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Who's Hiring?

  • Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online team is building the next generation of software development tools in the cloud out in Durham, North Carolina. Come help us build innovative workflows around Git and continuous deployment, help solve the Git scale problem or help us build a best-in-class web experience. Learn more and apply.

  • Are you someone who can efficiently spin up and maintain large production Linux deployments? Can you troubleshoot systems in the middle of the night as well as design them so that you don't have to wake up? If so, and you want to work with some of the best in the business, you will probably love the Infrastructure Group at Location Labs. Please apply here.

  • As a Lead Software Engineer at Enova you’ll be one of Enova’s heavy hitters, overseeing technical components of major projects. We’re going to ask you to build a bridge, and you’ll get it built, no matter what. You’ll balance technical requirements with business needs, while advocating for a high quality codebase when working with full business teams. You’re fluent in ‘technical’ language and ‘business’ language, because you’re the engineer everyone counts on to understand how it works now, how it Continue reading

Arista expands its portfolio with 25, 50, and 100-Gig data center switches

It seems 10 Gig Ethernet (Gig-E) technology has been the de facto standard in data centers for the better part of a decade now. Frankly, 10 Gig-E is still a lot of bandwidth and is fine for most businesses. However, it cannot cost-effectively meet the bandwidth requirements of next-generation cloud and web-scale environments. Sure, there's 40 Gig-E, but that's actually four 10 Gig-E "lanes" bonded together, so the cloud provider would likely have to install at least twice as many switches, along with all the cabling, space, power, and cooling required to meet the needs of today and the near future.This is the primary driver behind the development of the 25 Gig-E standard. Compared to 10 Gig-E, 25 Gig-E provides 2.5-times the performance, making it much more cost-effective. Since the 25 Gigabits of bandwidth is provided in single lane, it provides much greater density and scale than 10 Gig-E. Also, deploying 25 Gig-E provides an easy upgrade path to 50 Gig-E (2 lanes) or even 100 Gig-E (4 lanes).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Attackers can take over Cisco routers; other routers at risk, too

Attackers have successfully infected Cisco routers with an attack that persists to provide a means for compromising other machines and data on the networks the routers serve, FireEye says.The SYNful Knock attack successfully implanted altered versions of firmware into 14 Cisco routers in India, Mexico, the Philippines and Ukraine, according to FireEye, that gives full access to the devices, and researchers expect compromised machines to show up in more places and in other brands of routers.SYNful Knock downloads software modules to customize further attacks and have been found in in Cisco 1841, 2811 and 3825 routers. It initially requires either physical access to routers or valid passwords; there is no software vulnerability being exploited, FireEye says in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DomainTools’ Iris interface speeds up cybercrime investigations

Cybercriminals often leave a lot of digital crumbs, and when organizations get attacked, finding those clues can help reveal who is attacking and why.For 15 years, a small company called DomainTools, based in Seattle, has collected vast amounts of information about the Web: historical domain name registrations and network information, all of which are extremely valuable in investigating cyberattacks.Using its tools makes it possible, for example, to see what other websites are using a particular IP address, what email address was used to register them, DNS servers and other information.But DomainTools' Web-based interface wasn't designed in a way that reflected the workflows that investigators follow when probing cyberattacks and the speed at which they need to collate large amounts of information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network Firefighters or Fire Marshals?

FireMarshal

Throughout my career as a network engineer, I’ve heard lots of comparisons to emergency responders thrown around to describe what the networking team does. Sometimes we’re the network police that bust offenders of bandwidth polices. Other times there is the Network SWAT Team that fixes things that get broken when no one else can get the job done. But over and over again I hear network admins and engineers called “fire fighters”. I think it’s time to change how we look at the job of fires on the network.

Fight The Network

The president of my old company used to try to motivate us to think beyond our current job roles by saying, “We need to stop being firefighters.” It was absolutely true. However, the sentiment lacked some of the important details of what exactly a modern network professional actually does.

