IDG Contributor Network: Stanford researchers attempt vodka-based Internet messaging

Sending Internet of Things, or IoT messages using liquids, such as vodka or glass cleaner, could replace light as the next go-to network carrier for the Internet.Pulses of liquid chemicals, replicating the ones-and-zeros of traditional electron-based data streams are better than copper wires, wireless or fiber because they’re cheaper, and aren’t susceptible to the same kind of interference, claim the inventors from Stanford University. Wireless signals, for example, can run into problems among large masses of metals.Vodka was the liquid of choice for the first of the pH-based messaging tests run by the school, but amusingly failed due to the receiving computer getting “too saturated with vodka to receive more messages,” according to fellow Nariman Farsad, who has been working on the concept.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: DevOps and what’s in a name

As is normal in engineering endeavors, we often forget the purpose or the problem we are trying to solve and instead get mired in the details of the process or the tool. We tend to lose site that bringing DevOps together has the purpose of solving how to more rapidly deliver higher-quality, more secure products to our customers, so they can solve their problems and we stay ahead of our competitors. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Is The Rise Of SD-WAN Thanks To Ethernet?

Ethernet

SD-WAN has exploded in the market. Everywhere I turn, I see companies touting their new strategy for reducing WAN complexity, encrypting data in flight, and even doing analytics on traffic to help build QoS policies and traffic shaping for critical links. The first demo I ever watched for SDN was a WAN routing demo that chose best paths based on cost and time-of-day. It was simple then, but that kind of thinking has exploded in the last 5 years. And it’s all thanks to our lovable old friend, Ethernet.

Those Old Serials

When I started in networking, my knowledge was pretty limited to switches and other layer 2 devices. I plugged in the cables, and the things all worked. As I expanded up the OSI model, I started understanding how routers worked. I knew about moving packets between different layer 3 areas and how they controlled broadcast storms. This was also around the time when layer 3 switching was becoming a big thing in the campus. How was I supposed to figure out the difference between when I should be using a big router with 2-3 interfaces versus a switch that had lots of interfaces and could route just as Continue reading

An Early Look at Ansible Container v0.3.0

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The Ansible Container project is targeting mid-January for its next release, and so we thought now would be a good time to check in and look at the features actively under development and anticipated to ship.

With only a glance at the roadmap page, the casual visitor may think it seems a bit smallish, having only three items. However, the items represent features that are important to the project, and require a level of effort that’s anything but small, as we’ll see.

Building container images

The first item up is an image build cache. Building container images is of course a core function of the tool, and having a caching mechanism can improve the speed at which images are built.

If you’re not familiar with container images and how they’re built, think of an image as a tall building with dozens of floors, where each floor is layered on top of the previous floor, starting with the building’s foundation, and adding one floor or layer at a time until you reach the top. In the same way, a container image is a file system built in layers.

The build process starts with a base image, say Fedora 25, Continue reading

Datanauts 64: Advancing Your IT Career

Todays Datanauts episode is about how to advance your IT career. We talk with trainer Neil Anderson about developing a plan & get insights from a survey of CTOs & HR leaders about what theyre looking for in IT employees The post Datanauts 64: Advancing Your IT Career appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Lessons learned from the 7 major cyber security incidents of 2016

Cyber incidents dominated headlines this year, from Russia’s hacking of Democrat emails to internet cameras and DVRs launching DDoS attacks, leaving the impression among many that nothing should be entrusted to the internet. These incidents reveal technical flaws that can be addressed and failure to employ best practices that might have prevented some of them from happening. +More on Network World: Gartner Top 10 technology trends you should know for 2017+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lessons learned from the 7 major cyber security incidents of 2016

Cyber incidents dominated headlines this year, from Russia’s hacking of Democrat emails to internet cameras and DVRs launching DDoS attacks, leaving the impression among many that nothing should be entrusted to the internet. These incidents reveal technical flaws that can be addressed and failure to employ best practices that might have prevented some of them from happening. +More on Network World: Gartner Top 10 technology trends you should know for 2017+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Know your (cyber) enemy

