High Availability Planning: Identify the Weakest Link

Everyone loves to talk about business critical applications that require extremely high availability, but it’s rare to see someone analyze the whole application stack and identify the weakest link.

For more details, watch my Designing Active/Active and Disaster Recovery Data Centers or attend one of my workshops.

If you start mapping out the major components of an application stack, you’ll probably arrive at this list (bottom-to-top):

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Trump Hotels investigating possible payment card breach

The Trump Hotel Collection said on Monday it is working with the Secret Service and FBI to investigate a possible payment card breach, its second one in less than a year.The luxury hotel group is run by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his family. "Like virtually every other company these days, we are routinely targeted by cyber terrorists whose only focus is to inflict harm on great American businesses," said Eric Trump, one of the candidate's sons, in an email statement. "We are committed to safeguarding all guests' personal information and will continue to do so vigilantly."News of the breach was first reported by computer security writer Brian Krebs, citing three unnamed sources in the financial sector.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interop Vegas 2016

I’m happy to be given the opportunity to speak once more at Interop Vegas in 2016. No workshop for me this year, but I will be putting on three individual talks, all focusing on topics that have been very near and dear to me over the past year. Last year I was very focused on putting the theory behind network automation into practical terms, and making it “real”. Over the past year I’ve seen rapid growth in adoption of these ideas, and I was happy to be just one very small part of helping to make that happen.

Interop Vegas 2016

I’m happy to be given the opportunity to speak once more at Interop Vegas in 2016. No workshop for me this year, but I will be putting on three individual talks, all focusing on topics that have been very near and dear to me over the past year. Last year I was very focused on putting the theory behind network automation into practical terms, and making it “real”. Over the past year I’ve seen rapid growth in adoption of these ideas, and I was happy to be just one very small part of helping to make that happen.

Interop Vegas 2016

I’m happy to be given the opportunity to speak once more at Interop Vegas in 2016. No workshop for me this year, but I will be putting on three individual talks, all focusing on topics that have been very near and dear to me over the past year.

Last year I was very focused on putting the theory behind network automation into practical terms, and making it “real”. Over the past year I’ve seen rapid growth in adoption of these ideas, and I was happy to be just one very small part of helping to make that happen.

Since the last Interop, my career has steered me towards a more direct approach to network automation, specifically through software development. So I’d like to spend some time providing an overview of my sessions at the upcoming Interop Vegas 2016, which are all inspired by the last year of my career.

Test-Driven Network Automation

I am obviously very passionate about network automation, and have been very vocal about my belief that network automation only has a chance if it is done properly, which includes proper testing. I strongly believe that network automation can and should take place within the context of a Continue reading

DNS OARC 24

For a supposedly simply query response protocol that maps names to IP addresses there a huge amount going on under the hood with the DNS. DNS OARC held a 2 day workshop in Buenos Aires prior to IETF 95. Here are my impressions of this meeting.

Intel’s top PC, IoT executives leave in management shakeup

The writing was on the wall for some Intel executives after a former Qualcomm executive was hired to oversee the company's PC, Internet of Things and software businesses, and two of them are departing.Kirk Skaugen, who previously led the Client Computing Group, and Doug Davis, who ran the IoT group, are leaving the company, Intel said Monday.Their roles were diminished after the November appointment of Venkata Renduchintala, who formerly worked at Qualcomm, as president of Intel's Client and IoT businesses and its Systems Architecture Group. Renduchintala, who's known as Murthy, is effectively Intel's number two executive after Brian Krzanich.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Light will ultimately secure the Internet, scientists say

The Internet will eventually be secured from hackers by a technology called quantum photonics, say researchers. Single light particles will ultimately be used to exchange information in secure systems, they think. The technique is part of quantum computing. And now that a limitation has been overcome, the scientists at the University of Sydney say that the ultra-secure system is one step closer to realization. It’s been guessed at that photonics will be the future of security, however figuring out how to create a single photon has been holding back the forward movement in the research, the team says in a news release on the university’s website. They now think they’ve figured out how to do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brocade buying Ruckus Wireless for $1.2 billion

