Verizon, unions agree to involve federal mediator in contact talks

After meeting with U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez yesterday, Verizon and union leaders representing some 40,000 striking workers agreed to continue stalled contract negotiations with the assistance of a federal mediator who has on her resume decades of experience as general counsel for a major union.  From a U.S. Department of Labor press release:“The parties involved in the Verizon labor dispute, including the senior leadership of the unions and the company and their bargaining teams, met today in Washington with Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Allison Beck, an experienced federal mediator who the parties agreed today would assist in the ongoing contract negotiations. Discussions will continue in Washington this week under the auspices of the Department of Labor.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

25 best cities for jobs

Looking for a new job and a new city? See which metro areas made Glassdoor's ranking of the best locations in the U.S. for job seekers.Several of the top sites are major U.S. cities and tech hubs, but if that’s not your speed, don’t fret. Some of the best job opportunities are located in small and midsize metro areas, Glassdoor reports.To come up with its list, Glassdoor equally weighted four factors: hiring opportunity, cost of living, job satisfaction, and work-life balance.The report also includes median pay for employees and a few in-demand jobs for each metro location. While the ranking covers all kinds of jobs across all industries, a wide variety of tech positions appear among the in-demand jobs in most of the 25 cities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

25 best cities for jobs

Looking for a new job and a new city? See which metro areas made Glassdoor's ranking of the best locations in the U.S. for job seekers.Several of the top sites are major U.S. cities and tech hubs, but if that’s not your speed, don’t fret. Some of the best job opportunities are located in small and midsize metro areas, Glassdoor reports.To come up with its list, Glassdoor equally weighted four factors: hiring opportunity, cost of living, job satisfaction, and work-life balance.The report also includes median pay for employees and a few in-demand jobs for each metro location. While the ranking covers all kinds of jobs across all industries, a wide variety of tech positions appear among the in-demand jobs in most of the 25 cities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM acquires Apical to add eyes to IoT

ARM has acquired Apical, a U.K. designer of embedded computer vision technology, and plans to incorporate that technology into future ARM microprocessor and system-on-chip designs, it said Wednesday.The move will open up new opportunities for designers of autonomous vehicles and security systems, among other connected things, according to ARM CEO Simon Segars. Computer vision is in its early stages, and Apical is at the forefront of embedding such technology, he said.Apical's technologies is already used in 1.5 billion smartphones, according to ARM, although many of those phones may be using nothing more sophisticated than a display brightness control Apical calls Assertive Display. That technology also turned up in Samsung Electronics' new laptop, the ATIV Book 9.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Draw network diagrams online [2016 Edition]

In this post from 2011 I was explaining that my preferred online tool to draw network diagrams is LucidChart.com. Since then LucidChart.com developed really good and added constantly new features. Unfortunately with the new great additions some not so nice restrictions appeared for the free account.
Those restrictions (like 5 active documents) really make it difficult for me to work with this tool as I got used to a different style.

I’m not a cheap guy! If I would use this tool professionally there would be no problem to buy a subscription package, but at work Visio is saint (unfortunately) and the rest of the time, especially when I’m on my Mac, I just need a fast tool to draw brief network diagrams like for my blog or fast explanation to somebody online.

LucidChart.com is my recommendation if you rely on online tool to work with Visio documents. Last time when I checked their Visio import tool was doing a great job.

Back to this story, I was looking online for another tool when I came across Draw.io.

Draw.io doesn’t need an account creation, rather it just give you direct access to the tool.
Since Continue reading

Apple’s Tim Cook woos app developers in India

In a bid to win over more Indian developers, Apple on Wednesday announced it would set up by early next year a facility to help developers on best practices and to improve the design, quality and performance of their apps on the iOS platform.The facility in Bangalore, called a Design and Development Accelerator, aims to provide specialized support for the “tens of thousands” of developers in the country, who develop applications for the iOS operating system.Bangalore has a large base of developers, working for the research and development centers of multinational companies or in startups, besides others who work independently. Apple estimates that over 1 million people in the city work in the tech sector, with over 40 percent of graduates from local universities specializing in engineering or IT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fragmenting IPv6

The design of IPv6 represented a relatively conservative evolutionary step of the Internet protocol. Mostly, it's just IPv4 with significantly larger address fields. Mostly, but not completely, as there were some changes. IPv6 changed the boot process to use auto-configuration and multicast to perform functions that were performed by ARP and DHCP in IPv4. IPv6 added a 20-bit Flow Identifier to the packet header. IPv6 replaced IP header options with an optional chain of extension headers. IPv6 also changed the behaviour of packet fragmentation. Which is what we will look at here.