Picture this: Your company's network is facing a DDoS attack, but you have no idea who is responsible or what their motivation might be. Without this knowledge, you can't tell if they want money in exchange for stopping the attack or if the attack is a diversion to occupy your security team while your network is being penetrated and commercial secrets are stolen.In the aftermath of a network breach it can also be incredibly useful to know some information about the likely attackers. That's because knowing who they were — or just where they were from — can help you carry out a more accurate damage assessment exercise.  This knowledge can guide you where to look for signs of data compromise, and what other specifics (such as exploit kits or Trojans that may have been left behind) to search for.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Know your (cyber) enemy

Picture this: Your company's network is facing a DDoS attack, but you have no idea who is responsible or what their motivation might be. Without this knowledge, you can't tell if they want money in exchange for stopping the attack or if the attack is a diversion to occupy your security team while your network is being penetrated and commercial secrets are stolen.In the aftermath of a network breach it can also be incredibly useful to know some information about the likely attackers. That's because knowing who they were — or just where they were from — can help you carry out a more accurate damage assessment exercise.  This knowledge can guide you where to look for signs of data compromise, and what other specifics (such as exploit kits or Trojans that may have been left behind) to search for.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adobe fixes actively exploited critical vulnerability in Flash Player

Adobe Systems has released security updates for several products, including one for Flash Player that fixes a critical vulnerability that's already known and exploited by attackers.The Flash Player update fixes 17 vulnerabilities, 16 of which are critical and can be exploited to execute malicious code on affected systems. One of those vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2016-7892 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) catalogue, is already being used by hackers."Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for CVE-2016-7892 exists in the wild, and is being used in limited, targeted attacks against users running Internet Explorer (32-bit) on Windows," the company said in a security advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adobe fixes actively exploited critical vulnerability in Flash Player

Adobe Systems has released security updates for several products, including one for Flash Player that fixes a critical vulnerability that's already known and exploited by attackers.The Flash Player update fixes 17 vulnerabilities, 16 of which are critical and can be exploited to execute malicious code on affected systems. One of those vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2016-7892 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) catalogue, is already being used by hackers."Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for CVE-2016-7892 exists in the wild, and is being used in limited, targeted attacks against users running Internet Explorer (32-bit) on Windows," the company said in a security advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Manage Cloudflare records with Salt

We use Salt to manage our ever growing global fleet of machines. Salt is great for managing configurations and being the source of truth. We use it for remote command execution and for network automation tasks. It allows us to grow our infrastructure quickly with minimal human intervention.

Salt

CC-BY 2.0 image by Kevin Dooley

We got to thinking. Are DNS records not just a piece of the configuration? We concluded that they are and decided to manage our own records from Salt too.

We are strong believers in eating our own dog food, so we make our employees use the next version of our service before rolling it to everyone else. That way if there's a problem visiting one of the 5 million websites that use Cloudflare it'll get spotted quickly internally. This is also why we keep our own DNS records on Cloudflare itself.

Cloudflare has an API that allows you to manage your zones programmatically without ever logging into the dashboard. Until recently, we were using handcrafted scripts to manage our own DNS records via our API. These scripts were in exotic languages like PHP for historical reasons and had interesting behavior that not everybody enjoyed. Continue reading

More details about containerd, Docker’s core container runtime component

Today we announced that Docker is extracting a key component of its container platform, a part of the engine plumbing–containerd a core container runtime–and commits to donating it to an open foundation. containerd is designed to be less coupled, and easier to integrate with other tools sets. And it is being written and designed to address the requirements of the major cloud providers and container orchestration systems.

Because we know a lot of Docker fans want to know how the internals work, we thought we would share the current state of containerd and what we plan for version 1.0. Before that, it’s a good idea to look at what Docker has become over the last three and a half years.