Think about your job. You spend most of your time implementing change requests and trying to fix things that don’t go according to plan. Or figuring out why a change six months ago suddenly decided today to create a routing loop. And every problem you encounter is a huge one that requires an “all hands on deck” mentality Continue reading

Attackers install highly persistent malware implants on Cisco routers

Replacing router firmware with poisoned versions is no longer just a theoretical risk. Researchers from Mandiant have detected a real-world attack that has installed rogue firmware on business routers in four countries.The router implant, dubbed SYNful Knock, provides attackers with highly privileged backdoor access to the affected devices and persists even across reboots. This is different than the typical malware found on consumer routers, which gets wiped from memory when the device is restarted.SYNful Knock is a modification of the IOS operating system that runs on professional routers and switches made by Cisco Systems. So far it was found by Mandiant researchers on Cisco 1841, 8211 and 3825 "integrated services routers," which are typically used by businesses in their branch offices or by providers of managed network services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Dangers Of SDN Failure

The concepts of software-defined networking and hybrid cloud challenge the traditional boundaries of the enterprise network. Nathan Pearce, Principal Technologist at F5 Networks, examines the ownership issues surrounding SDN and cloud, and who must be responsible for an inevitable outage.

Technology that predicts your next security fail

In 2013, the IRS paid out $5.8 billion in refunds for tax filings it later realized were fraudulent, according to a 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office. This news comes as no surprise to the Kentucky Department of Revenue, which is stepping up its own war against rising fraud cases with predictive analytics.Predictive analytics uses publicly available and privately sourced data to try to determine future actions. By analyzing what has already happened, organizations can detect what is likely to happen before anything affects the security of the organization's physical infrastructure, human capital or intellectual property.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 Websites To Visit If You Want to be a CCIE

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
During my CCIE journey I have used many online resources from paid to free, the list below shows my top 10 ccie related websites that I used on a regular basis to to get information and study material. These range from Cisco to training providers and personal blogs. All which provided benefits to my study. […]

Other pages of interest:

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post 10 Websites To Visit If You Want to be a CCIE

The Autumn Cloud/SDN Roadtrip

One of my kids recently asked me whether I plan to travel somewhere during the autumn. The answer was “a bit” surprising: Boston (just got back), Zurich, Bern, Stockholm, Ljubljana, Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Rome, Miami, Ljubljana, Helsinki, and maybe Munich and/or another trip to Zurich… so I might not be able to blog as frequently as usual.

Most of those trips are public events (hyperlinked). If you’re anywhere close one of those cities, check them out and drop by.

Business Critical Apps & the DMVPN Underlay of IWAN’s Intelligent Path Control

Let’s assume we have a Branch with 1 Router and 2 WAN connections.  We decide to use Intelligent Path Control with PfRv3 and design our policy such that the business critical traffic goes over one of the WAN clouds (MPLS, for example) and will use the other WAN cloud (Internet, for example) should a certain level of impairment (delay, loss, jitter) occur on the primary path.

But that business critical traffic is well….. critical to your business.  So that probably isn’t really good enough. Let’s take this a couple steps further to make sure your business critical traffic is treated as such.

With Intelligent Path Control with PfRv3 what will actually happen is that while the business critical traffic is going over the primary channel, a backup channel will be created over the other WAN cloud. On top of that, PfRv3 will be checking the health of the path the backup channel is taking.  Actually… let me be even more specific.  PfRv3 will be checking the health of the exact path that business critical traffic would take if it were to be sent over the fallback WAN cloud.

“How is this accomplished?

Regardless of hashing algorithms Continue reading

The Changing Mobile World

Today’s Internet is undoubtedly the mobile Internet. Sales of all other forms of personal computers are in decline and the market focus is now squarely on tablets, “smart” phones and wearable peripherals. You might think that such significant volumes and major revenue streams would underpin a highly competitive and diverse industry base, but you’d be wrong. In 2014 84% of all of the new mobile smart devices were using Google’s Android platform, and a further 12% were using Apple’s iOS system. This consolidation of the platform supply into just two channels is a major change. Further changes are happening. In a world as seemlingly prodigious as the mobile Internet it’s scarcity that is driving much of these changes, but in this particular case it’s not the scarcity of IPv4 addresses. It’s access to useable radio spectrum.
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