CCDE – I passed the CCDE Practical in Madrid!

Hi everyone.

I’ve not been posting lately because I have been studying very hard for the CCDE practical.

Passed the lab in Madrid? Isn’t this guy from the North? I was supposed to take this exam in Frankfurt on Tuesday the 17th of May. Wise from my trips to the CCIE lab in Brussels I took a flight that landed around noon on Monday. I have a routine I like to use the day before a big exam. I had just scouted the Pearson Professional Centre (PPC) location and got back to my room. At 14.05 I receive an e-mail from Pearson Vue saying they can’t deliver my exam. Can you imagine the panic I felt? I had been preparing for months of furious studying for this day. The CCDE practical is only delivered every three months so I would have to wait for three more months to take it if I could even get a seat then. I had prepared for this day and my plan was to try to pass it and if I didn’t, come back in three months and pass it then.

There was no time to waste. I found an open seat in Madrid Continue reading

Black hole detection

The Broadcom white paper, Black Hole Detection by BroadView™ Instrumentation Software, describes the challenge of detecting and isolating packet loss caused by inconsistent routing in leaf-spine fabrics. The diagram from the paper provides an example, packets from host H11 to H22 are being forwarded by ToR1 via Spine1 to ToR2 even though the route to H22 has been withdrawn from ToR2. Since ToR2 doesn't have a route to the host, it sends the packet back up to Spine 2, which will send the packet back to ToR2, causing the packet to bounce back and forth until the IP time to live (TTL) expires.

The white paper discusses how Broadcom ASICs can be programmed to detect blackholes based on packet paths, i.e. packets arriving at a ToR switch from a Spine switch should never be forwarded to another Spine switch.

This article will discuss how the industry standard sFlow instrumentation (also included in Broadcom based switches) can be used to provide fabric wide detection of black holes.

The diagram shows a simple test network built using Cumulus VX virtual machines to emulate a four switch leaf-spine fabric like the one described in the Broadcom white paper (this network is Continue reading

CyberChaff: HaLVM unikernels protecting corporate networks

Unikernel technologies, specifically the libraries, are applicable in many ways (e.g. the recent Docker for Mac and Windows products). However, unikernels themselves can enable new categories of products. One of the most prominent products is a network security tool called CyberChaff, based on open source HaLVM unikernels. Today Formaltech, a Galois subsidiary, revealed that Reed College is one of their happy CyberChaff users!

Defending a Network With CyberChaff

CyberChaff is designed to detect one of the early and critical steps in a security breach: the point when an attacker pivots from their initial entry point to the more juicy parts of the network. This step, the pivot, typically involves scanning the network for hosts that may be better positioned, appear to have more privileges, or are running critical services.

To impair this step of the attack, CyberChaff introduces hundreds (or thousands) of false, lightweight nodes on the network. These hosts are indistinguishable from real hosts when scanned by the attacker, and are each implemented as their own HaLVM unikernel. See the diagram below where green nodes are the real hosts and the orange nodes are HaLVM CyberChaff nodes. This means that an attacker is faced with a huge Continue reading

Publisher of LA Times and Chicago Tribune sends IT jobs overseas

Tribune Publishing Co., a major newspaper chain, is laying off as many as 200 IT employees as it shifts work overseas.The firm, which owns the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant and many other media properties, told IT employees in early April that it's moving work to India-based Tata Consultancy Services.Interestingly, the Tribune IT employees were notified within weeks of a similar announcement involving IT employees at the McClatchy Company, another major newspaper chain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft and Amazon look to scoop up SAP workloads headed to the cloud

As SAP holds its annual Sapphire Now user conference in Orlando this week, two of the leading IaaS providers are making the case for running SAP apps on their public clouds.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined SAP CEO Bill McDermott during the Sapphire keynotes on Tuesday to announce a broad partnership between the two companies that will optimize the Azure public cloud to run SAP workloads.Not to be outdone, early this morning before the keynote even kicked off Amazon Web Services issued a press release announcing a handful of customers – including General Electric, Brooks Brothers and Lionsgate are running SAP apps on its public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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