Houston, we have code!

Did you know that the computer that coordinated the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon, the Apollo Guidance Computer, had about 0.08 percent of the processing power of an iPhone 5s? That it had just 2K of RAM and ran at 1.024MHz and its external signaling ran at 512Khz ? That it had only four 16-bit registers and 32KB of storage? Despite having so little power, the AGC guided the Apollo 11 mission across more than 221,000 miles of space to land on the moon then brought them back again. Amazing. And check out the AGC's user interface:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

​I hunted Pokemon by two of the world’s most famous landmarks and all I caught was a lousy Zubat

If you’ve not seen it, the new Pokemon Go mobile game lets you walk around town interacting with local landmarks via your phone’s screen. You’ll likely find plaques, artworks and other local facts about where you live and work that you never knew existed. And then, every once in a while, a wild Pokemon will appear on the ground next to you (it’s invisible but you can see it on your phone’s screen) and you’ve gotta catch it by flicking Pokeballs at it. There are some exotic Pokemon and many boring ones. Perhaps I was hoping for too much when I stood beneath Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge, looking out across the water to the enormously-famous Sydney Opera House only to be notified that the wild Pokemon that had appeared was this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Performance Review of Overlay Tunnels with Open vSwitch

In my previous article I presented various encapsulation techniques used to extend Layer 2 reachability across separate networks using tunnels created with Open vSwitch. Although the initial intention was to include some iperf test results, I decided to leave these for a separate post (this one!) because I hit few problems.

Cayenne, how to manage a frustration of IoT devices

Collective nouns are fascinating. You start with the basics — a flock of seagulls, a herd of buffalo, a school of fish, an army of ants — then you move on to the more interesting ones — a lodge of beaver, a mob of kangaroos, a warren of rabbits, a covey of grouse. Now we come to the truly great collective nouns: An unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, an implausibility of gnus, an ambush of tigers, and a descent of woodpeckers. We also have collective nouns for things: A box of crayons, a pad of paper, and so on. There are also the invented collective nouns; a purchase of senators, a deficit of economists, a shortage of dwarves, and for all you GoT fans, a weyr of dragons (okay, so that was made up by Anne McCaffrey but it works even better for GoT). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bugs & Bugs: As in, the software kind — and insects

Network World this past Friday afternoon launched the alpha version of our possibly regular new Facebook Live stream dubbed Bugs & Bugs, as in the software kind and actual insects.I've joined forces with our resident IT security expert, Tim Greene, who handles the software bugs side of things. I, an amateur entomologist, take charge of the insect news.Perhaps surprisingly, there is no shortage of either. Between Tim checking out the new Stuxnet documentary Zero Days and reviewing new research from New York University and others to help reduce software bugs, and me catching up on the Gypsy Moth invasiion and a cyborg locust, we had no shortage of material.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bugs & Bugs: As in, the software kind — and insects

Network World this past Friday afternoon launched the alpha version of our possibly regular new Facebook Live stream dubbed Bugs & Bugs, as in the software kind and actual insects.I've joined forces with our resident IT security expert, Tim Greene, who handles the software bugs side of things. I, an amateur entomologist, take charge of the insect news.Perhaps surprisingly, there is no shortage of either. Between Tim checking out the new Stuxnet documentary Zero Days and reviewing new research from New York University and others to help reduce software bugs, and me catching up on the Gypsy Moth invasiion and a cyborg locust, we had no shortage of material.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacker claims to have breached Amazon server, dumped data on nearly 84,000 Kindle users

After a person claiming to be a security researcher “declared war on the Baton Rouge police” and took credit for the data breach after the shooting death of Alton Sterling, he took aim at Amazon. 0x2Taylor In a Twitter direct message, hacker @0x2Taylor told Mic the he and a buddy “’breached a server’ owned by Amazon that contained database files with more than 80,000 Kindle users’ information.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacker claims to have breached Amazon server, dumped data on nearly 84,000 Kindle users

After a person claiming to be a security researcher “declared war on the Baton Rouge police” and took credit for the data breach after the shooting death of Alton Sterling, he took aim at Amazon. 0x2Taylor In a Twitter direct message, hacker @0x2Taylor told Mic the he and a buddy “’breached a server’ owned by Amazon that contained database files with more than 80,000 Kindle users’ information.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE DCv2 Techtorial @ Cisco Live US 2016

This morning I’m in Las Vegas for Cisco Live 2016, and am attending TECCCIE-3644 – CCIE DC Techtorial which focuses on the new CCIE Data Center v2 updates.

I’m live blogging the session so please feel free to submit your questions for the CCIE team as a comment here and I’ll try to get an answer for you.

Slides from the session are available here.

Update 6 – 13:55PDT - UCS will be running 3.x, not 2.x as currently listed on the blueprint.

Update 5 – 11:30PDT - Starting Storage Networking now. Interested to see what the scope is going to be now with the MDSes removed and the N9K’s added.

Update 4 – 09:15PDT - One major format change for the CCIE DCv2 Lab Exam is the introduction of the Diagnostics section, similar to other tracks such as RSv5. Here are some highlights and demo questions illustrating the format of the Diag section.

  • Diag section consists of one or more independent Tasks.
  • Each Task can have one or more Questions.
  • Questions are typically 1 point apiece, but could be 2 or 3 points.
  • Each Question within a task is graded individually. It is possible to get Task Continue reading

Pseudowire Headend Termination (PWHT) For Juniper MX

I’ve been doing quite a lot of MX BNG stuff this year, so I thought I’d run through another quite flexible way of terminating broadband subscribers onto a Juniper MX router.

