster than PCIe; this article lists the highest speed of PCIe as 15.8G/s across 16 lanes, with faster speeds expected into the future. Further, PCIe runs on parallel lanes, which means it must be very difficult to build a switch for the technology. The simplest way to build such a switch would be to pull the signals off the 16 different lanes, serialize them into a single packet of some sort, and then push them back out into 16 lanes again (potentially in different order/etc.).

So why should composable systems use something like PCIe, rather than using 100g Ethernet. After all, the Ethernet NIC is essentially doing precisely what a PCIe switch would need to do by pulling the data off a PCIe bus, serializing the data, and sending it over a network to a switch, which can, with the right design, already switch these packets Continue reading

Augury scoops up cash to power the industrial IoT

Ever since outgoing GE CEO Jeff Immelt opined upon his organization’s move from being an industrial machinery vendor to a software one, the world has been increasingly interested in the opportunities introduced by the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).IIoT simply refers to the increasing trend towards industrial machinery being connected to the internet and pinging off all sort of interesting data that can then be monitored and analyzed. And while it is fair to say that connected industrial machinery has been around for a long time (via SCADA and PLCs), the difference today is that under the IIoT, it is general the public internet that has all this data traversing on it. Further, increasingly customers are looking to the IIoT to deliver efficiencies, create agility and reduce downtime.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Balancing Trademarks and Domain Names

The UDRP is a simple-worded, non-territorial, specialized forum for adjudicating claims of cybersquatting. It is conducted wholly online. It is not a trademark court. If there’s any analogy with litigation, it is that the complaint should be treated as a motion for summary judgment. Whether there is cybersquatting depends on arbitrators (called Panels) applying core principles to the particular facts that have been brought to their attention. The record is paramount; silence (failure to make a case) is deadly. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Balancing Trademarks and Domain Names appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Remotely Triggered Black Hole (RTBH) Routing

The screen shot demonstrates real-time distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation. Automatic mitigation was disabled for the first simulated attack (shown on the left of the chart).  The attack reaches a sustained packet rate of 1000 packets per second for a period of 60 seconds. Next, automatic mitigation was enabled and a second attack launched. This time, as soon as the traffic crosses the threshold (the horizontal red line), a BGP remote trigger message is sent to router, which immediately drops the traffic.
The diagram shows the test setup. The network was built out of freely available components: CumulusVX switches and Ubuntu 16.04 servers running under VirtualBox.

The following configuration is installed on the ce-router:
router bgp 65140
 bgp router-id 0.0.0.140
 neighbor 10.0.0.70 remote-as 65140
 neighbor 10.0.0.70 port 1179
 neighbor 172.16.141.2 remote-as 65141
 !
 address-family ipv4 unicast
  neighbor 10.0.0.70 allowas-in
  neighbor 10.0.0.70 route-map blackhole-in in
 exit-address-family
!
ip community-list standard blackhole permit 65535:666
!
route-map blackhole-in permit 20
 match community blackhole
 match ip address prefix-len 32
 set ip next-hop 192.0.2.1
The ce-router peers with the upstream service provider router ( Continue reading
1 … 2,008 2,009 2,010 2,011 2,012 … 3,837