Worth Reading: The Value of Strategic Network Design

Every organization has its own philosophy when it comes to managing its IT network. And over the years as a senior engineer, I’ve learned to recognize that philosophy almost immediately. While each company is distinct in how its network evolved and how it performs, most IT departments manage and maintain that network with some combination of a reactive and proactive mindset. via netcraftsmen

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Michael Dell buying a house in Boston, thankfully

Dell CEO and Chairman Michael Dell is a few pen strokes away from buying a house in the city of Boston, Fortune reports, which may help assuage concerns here in Massachusetts that his company’s recent $67 billion purchase of EMC will result in the storage powerhouse and its some 9,500 local employees moving to Texas.Dell from the moment the deal was announced has said he plans to keep EMC right where it is, but nothing says “We’re sticking around” quite like ponying up for a local abode (Dell has other homes in Texas and Hawaii).  And, local jobs aside, I have an even more parochial concern about Dell’s intentions: I live and pay taxes in the town of Hopkinton, which is the longtime home of EMC. There must be a second-largest employer/taxpayer, but I couldn’t tell you who that might be.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle slams door on Russian cyberspies who hacked Nato PCs through Java

Oracle has fixed a vulnerability in Java that a Russian cyberespionage group used to launch stealthy attacks earlier this year.At the same time, Oracle fixed 153 other security flaws in Java and a wide range of its other products, it said Tuesday.The Java vulnerability can be used to bypass the user confirmation requirement before a Web-based Java application is executed by the Java browser plug-in. This type of protection mechanism is commonly referred to as click-to-play.The flaw was reported to Oracle by security researchers from Trend Micro, who first spotted the vulnerability in July in attacks launched by a Russian hacker group dubbed Pawn Storm that commonly targets military and governmental institutions from NATO member countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT/IT: Distributed OpenFlow

According to ECI, it’s a naïve view to have a single controller control large-scale networks in a reactive mode. Such a global view doesn’t scale, ECI claims. It means the first frame of each new flow is sent to the controller, where an SDN app decides on the desired behavior, derives the required network configurations and then uses the SDN controller to configure all the relevant switches. via sdxcentral

If I were a bit more snarky, I’d be tempted to say something like, “well, if you add a small hello protocol to each of the applets to monitor neighbor reachability, and a small protocol that can exchange local reachability information, and then perhaps a local algorithm to determine which path is the shortest, you can reinvent IS-IS.” But I’m not that snarky, of course…

I have come to believe that at least half of what we invent in the networking world is simply a product of not spending the time nor effort to study what’s already been invented, or the perception that what’s already been invented is “too complex,” and hence not stuff anyone wants to spend time learning nor understanding. A full three quarters of what remains is Continue reading

Malvertising – the new silent killer?

Malvertising is the latest way for criminals to infect your computer with malware – and the only thing you need to do to allow it is to visit your favorite website that relies on advertising. That's because they're slipping bad code into ads that are put onto those websites through advertising networks. Big name websites like Forbes, Huffington Post and the Daily Mail have been the focus of attacks.In a recent report by Cyphort found that malvertising has spiked 325 percent in 2014. A more recent report shows that malvertising reached record levels this past summer. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ever Heard of Role-Based Access Control?

During my recent SDN workshops I encountered several networking engineers who use Nexus 1000V in their data center environment, and some of them claimed their organization decided to do so to ensure the separation of responsibilities between networking and virtualization teams.

There are many good reasons one would use Nexus 1000V, but the one above is definitely not one of them.

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CCNA – Operation Of IP Data Networks 1.4

It’s time for the next topic for the CCNA.

1.4 Describe the purpose and basic operation of the protocols in the OSI and TCP/IP models

There are tons of books written on the OSI and TCP/IP model so I won’t describe these models in depth here. What I will do is explain what you need to know at each level and explain how the real world works. We have two models, one from OSI and one from DOD.

CCNA OSI vs DOD model
CCNA OSI vs DOD model

In the real life everyone references the OSI model. I’ve never heard anyone reference the DOD model which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its merits but everyone always uses the OSI model as a reference.

The OSI model has seven layers but people sometimes joke that layer 8 is financial and layer 9 is political.

Starting out with the physical layer, what you need to know is auto negotiation. Auto negotiation is good, hard coding speed and duplex will no doubt lead to ports that are hard coded on one side and auto on the other side to end up in half duplex. Gone are the days when auto negotiation wasn’t compatible and lead to misconfigured Continue reading

Google, Yahoo tighten spam filtering

Google and Yahoo are expanding their use of a successful system for identifying spam.The move is part of years-long effort to implement a series of checks designed to figure out if an email really has been sent by the domain it purports to come from.Email spoofing has long been a problem since its easy to forge the "from" address, making it more likely the receiver will believe it came from a legitimate source.By Nov. 2, Yahoo plans to being using DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) for its ymail.com and rocketmail.com services. Next year, Google also plans to move Gmail to a strict DMARC policy, according to a news release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6WIND Offering Accelerated L3 Virtual Appliances

6WIND, a Packet Pushers sponsor, has been helping get the most networking performance from x86 hardware, making the acceleration software that other companies could use to make the most of their standard servers with multi-core CPUs and Linux. 6WIND has recently taken a further step, offering its own VNFs and virtual networking acceleration software packages to end users like you and me. For example, the Turbo Router and Turbo IPSEC appliances compete with virtual routers from Cisco and Brocade. 6WIND will be appearing on the Packet Pushers Priority Queue podcast near the end of October 2015.

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Magento says compromised sites haven’t patched older vulnerabilities

Magento said Tuesday there does not appear to be a new vulnerability in its e-commerce platform that is causing some websites to become infected with the Neutrino exploit kit. Some of the affected websites appear to not have patched a code execution vulnerability nicknamed the Shoplift Bug Patch, Magento's security team wrote in a blog post. A patch was released in February. Other Magento-powered sites have not applied other patches, making them vulnerable. The latest attack against Magento was highlighted by Malwarebytes and Sucuri, two security companies, who noticed attacks on the client and server sides.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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