A Voyage of Discover-E

 

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I’m very happy to be attending the first edition of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) Discover in London next week. I say the first edition because this is the first major event being held since the reaving of HP Inc from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I’m hopeful for some great things to come from this.

It’s The Network (This Time)

One of the most exciting things for me is seeing how HPE is working on their networking department. With the recent news about OpenSwitch, HPE is trying to shift the way of thinking about a switch operating system in a big way. To quote my friend Chris Young:

Vendors today spend a lot of effort re-writing 80% of their code and focus on innovating on the 20% that makes them different. Imagine how much further we’d be if that 80% required no effort at all?

OpenSwitch has some great ideas, like pulling everything from Open vSwitch as a central system database. I would love to see more companies use this model going forward. It makes a lot of sense and can provide significant benefits. Time will tell if other vendors recognize this and start using portions of OpenSwitch in their projects. But Continue reading

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Who's Hiring?

  • Senior Devops Engineer - StatusPage.io is looking for a senior devops engineer to help us in making the internet more transparent around downtime. Your mission: help us create a fast, scalable infrastructure that can be deployed to quickly and reliably.

  • As a Networking & Systems Software Engineer at iStreamPlanet you’ll be driving the design and implementation of a high-throughput video distribution system. Our cloud-based approach to video streaming requires terabytes of high-definition video routed throughout the world. You will work in a highly-collaborative, agile environment that thrives on success and eats big challenges for lunch. Please apply here.

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  • At Scalyr, we're analyzing multi-gigabyte server logs in a fraction of a second. That requires serious innovation in every part of the technology stack, from frontend to backend. Continue reading

What you need to know about Dell’s root certificate security debacle

In an attempt to streamline remote support, Dell installed a self-signed root certificate and corresponding private key on its customers' computers, apparently without realizing that this exposes users' encrypted communications to potential spying.Even more surprising is that the company did this while being fully aware of a very similar security blunder by one of its competitors, Lenovo, that came to light in February.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Frequent CCIE R&S V5 Questions!

While teaching a CCIE R&S Bootcamp the other day, I realized that I get a lot of the same questions pertaining to the CCIE R&S V5 Lab pretty frequently, so I decided to put together a video series that addresses these questions. I’ve mapped out 4 videos – each of which cover the 3 section in the lab, and an introduction to the general lab concepts and theory. Enjoy, and if there’s anything I can help you with please feel free to email me at [email protected].

JP Cedeno, CCIE R&S V5 (CCIE #47408)
iPexpert’s Sr. CCIE R&S Instructor

Explosions Leave Crimea in the Dark

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Above photo credit: http://varlamov.ru/

Just after midnight local time on 22 November, saboteurs, presumably allied with Ukrainian nationalists, set off explosives knocking out power lines to the Crimean peninsula.  At 21:29 UTC on 21 November (00:29am on 22-Nov, local time) , we observed numerous Internet outages affecting providers in Crimea and causing significant degradation in Internet connectivity in the disputed region.

With Crimean Tatar activists and Ukrainian nationalists currently blocking repair crews from restoring power, Crimea may be looking at as much as a month without electricity as the Ukrainian winter sets in.  Perhaps more importantly, the incident could serve as a flash point spurring greater conflict between Ukraine and Russia.  ua_map

Impacts

The impacts can be seen in the MRTG traffic volume plot from the Crimea Internet Exchange — the drop-offs are noted with red arrows and followed by intermittent periods of partial connectivity.

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Dyn’s latency measurements into Miranda-Media, the Crimean local agent of Russian state operator Rostelecom, show that some parts of the network remain reachable despite the power loss.  However, while backup generators may be keeping the networking infrastructure online, it won’t be of much good for the people of Crimea Continue reading

Reaction: Personal Integrity

There is, on a daily basis, a choice you must make as a geek, as someone who is involved in technology — particularly in the world of computer networking. The choice we always face, every one of us, is whether to champion a particular product or service, or to champion solving the problem at hand. Between doing what’s best for a vendor — or even harder, what’s best for our career — or doing what’s best for our customer (whoever that customer might be). In other words, what to do with our personal integrity.

I know it’s hard, when you’re working for a vendor, not to just throw yourself into a product to the point of seeing it as the hammer that solves every problem, whether a nail or not. I know it’s hard, when you work for a smaller company, or in what feels like a “side alley” of our little industry (what Ethan calls a “mud puddle”) not to try to throw yourself at being famous, or warping the direction of the company so you can learn something new. I once worked on an account where I’d been asking to come in and help them switch from EIGRP Continue reading

How Lockheed Martin, Cisco and PWC manage cybersecurity

Cybersecurity remains a top priority for companies in all industries. The reason is clear. Criminals and other parties have access to inexpensive tools and training to attack companies and governments. The New York Times reported on the rise of ransomware earlier in 2015. This type of malicious software encrypts a user’s data and demands a payment to release it (or the data will be destroyed).Many companies are deploying greater resources to turn the tide of hackers: Google has a team of 10 full time hackers working to eliminate flaws. Given these threats, executives and technology leaders are asking for best practices and technologies. Developing security awareness in staff, growing security professionals and equipping CIOs to monitor security remain vital components to a successful security management strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Light-O-Rama to create holiday light shows

If you want to have a holiday light show that will back up traffic and make people of all ages smile (except Grinches and Scrooges), then you might be interested in Light-O-Rama. It’s been used by contestants in the Great Light Fight and was running behind the scenes of the first viral video of Christmas lights to Wizards in Winter. Incidentally, it took the electrical engineer who set up that light show about two months and 16,000 lights; for each minute of the song, it took him about one hour to sequence 88 Light-O-Rama channels. One LOR hardware controller generally has 16 channels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell admits installing security hole on laptops, apologizes, offers fix

Dell acknowledges a root certificate it installed on its laptops was a bad idea and is pushing a patch to permanently remove it.In a blog post company spokesperson Laura Thomas says eDellRoot was installed as a support tool to make it faster and easier for customers to service the devices. But some of those customers discovered the certificate and recognized it as a serious security threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blogging Rule#1: Be Useful

I love stumbling upon new networking-focused blogs. Many of my old friends switched to the dark side vendors and stopped blogging, others simply gave up, and it seems like there aren’t that many engineers that would like to start this experiment.

One of the obvious first questions is always “what should I write about” and my reply is always “it doesn’t really matter – make sure it’s useful.”

Read more ...

As China moves to payment cards, cybercriminals follow

As China increasingly embraces payment cards over cash, Trend Micro is seeing an uptick in cybercriminal activity aimed at card fraud. The security company published a new study of the Chinese underground cybercriminal market, which shows a strong interest in ways to capture payment card details. "Cybercriminals quickly jumped on the noncash payment bandwagon," wrote report author Lion Gu of Trend Micro's Forward-Looking Threat Research Team. The market for such tools has been strong in countries that heavily use payment cards, so it's probably not surprising that the trade would rise in China.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell security error widens as researchers dig deeper

The fallout from a serious security mistake made by Dell is widening, as security experts find more issues of concern.Researchers with Duo Security have found a second weak digital certificate in a new Dell laptop and evidence of another problematic one circulating.The issue started after it was discovered Dell shipped devices with a self-signed root digital certificate, eDellRoot, which is used to encrypt data traffic. But it installed the root certificate with the private encryption key included, a critical error that left many security experts aghast.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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