Networking hardware vendor Brocade announced today that it would add a wireless infrastructure club to its bag in the form of Ruckus Wireless, as part of a deal with a net value of $1.2 billion.The objective, according to Brocade’s public statement, is to broaden the company’s enterprise networking stable and boost profits, since wireless is a growth area. Like any merger of this type, the idea seems to be to offer a unitary set of products and services.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: HTTP compression continues to put encrypted communications at risk + 12 powerful Windows 10 tools that hardcore PC enthusiasts will loveTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers reveal ‘Surreptitious Sharing on Android’ vulnerabilities

TU Braunschweig, Institute for Operating Systems and Computer Networks, Professors Dominik Schürmann and Lars Wolf are warning about a “Surreptitious Sharing” vulnerability which is present in many Android communication apps. Their pre-published research paper, Surreptitious Sharing on Android (pdf), is to be presented at the security conference GI Sicherheit 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing BGP: A Case Study (6)

In my last post on securing BGP, I said—

Here I’m going to discuss the problem of a centralized versus distributed database to carry the information needed to secure BGP. There are actually, again, two elements to this problem—a set of pure technical issues, and a set of more business related problems. The technical problems revolve around the CAP theorem, which is something that wants to be discussed in a separate post; I’ll do something on CAP in a separate post next week and link it back to this series.

The CAP theorem post referenced above is here.

securing-bgpBefore I dive into the technical issues, I want to return to the business issues for a moment. In a call this week on the topic of BGP security, someone pointed out that there is no difference between an advertisement in BGP asserting some piece of information (reachability or connectivity, take your pick), and an advertisements outside BGP asserting this same bit of information. The point of the question is this: if I can’t trust you to advertise the right thing in one setting, then why should I trust you to advertise the right thing in another? More specifically, if you’re using Continue reading

HTTP compression continues to put encrypted communications at risk

Security researchers have expanded and improved a three-year-old attack that exploits the compression mechanism used to speed up browsing in order to recover sensitive information from encrypted Web traffic.The attack, known as BREACH, takes advantage of the gzip/DEFLATE algorithm used by many Web servers to reduce latency when responding to HTTP requests. This compression mechanism leaks information about encrypted connections and allows man-in-the-middle attackers to recover authentication cookies and other sensitive information.The BREACH (Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext) attack was first presented at the Black Hat USA security conference in August 2013 by security researchers Angelo Prado, Neal Harris and Yoel Gluck. While it theoretically affects all SSL/TLS ciphers, their version of the attack was most effective against connections encrypted with stream ciphers, such as RC4.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Remove Duplicates in a Large Dataset Reducing Memory Requirements by 99%

This is a guest repost by Suresh Kondamudi from CleverTap.

Dealing with large datasets is often daunting. With limited computing resources, particularly memory, it can be challenging to perform even basic tasks like counting distinct elements, membership check, filtering duplicate elements, finding minimum, maximum, top-n elements, or set operations like union, intersection, similarity and so on

Probabilistic Data Structures to the Rescue

Probabilistic data structures can come in pretty handy in these cases, in that they dramatically reduce memory requirements, while still providing acceptable accuracy. Moreover, you get time efficiencies, as lookups (and adds) rely on multiple independent hash functions, which can be parallelized. We use structures like Bloom filters, MinHash, Count-min sketch, HyperLogLog extensively to solve a variety of problems. One fairly straightforward example is presented below.

The Problem

We at CleverTap manage mobile push notifications for our customers, and one of the things we need to guard against is sending multiple notifications to the same user for the same campaign. Push notifications are routed to individual devices/users based on push notification tokens generated by the mobile platforms. Because of their size (anywhere from 32b to 4kb), it’s non-performant for us to index Continue reading

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