Data Storage: An Evolution
A look at how storage technologies have changed since the days of punch cards and magnetic tape.
Video: Docker Networking Options
After introducing the fundamentals of Docker networking, Dinesh Dutt focused on various Docker networking options, including multi-host networking with overlays.
After watching the video, you might also want to listen to Episode 49 of Software Gone Wild with Brent Salisbury, Dave Tucker and Madhu Venugopal.
Inspecting SCEP enrollment traffic
SCEP is a protocol which facilitates client enrollment with a Certificate Authorities (CA), delivery and renewal of certificates and delegation of identity verification from a CA to a trusted Registration Authoritie (RA)A project I'm working on requires me to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on behalf client which doesn't exist yet, and deliver of those requests to the CA via an RA that I'm building. I'll then set aside the certificate and keys for installation onto the client system when it becomes available.
It seemed like ripping apart a request from a real client, as delivered by a real RA would be a good place to start, so that's what I did. I set up a CA (R1), an RA (R2) and a client (R3), performed the enrollment and captured the traffic between the R2 and R1.
There's a nice diagram detailing how a client delivers its to a CA on this Cisco page, so have a quick peek at the breakdown listed under Client Enrollment there.
A CSR delivered by an RA (rather than the client) is similarly encapsulated, except that both of the PKCS7 functions are performed by the RA (with the RA's private key), Continue reading
Monitoring at Terabit speeds
From the SCinet web page, "The Fastest Network Connecting the Fastest Computers: SC16 will host the most powerful and advanced networks in the world – SCinet. Created each year for the conference, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference."
SC16 live real-time weathermaps provides additional demonstrations of high performance network monitoring.
Technology Short Take #73
Welcome to Technology Short Take #73. Sorry for the long delay since the last Technology Short Take; personal matters have been taking quite the toll (if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know to what personal matters I’m referring). In any case, enough of that—here’s some data center-related content that I hope you find useful!
Networking
- Ansible has made some good progress in supporting network automation in the latest release (2.2), according to this blog post. This is an area where I hope to spend more time in the coming weeks before years’ end.
- Tomas Fojta shows how to use a PowerShell script to monitor the health of NSX Edge gateways.
- Jeremy Stretch mulls over the (perceived) problem of getting traffic into and out of overlay networks. I recommend reading this article, as well as reading the comments. Many commenters suggest just using L3 and having the hosts participate in a routing protocol like BGP, but as Jeremy points out many switches don’t have the capacity to handle that many routes. (Or, if they do, they’re quite expensive.) Seems like there’s this company in Palo Alto making a product that handles this issue pretty decently…(hint).
- Cumulus Continue reading
Kubernetes Founders Create a New Container Company
Heptio has already raised $8.5 million.