The feature is called Psuedowire headend termination, “PWHT” or simply Psuedowire head-end “PWHE” depending on whether you work for Cisco or Juniper? but it essentially solves a relatively simple problem.

In traditional broadband designs – especially in DSL “FTTC” or Fibre Ethernet “FTTP” we’re used to seeing large numbers of subscribers, connecting into the ISP edge at layer-2 with PPPoE or plain Ethernet. This is normally performed with VLANS, either via an MSAN (DSL/FTTC) or as is the case with Ethernet FTTP subscribers – a plain switched infrastructure or some form of passive-optical (PON/GPON) presentation:

 

Capture

These subscribers then terminate on a BNG node on the edge of the network, which would historically have been a Cisco 7200, GSR10k, Juniper ERX or Redback router, which essentially bridges the gap between the access network and the internet.

For very large service providers with millions of subscribers this sort of approach normally works well, because their customer base is so large; it makes sense for them to provision a full-size BNG node Continue reading

Saving Money with IOT Water Heater

About six months ago I installed an Energy Efficient water heater. This unit is what is known as a heat pump water heater. For those not familiar with refrigeration, this works by moving heat instead of creating heat. By contrast, traditional electric water heaters use resistance coils to heat the water. This new unit also has traditional coils that can be used for high demand or high temperature settings as well.

I guess by now everyone is wondering what this has to do with the topics we discussed at PacketU. To better understand the relationship, you can see that this Water Heater is also Connected to the Internet. The primary reasons I wanted to connect it to the Internet was to schedule the modes around my family’s usage patterns and control vacation mode from a mobile phone. When purchasing this unit I was quite skeptical and was concerned about transitioning from a simple conventional model to a mode that literally has moving parts.

I wanted to follow up and share my experience and why I now believe this was  a good decision. I have been tracking my energy usage since installation and the results are promising. Without changing any other habits Continue reading

Firepower Indications of Compromise

Several days ago I wrote an article about Firepower Sinkhole rules. While I was confirming this in a lab, I temporarily created a custom DNS sinkhole rule. That rule classified requests for temp.packetu.com as Command and Control and returned an IP address of 1.1.1.1. What I later noticed is that this caused my laptop to be classified with an IOC.

Indications of Compromise (IOCs) can be thought of as reasons why Firepower Management Console believes a host cannot be trusted or is otherwise affected by malware. These can be found in multiple places in the UI. I find the Context Explorer to be a good middle ground for most SecOps team members and a good place to notice whether current IOC’s exist.

My network is rather simple and I only currently have one IOC. In any case, I can use the Context Explorer to launch the host information for the impacted host.

IOC Context Explorer

Once the Host Profile screen is launched, I can get a little more about information about the activity that causes Firepower to believe that this is a compromised host.

IOC Host Profile

Also notice that there is a garbage can icon to the right of the Indication of Compromise that was Continue reading

General – Network Engineering vs Coding

Introduction

There has been a lot of talking about the future of the network engineer for the last couple of years. Many articles have declared that we MUST learn to program or we will be banished from the world by the programming overlords! I definitely do not agree with this bold statement but lately I have started to learn Python. Why?

Why Learn Programming?

As a network architect I probably won’t ever write a line of code or at least very rarely so. So why bother learning?

I didn’t learn a lot of programming back in my days of school. I fiddled around a bit with Basic, some Pascal and then at the university I tried some C# and C++. I never felt connected with programming. I never felt that I was good at it. This surprised me a bit because I’ve always been good at learning things. I’m good at analyzing things, troubleshooting things and I have a strong background in maths and science in general. I had all the skills that good programmers normally have so why couldn’t I learn programming? Because I struggled I didn’t enjoy doing it so I never pushed through until it “clicked”.

Later Continue reading

Sideloaders beware: a Pokemon Go knock-off contains malware

The new smash-hit game "Pokemon Go" could become bait for hackers wanting to take over your phone.Researchers at security firm Proofpoint have already found an Android version of the game containing malware. Once installed, it uses a remote access tool called DroidJack that can give a hacker full access to the phone, Proofpoint said Thursday.The company hasn’t yet seen the infected game in the wild, but it shows that hackers are already hard at work targeting it. Proofpoint discovered the software in a malicious online file repository.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sideloaders beware: a Pokemon Go knock-off contains malware

The new smash-hit game "Pokemon Go" could become bait for hackers wanting to take over your phone.Researchers at security firm Proofpoint have already found an Android version of the game containing malware. Once installed, it uses a remote access tool called DroidJack that can give a hacker full access to the phone, Proofpoint said Thursday.The company hasn’t yet seen the infected game in the wild, but it shows that hackers are already hard at work targeting it. Proofpoint discovered the software in a malicious online file repository.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gaming desktops with AMD’s Radeon RX 480 are on sale for under $800

Desktops with AMD's $199 Radeon RX 480 graphics card have started to go on sale a month after the GPU was announced.Some of the desktops are priced under $800, which is very affordable by gaming PC standards. That's largely because of the GPU's low price, but the RX 480 is no slouch: it's capable of 4K gaming and makes desktops VR-ready.It's the first GPU based on AMD's new Polaris architecture, but you can expect even faster, higher-priced Polaris cards later this year.Best Buy is selling the CyberPowerPC Desktop with an eight-core AMD FX 8320 CPU and RX 480 for $849.99. It has a 2TB hard drive, eight USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and 16GB DDR3 RAM (not the speedier DDR4 in some gaming systems).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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