Comments for my biracial niece
How to teach endian
On /r/programming is this post about byte-order/endianness. It gives the same information as most documents on the topic. It is wrong. It's been wrong for over 30 years. Here's how it should be taught.One of the major disciplines in computer science is parsing/formatting. This is the process of converting the external format of data (file formats, network protocols, hardware registers) into the internal format (the data structures that software operates on).
It should be a formal computer-science discipline, because it's actually a lot more difficult than you'd expect. That's because the majority of vulnerabilities in software that hackers exploit are due to parsing bugs. Since programmers don't learn about parsing formally, they figure it out for themselves, creating ad hoc solutions that are prone to bugs. For example, programmers assume external buffers cannot be larger than internal ones, leading to buffer overflows.
An external format must be well-defined. What the first byte means must be written down somewhere, then what the second byte means, and so on. For Internet protocols, these formats are written in RFCs, such as RFC 791 for the "Internet Protocol". For file formats, these are written in documents, such as those describing GIF files, JPEG Continue reading
Network Automation Survey
Network Automation is just getting started and it’s odd to say that as IT professionals from other technology disciplines are always surprised to see how much manual interaction there still is between the networking engineering/operations teams and the actual devices they manage.
I’ll never forget the days in 2012-2013 performing my best Google searches to find ways to program or to automate network routers and switches. I didn’t care what programming language was being used or even what tool, but I found nothing. Every time I heard someone say they were using a network script, I’d say “email it to me, that sounds interesting.” Unfortunately, 100% of the time, it ended up being a notepad or a Word file, not a script. What a bummer.
I like to think I’m a solid Googler too. It was amazing though - there was near nothing. Do a search today on network automation or network programming and you’d be amazed on what you’ll find - we’ve come a long way in the past 36 months with respect to network automation, but I truly believe we’re still in the 2nd or 3rd inning (if we were playing a game of baseball, of course).
Network Automation Survey
Network Automation is just getting started and it’s odd to say that as IT professionals from other technology disciplines are always surprised to see how much manual interaction there still is between the networking engineering/operations teams and the actual devices they manage.
I’ll never forget the days in 2012-2013 performing my best Google searches to find ways to program or to automate network routers and switches. I didn’t care what programming language was being used or even what tool, but I found nothing. Every time I heard someone say they were using a network script, I’d say “email it to me, that sounds interesting.” Unfortunately, 100% of the time, it ended up being a notepad or a Word file, not a script. What a bummer.
I like to think I’m a solid Googler too. It was amazing though - there was near nothing. Do a search today on network automation or network programming and you’d be amazed on what you’ll find - we’ve come a long way in the past 36 months with respect to network automation, but I truly believe we’re still in the 2nd or 3rd inning (if we were playing a game of baseball, of course).
Cisco: Cloud-Native Apps Will Dominate By 2020
Big data, IoT, and other applications are changing cloud computing, according to Cisco's sixth annual Global Cloud Computing Index.
Trends in High Performance NFV
A wide array of supplementary technologies, including adjustments to the NIC, are being built to deliver high performance NFV for service providers.
Networking Field Day 13 – Sneak Preview
This is going to be a busy week for the Tech Field Day family. They have delegates en-route to Tech Field Day 12 this morning, and Wednesday the crew for Network Field day 13 arrive. I can’t express how excited I am about going to Networking Field Day 13 this week. I haven’t been to an actual NFD event since NFD2, although I did get to go to the TFD9 event in Austin a couple years ago. I can’t wait to land in San Jose. For those new to this concept, Networking Field day is an event that is focused on bringing together IT product vendors and thought leaders in the industry to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Please be sure to read my disclaimer page on this topic. These events are streamed live, so if you want to listen in while we talk about the latest and greatest technologies from the vendors we’re meeting with, or if you just want to listen to us moan and groan at the occasional Gartner or NASCAR slides… you should tune in. On the menu for this week we have a number of exciting companies that I’d Continue reading
Worth Reading: IoT Goes Nuclear
The post Worth Reading: IoT Goes Nuclear appeared first on 'net work.
BGP Tools for the DFZ (2)
In the last post in this series, I looked at the whois database to make certain the registration information for a particular domain name is correct. Now it’s time to dig a little deeper into the DFZ to see what we can find. To put this series in the widest context possible, we will begin by assuming we don’t actually know the Autonomous System number associated with the domain name we’re looking for—which means we will need to somehow find out which AS number belongs to the organization who’s routes we are trying to understand better. The best place to start in our quest for an AS number that matches a domain name is peeringdb. The front page of peeringdb looks like this—
As the front page says, peeringdb primarily exists to facilitate peering among providers. Assume you find you are a large college, and you find you have a lot of traffic heading to LinkedIn—that, in fact, this traffic is consuming a large amount of your transit traffic through your upstream provider. You would really like to offload this traffic in some way directly to LinkedIn, so you can stop paying the transit costs to this particular network. But Continue reading