The Docker platform isn’t a container runtime. It is in fact a set of integrated tools that allow you to build ship and run distributed applications. That means Docker handles networking, infrastructure, build, orchestration, authorization, security, and a variety of other services that cover the complete distributed application lifecycle.

Docker and containerd

The core container runtime, which is containerd, is a small but vital part of the platform. We started breaking out containerd from the rest of the engine in Docker 1.11, Continue reading

Let There Be Light: The Year in Silicon Photonics

Computing historians may look back on 2016 as the Year of Silicon Photonics. Not because the technology has become ubiquitous – that may yet be years away – but because the long-awaited silicon photonics offerings are now commercially available in networking hardware. While the advancements in networking provided by silicon photonics are indisputable, the real game changer is in the CPU.

For over half a century, Moore’s Law has been the name of the game. The transistor density on chips has been remarkably cooperative in doubling on schedule since Gordon Moore first made his observation in 1965. But Moore’s Law …

Let There Be Light: The Year in Silicon Photonics was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

containerd – a core container runtime project for the industry

Today Docker is spinning out its core container runtime functionality into a standalone component, incorporating it into a separate project called containerd, and will be donating it to a neutral foundation early next year. This is the latest chapter in a multi-year effort to break up the Docker platform into a more modular architecture of loosely coupled components.

Over the past 3 years, as Docker adoption skyrocketed, it grew into a complete platform to build, ship and run distributed applications, covering many functional areas from infrastructure to orchestration, the core container runtime being just a piece of it. For millions of developers and IT pros, a complete platform is exactly what they need. But many platform builders and operators are looking for “boring infrastructure”: a basic component that provides the robust primitives for running containers on their system, bundled in a stable interface, and nothing else. A component that they can customize, extend and swap out as needed, without unnecessary abstraction getting in their way. containerd is built to provide exactly that.

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What Docker does best is provide developers and operators with great tools which make them more productive. Those tools come from integrating many different components into a Continue reading

Review: Google Home invades my home

OK Google, you’re now inside my home, paying attention to my requests (at least when I say “OK Google” or “Hey Google”), learning even more about me. Let’s just make sure that you don’t learn too much.As part of my testing of the Google Wifi wireless mesh system, Google also sent me the $129 Google Home device, which acts as a voice-controlled personal assistant. Much like the Google app on your smartphone, you can ask the Google Home questions and it will try to either give you an answer or perform a task (depending on other things connected to your network).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Setup HA for RHV-M pt3

Hi Folks.. the last time I left off, we had just finished setting up the initial pieces for hosted engine (RHEL configuration) in order to provide HA for RHV-M. Today we’re going to add an additional host and test things out.

Let’s get going!Once hosted engine is setup, adding another RHEL host to the configuration is almost identical to a standard configuration. There is only 1 additional step that involves ensuring that the HA pieces specific to hosted engine get installed along with the RHV packages.

The workflow itself is simple:

  1. Deploy a RHEL host, subscribe it to Red Hat CDN or Satellite and update it
  2. Add the Cockpit package and enable it (we won’t highlight that here, but you can see it in the previous post)
  3. Log into RHV-M, go to the “Hosts” tab, select “New”, fill in the relevant information, be sure to visit the “Hosted Engine” tab and select the “deploy” radio button.
  4. Once it finishes installing, give everything a minute or so to sync up, then test!

As usual, I recorded a walk through so that things are more clear. I sped things up significantly as my home lab is ~very~ slow.. Maybe I’ll get Continue reading

Why Microsoft added 6 years to Windows Server support

Microsoft will extend support for the Windows Server and SQL Server product lines to keep customers, and ultimately convince them to move their workloads into the cloud, an analyst said today.Last week, Microsoft unveiled "Premium Assurance," which will add up to six more years to the support lifespan of Windows Server 2008 and later, and SQL Server 2008 and later. Enterprises with existing Software Assurance agreements will be able to purchase the additional support starting in March 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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