The Design Mindset (3)

So you’ve spent time asking what, observing the network as a system, and considering what has actually been done in the past. And you’ve spent time asking why, trying to figure out the purpose (or lack of purpose) behind the configuration and design choices made in the past. You’ve followed the design mindset to this point, so now you can jump in and make like a wrecking ball (or a bull in a china shop), changing things so they’re better, and the new requirements you have can fit right in. Right?

Wrong.

As an example, I want to take you back to another part of a story I told here about my early days in the networking world. Before losing the war over Banyan Vines, I actually encountered an obstacle that should have been telling—but I was too much of a noob at the time to recognize it for the warning it really was. At the time, I had written a short paper comparing Vines to Netware; the paper was, perhaps, ten pages long, and I thought it did a pretty good job of comparing the two network operating systems. Heck, I’d even put together a page showing how Vines Continue reading

NAND mirroring proof-of-concept show that FBI could use it to crack iPhone

So NAND mirroring doesn’t work to crack into Syed Farook's work iPhone and grab the contents, huh? Tell that to the security researcher’s proof-of-concept demonstration.iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski previously suggested the FBI could use NAND mirroring to get information off the locked San Bernadino shooter’s iPhone; yet FBI Director James Comey claimed that making a copy of the phone’s chip to get around the passcode “doesn’t work” and the solution would be “software-based.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Change Control: Embrace the Red Tape

Change control isn’t so bad. With the underlying goal of risk mitigation, good change control can save a network engineer from the dreaded resume generating event we sweat over during cutovers. Change management frameworks such as ITIL layer an element of bureaucracy over network operations to provide a basis for a quantitative approach to IT […]

The post Change Control: Embrace the Red Tape appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Change Control: Embrace the Red Tape

Change control isn’t so bad. With the underlying goal of risk mitigation, good change control can save a network engineer from the dreaded resume generating event we sweat over during cutovers. Change management frameworks such as ITIL layer an element of bureaucracy over network operations to provide a basis for a quantitative approach to IT […]

The post Change Control: Embrace the Red Tape appeared first on Packet Pushers.

46% off APC Back-UPS Pro Uninterruptible Power Supply – Deal Alert

Relying on a cheap power strip to protect your valuable electronic systems can be risky. Unexpected power disruptions and voltage fluctuations can disconnect and cause massive damage to your networking equipment, televisions, gaming equipment, security systems or anything else you've got plugged in. Enter the APC Back-UPS Pro BR1500G uninterruptible power supply. List price is $310, but after a dramatic $143 discount you can purchase this unit now for $166.97 (See on Amazon). It is currently rated 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,700 reviewers (read reviews).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple demands delay in NY iPhone case

Apple last week asked a federal magistrate in New York to extend a court filing deadline until after the government decides whether it can unlock a different iPhone in a similar case, documents revealed.The New York case involved an iPhone used by a convicted drug dealer. Last year, the the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested a court order compelling Apple to help authorities crack that phone's security so that investigators could access its data. When Apple contested the motion in October it gave the first hint that it had drawn a line in the sand on assisting authorities.Magistrate Judge James Orenstein refused the government's demand, but the DOJ has appealed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ISPs are breaking net neutrality rules, advocacy groups say

Internet service providers are picking "winners and losers" in violation of U.S. net neutrality rules by selectively exempting Web traffic from their monthly data caps, according to a coalition of more than 50 advocacy groups.The Federal Communications Commission should stop ISPs from exempting selected Web traffic, known as offering zero-rating plans, and enforce its year-old net neutrality rules, the digital rights and consumer groups said in a letter to the agency Monday.INSIDER: 5 tricks to improve poor TCP performance Zero-rating plans "present a serious threat" to the open Internet, the letter said. "They distort competition, thwart innovation, threaten free speech, and restrict consumer choice."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How we implemented the video player in Mail.Ru Cloud

We’ve recently added video streaming service to Mail.Ru Cloud. Development started with contemplating the new feature as an all-purpose “Swiss Army knife” that would both play files of any format and work on any device with the Cloud available. Video content uploaded to the Cloud mostly falls into one of the two categories: “movies/series” and “users’ videos”. The latter are the videos that users shoot with their phones and cameras, and these videos are most versatile in terms of formats and codecs. For many reasons, it is often a problem to watch these videos on other end-user devices without prior normalization: a required codec is missing, or the file size is too big to download, or whatever.

