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The Design Mindset (2)

In a comment from last week’s post on the design mindset, which focuses on asking what through observation, Alan asked why I don’t focus on business drivers, or intent, first. This is a great question. Let me give you three answers before we actually move on to asking why?

Why can yuor barin raed tihs? Because your mind has a natural ability to recognize patterns and “unscramble” them. In reality, what you’re doing is seeing something that looks similar to what you’ve seen before, inferring that’s what is meant now, and putting the two together in a way you can understand. It’s pattern recognition at it’s finest—you’re already a master at this, even if you think you’re not. This is an important skill for assessing the world and reacting in (near) real time; if we didn’t have this skill, we wouldn’t be able to tolerate the information inflow we actually receive on a daily basis.

The danger is, of course, that you’re going to see a pattern you think you recognize and skip to the next thing to look at without realizing that you’ve mismatched the pattern. These pattern mismatches can be dangerous in the real world—like the time I Continue reading

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OED tools: tmux

The need If you work with Linux machines and you don’t use a terminal multiplexer you’re doing it wrong. What is a terminal multiplexer? It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal. The Solution I use tmux, […]

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Picking Up the Baton

I’m incredibly excited and honored to take on the role of CEO of Cumulus Networks. In many ways, I’ve trained for this role my whole life. I grew up in Silicon Valley. I have had a front row seat to the growth of the tech economy and been fortunate to watch many passionate leaders grow companies from simple concepts to multi-million dollar firms. I couldn’t be more committed than I am today to bringing a lifetime of experience and learning to bear in leading Cumulus Networks to its next phase.

First and foremost, thank you, JR, for entrusting me with this enormous responsibility. JR and Nolan have both invested their hearts, souls and many years of their lives in Cumulus Networks. They have hired incredible people, built great products, signed impactful partnerships and — in a brief few years — have already had a profound impact on this industry. They have fundamentally changed how networking products are bought, sold, developed and deployed, and in the process spawned a legion of imitators. I’m honored to be entrusted with the job of moving this organization forward. JR and I bring incredibly complementary skills to the table; he is a technical visionary and Continue reading

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Finding Level

Nolan and I started Cumulus Networks with a specific vision: to help people build better, faster, easier networks.  To change the way that people think about building and deploying applications, regardless of scale. A lot of people have contributed into turning this vision into reality, and we’re excited by everything that we’ve achieved.

As we closed our series A, it was time to name a CEO, and we didn’t want to trust the company to a “professional CEO”. To that end, I took on the responsibility. In the early days I was able to stay involved with the technology and products; however, as the company has progressed, I’ve had less time to spend in the areas that motivated me to start the company.

Then along came Josh.  He participated in our extensive (some would say exhaustive) VP of Sales selection process and stood out.  His ability to grasp the business details as well as manage the team dynamics showed us that he has chops.  He joined us in June of 2015 and continued to impress.  He did his day job effectively by restructuring our sales team, refining the sales process, getting operations tight, and closing deals.  He also became a Continue reading

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Johns Hopkins team cracks iMessage photo, video encryption

A Johns Hopkins team has decrypted iMessage photos by guessing character-by-character the key used to encrypt it, and Apple plans to release a new iOS version today that will fix the flaw.Upgrading to iOS 9.3 should fix the problem for users of the operating system and iMessage, says Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins who led a team of grad students that broke the encryption, according to a story in the Washington Post.The story says he discovered a flaw in the encryption last fall and told Apple about it, but when months went by and nothing was done to patch it, he turned his team loose. Here’s how the Post describes the attack:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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To Compress or Not to Compress, that was Uber’s Question

Uber faced a challenge. They store a lot of trip data. A trip is represented as a 20K blob of JSON. It doesn't sound like much, but at Uber's growth rate saving several KB per trip across hundreds of millions of trips per year would save a lot of space. Even Uber cares about being efficient with disk space, as long as performance doesn't suffer. 

This highlights a key difference between linear and hypergrowth. Growing linearly means the storage needs would remain manageable.  At hypergrowth Uber calculated when storing raw JSON, 32 TB of storage would last than than 3 years for 1 million trips, less than 1 year for 3 million trips, and less 4 months for 10 million trips.

Uber went about solving their problem in a very measured and methodical fashion: they tested the hell out of it. The goal of all their benchmarking was to find a solution that both yielded a small size and a short time to encode and decode.

The whole experience is described in loving detail in the article: How Uber Engineering Evaluated JSON Encoding and Compression Algorithms to Put the Squeeze on Trip Data. They came up with a matrix of Continue reading

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Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS

Network Break serves up a bubbling cauldron of tech news, including a new hyperconverged platform from HPE, and big-name defectors from AWS such as Dropbox and Apple. There's also product and licensing news from Cisco, chip stories from Cavium and Broadcom, laurels for Huawei in an SDN competition, and more.

The post Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS

Network Break serves up a bubbling cauldron of tech news, including a new hyperconverged platform from HPE, and big-name defectors from AWS such as Dropbox and Apple. There's also product and licensing news from Cisco, chip stories from Cavium and Broadcom, laurels for Huawei in an SDN competition, and more.