In this article, I’ll go into detail to explain how video playback works in Mail.Ru Cloud, and how we made the Cloud player “omnivorous” and ensured support on a maximum number of end-user devices.

Storing and Caching: two approaches

Prophylactic Network Security

Trojan Defender

This week’s comedy gold was listening to a conversation emanating from a nearby inhabitant of our corporate cube accomodations, where one of my colleagues, Bob, was explaining to another coworker, George, the reasoning behind the decision to deploy firewalls to a particular new location.

Roughly summarized, the argument was this:

George, deploying a firewall is like having sex.

(No; I confess I had not anticipated ever typing that particular sentence, and I hope I never have to type it again.)

When you want to have sex, you decide whether you want a baby, and thus you choose whether or not to use contraception. If you don’t use contraception, while there’s no guarantee that a baby will arrive, there’s a real good chance that it will, so don’t be surprised if it does. Contraception isn’t perfect, but it at least reduces the likelihood of having a baby.

I confess I was laughing hard as I listened to the explanation because it’s an inspired analogy. However, buried somewhere in my subconscious was an Australian voice saying something like All these security products are a waste of money. It’s cheaper to save the money you would have spent, deal with a breach Continue reading

DARPA $2M contest looks to bring AI to wireless spectrum provisioning

Getting mobile devices to more intelligently access and use the ever-tightening wireless spectrum will be the goal of a new public competition from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.The defense research agency recently announced a $2 million Grand Challenge called the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) and said the primary goal of the contest was to infuse radios with “advanced machine-learning capabilities so they can collectively develop strategies that optimize use of the wireless spectrum in ways not possible with today’s intrinsically inefficient approach of pre-allocating exclusive access to designated frequencies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A very cool twist on optical communications

University of Ottawa researchers say their discovery that a twisted optical beam in a vacuum travels more slowly than the speed of light could be a boon for quantum computing and communications, and could benefit enterprise IT shops down the line.Their research, which began in late 2013, is outlined in the paper "Observation of subluminal twisted light in vacuum," published in The Optical Society's Optica journal.MORE: 10 of today's really cool network & IT research projectsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A very cool twist on optical communications

University of Ottawa researchers say their discovery that a twisted optical beam in a vacuum travels more slowly than the speed of light could be a boon for quantum computing and communications, and could benefit enterprise IT shops down the line.Their research, which began in late 2013, is outlined in the paper "Observation of subluminal twisted light in vacuum," published in The Optical Society's Optica journal.MORE: 10 of today's really cool network & IT research projectsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ping on You! – small weekend web/CGI project

For best article visual quality, open Ping on You! – small weekend web/CGI project directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

After a few previous web programming endeavors (both here on networkgeekstuff.com with SDN programming and in real life job) I had a taste to develop “something” and since I am a network geek, I wondered what I have needed in the past as network tools that would ideally be placed on the internet. So I came to the very basic list of things like ping, nslookup or putty as tool accessible only via a browser.

So without more delay, I give you first beta release of Ping on You! – pingonyou.com the list of current features is:

  • ping
  • nslookup
  • wget (for http response checks)
  • whois / ripe database

Here is a quick view how it looks when you try to ping google’s public DNS service on 8.8.8.8, since in the background a linux like ping tool is used, you have the same output:

web_view_beta

Additionally, here are some features that I plan to do when I get more time, however no release date right now because there are much more complex than the above ones:

[minipost] Windows partition editing with diskpart

For best article visual quality, open [minipost] Windows partition editing with diskpart directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

This will really be a micro-post as I only want to document this for my benefit. This is a way how to change partition table for disks, or USB sticks. In my example, I had a linux live boot USB stick that I needed to quickly convert into a usable storage USB stick with NTFS under windows and of course the visual GUI tools under My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management was not having full visibility on all partitions that the linux created on this USB stick, so this is how to actually do partitioning on windows.

So without more delay, this is an example how to clean the USB stick partition table and reformat it for windows use:

  1. start command prompt as Administrator and type “diskpart”
  2. enter “list disk”
  3. enter “select disk X”, where X is the and number of your USB stick ( ergo “select disk 1″ )
  4. enter “clean”
  5. enter “create partition primary”
  6. enter “select partition 1″
  7. enter “active”
  8. enter “format quick fs=ntfs”
  9. enter “assign”
  10. enter “exit”  to leave diskpart

In summary, short, but hopefully useful minipost for someone.

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