The post Network Break 79: HPE Hyperconverges; Dropbox Drops AWS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Worth Reading: Improving Communication

You’d think that after all these years of technology being a driving force behind business growth, there’d be similarly strong communication links between IT and business leaders. Alas, it’s still the case that those kinds of close relationships remain the exception rather than the rule. Let’s face it, even IT executives and the engineers or analysts who report to them sometimes seem to be speaking different languages. -via Netcraftsmen

The post Worth Reading: Improving Communication appeared first on 'net work.

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27% of US office workers would sell their passwords

In a survey released today, 27 percent of of U.S. office workers at large companies would sell their work password to an outsider, compared to a global average of 20 percent.And despite all the recent media attention on data breaches, password hygiene is actually deteriorating, said Juliette Rizkallah, CMO at SailPoint Technologies, which sponsored the survey.The study itself was conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent research firm. The same survey was conducted last year as well, but then only one in seven employees were willing to sell their passwords.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Why Network Disaggregation Isn’t For The Enterprise

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How Hard Is It to Think about Failures?

Mr. A. Anonymous, frequent contributor to my blog posts left this bit of wisdom comment on the VMware NSX Update blog post:

I don't understand the statement that "whole NSX domain remains a single failure domain" because the 3 NSX controllers are deployed in the site with primary NSX manager.

I admit I was a bit imprecise (wasn’t the first time), but is it really that hard to ask oneself “what happens if the DCI link fails?”

Read more ...

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Multi-Cloud Is Going Mainstream

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New products of the week 3.21.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Appthority Android AppKey features: Provides customers with comprehensive on-device monitoring and protection for employees and enterprises with the ability to know an app’s risk and compliance status before it ever gets installed on their device. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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New products of the week 3.21.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Appthority Android AppKey features: Provides customers with comprehensive on-device monitoring and protection for employees and enterprises with the ability to know an app’s risk and compliance status before it ever gets installed on their device. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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5 reasons to move to an SD-WAN

The enterprise WAN has transitioned from dedicated TDM circuits with Frame Relay and ATM, to Packet-over-SONET and MPLS, and now to Ethernet-access services. However, two things have remained constant, WAN bandwidth is still expensive and provisioning WAN services can take a long time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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Big Data vs. SDN

During one Software Defined Networking (SDN) workshop I hosted in Jakarta early this year, my friend was presenting a session with thought provoking title: Big Data vs. SDN. He is the CEO of a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and Data Analytic company that relies on Big Data technologies, so I can understand why he brought up such topic. But just like the new movie Batman vs. Superman that will be released this week, should the two heroes are fighting each other? Should the two are competing between each other? Big Data and SDN obviously solve different problems. And the way I look at it, they are actually closer to work together to deliver platform to help business with CAPEX reduction, OPEX reduction and agility in delivering new services.


The most natural approach to define Big Data is with the bigness. However according to Gartner, Big Data is defined as “high volume, high velocity and/or high variety information assets” that can be used to improve decision making and provide better insights.The majority of raw data, particularly Big Data, does not offer a lot of value in its unprocessed state. Big Data Analytic is the process of examining Big Data to Continue reading

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Researchers find flaw in Apple’s iMessage, decrypt iCloud photo

Apple's iMessage system has a cryptography flaw that allowed researchers to decrypt a photo stored in iCloud, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.The researchers, led by cryptography expert Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins University, wrote software that mimicked an Apple server and then targeted an encrypted photo stored on iCloud, the publication reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Vagrant, Ubuntu “Wily Werewolf,” and Networking

In what has been a fairly classic “yak shaving” exercise, I’ve been working on getting Ubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” running with Vagrant so that I can perform some testing with some other technologies that need a Linux kernel version of at least 4.2 (which comes with Ubuntu 15.10 by default). Along the way, I ran smack into a problem with Ubuntu 15.10’s networking configuration when used with Vagrant, and in this post I’m going to explain what’s happening here and provide a workaround.

The issue (described here on GitHub, among other places) involves a couple of changes in Ubuntu Linux (and upstream Debian GNU/Linux as well, although I haven’t personally tested it). One of the changes is in regards to how network interfaces are named; instead of the “old” eth0 or eth1 naming convention, Ubuntu 15.10 now uses persistent interface names like ens32 or ens33. Additionally, an update to the “ifupdown” package now returns an error where an error apparently wasn’t returned before.

The end result is that when you try to create a Vagrant VM with multiple network interfaces, it fails. Using a single network interface is fine; the issue only rears its Continue reading

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Why we are upset with the NYTimes Paris terrorist article

On the Twitters, we've been mocking that NYTimes article on the Paris terrorists and how they used "encryption". I thought I'd write up a brief note as to why.

According to the police report and interviews with officials, none of the attackers’ emails or other electronic communications have been found, prompting the authorities to conclude that the group used encryption. What kind of encryption remains unknown, and is among the details that Mr. Abdeslam’s capture could help reveal.