Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 23rd, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


The amazing story of Voyager's walkabout and the three body problem.

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  • $18 billion: wasted on US Army Future Combat system; 70%: Americans who support an Internet sales tax;  $1.3 billion: wasted on an interoperable health record system; trillions: NSA breaking Web and VPN connections; 615: human data teams beat by a computer; $900,000: cost of apps on your smartphone 30 years ago.

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @PatrickMcFadin: 'Sup 10x coder. Grace Hopper invented the compiler and has a US Navy destroyer named after her. Just how badass are you again?
    • @benwerd: I love Marty McFly too, but more importantly, the first transatlantic voice transmission was sent 100 years ago today. What a century.
    • Martin Goodwell: The nearly two-billion requests that Netflix receives each day result in roughly 20 billion internal API calls.
    • sigma914: It's great to see people implementing distributed services using a vertically scalable technology stack again. The past ~decade has seen a lot of "We can scale sideways so constant overheads are irrelevant! We'll just use Java and add Continue reading

Results of experimenting with Brotli for dynamic web content

Compression is one of the most important tools CloudFlare has to accelerate website performance. Compressed content takes less time to transfer, and consequently reduces load times. On expensive mobile data plans, compression even saves money for consumers. However, compression is not free—it comes at a price. It is one of the most compute expensive operations our servers perform, and the better the compression rate we want, the more effort we have to spend.

The most popular compression format on the web is gzip. We put a great deal of effort into improving the performance of the gzip compression, so we can perform compression on the fly with fewer CPU cycles. Recently a potential replacement for gzip, called Brotli, was announced by Google. Being early adopters for many technologies, we at CloudFlare want to see for ourselves if it is as good as claimed.

This post takes a look at a bit of history behind gzip and Brotli, followed by a performance comparison.

Compression 101

Many popular lossless compression algorithms rely on LZ77 and Huffman coding, so it’s important to have a basic understanding of these two techniques before getting into gzip or Brotli.

LZ77

LZ77 is a simple technique developed Continue reading

Getting Started with VMware NSX Distributed Firewall – Part 1

Who saw it coming that segmentation would be a popular term in 2015?!? Gartner analyst Greg Young was almost apologetic when he kicked off the Network Segmentation Best Practices session at the last Gartner Security Summit.

As a professional with a long history in the enterprise firewall space, I know I found it odd at first. Segmentation is such a basic concept, dovetailing with how we secure networks – historically on network boundaries. Network segmentation is the basis for how we write traditional firewall rules – somehow get the traffic TO the firewall, and policy can be executed. How much more can we say about network segmentation?

But there is a problem with the reach of segmentation based on network. If traffic does not cross the firewall, you are blind. All hosts in the same network, commonly the same VLAN, can abuse each other at will. Perhaps netflow or IPS sensors are throughout your network – just to catch some of this internal network free-for-all. And the DMZ? I like to think of all these networks as blast-areas, where any one compromise could potentially take everything else on the same network down.

It’s not really network segmentation that’s all the Continue reading

QOTW: Obsession with Knowledge

Like Gollum’s self-destructive obsession with the ring in Tolkien’s novels, when we see knowledge as something to possess, not only do we miss out on the fulfillment of seeing that knowledge positively influence the lives of those around us, but we miss out on the rich personal growth that results from participation in a free give and take of truth.
Philip Dow, Virtuous Minds

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Securing OpenStack Hosts with Ansible

Openstack-Tokyo

Deploying OpenStack can be a challenging process, and securing it can be even more daunting. Fortunately, there's a new project in the OpenStack big tent that wants to make this process easier: openstack-ansible-security.

Start Standardizing With the STIG

Securing an OpenStack deployment involves multiple levels of configuration:

  1. Securing the network
  2. Securing the host
  3. Securing the interconnected services

The goal of openstack-ansible-security is to tackle the second level -- securing the host.  A spec was proposed for the Mitaka release of OpenStack to secure OpenStack infrastructure hosts using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG).

The STIG is a collection of best practices for securing a host and its services against common attacks.  The collection is broken up into multiple sections, called categories.  The STIG Viewer service makes these categories easier to review.  The categories include:

  • Cat 1: For highly sensitive systems
  • Cat 2: For medium sensitivity systems
  • Cat 3: For low sensitivity systems

These are meant to be stackable, so an extremely sensitive system would require categories 1, 2 and 3.  Each STIG item provides a description of what needs to be changed, why it should be changed, how to change it, and Continue reading

Cisco fixes iOS 9 compatibility issue that blocked some VPNs

When iOS 9 debuted in September, Cisco's AnyConnect VPN client for iOS stopped working correctly with some VPN server configurations, preventing resources from loading. During iOS 9's beta period, Cisco filed a bug report with Apple about iOS 9 breaking DNS resolution in IPv4-based split tunnneling, but iOS 9 shipped without a fix. So did iOS 9.01, 9.02, and this week's iOS 9.1.But on Thursday, Cisco released an AnyConnect client update in the App Store, version 4.0.03016, that resolves the issue. Split-tunnel VPNs again work correctly, InfoWorld's tests reveal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Make a Science Reasonable Research Paper

They are simply not a reality of what faculty is really like although movies like Dog House are unquestionably engaging. Some college students might differ with me, but faculty is not about becoming successful socially, all, instead, it’s about being successful academically. Your freshman year is your vital year of school. For all, it fails them as university students or makes them. Students who wander onto university their year thinking that faculty is one occasion that is large come in to get a rude awakening, particularly if they’ve been hearing upperclassmen reveal reports about waiting before the last second to create that report and not going to course. Continue reading

How to Publish a Two Page Paper in a Single Day

A dog photo in a “poop argument” has enraged visitors of a SWAT group standoff when nearly several users of the Wisconsin police SWAT team turned up, positioned themselves behind an armored vehicle, and pumped two fits right into a little, end-wagging puppy. The SWAT were termed following the pet, who lowered a deuce within the wrong position, started a defecation conflict between his neighbors and an man. Writes the NY Daily Information on Nov. 3: ” SWAT crew delivered to manage a town argument over waste ended up igniting a firestorm of criticism from the nearby police force, and harming canine. Continue reading

Russian cyberspies targeted the MH17 crash investigation

A Russian cyberespionage group that frequently targets government institutions from NATO member countries tried to infiltrate the international investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17).MH17 was a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that crashed in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border on 17 July, 2014. All 283 passengers and 15 crew members lost their lives.The Dutch Safety Board led an international investigation into the incident and released a final report on Oct. 13, concluding that the Boeing 777-200 aircraft was shot down by a warhead launched from a Russian-built Buk missile system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

25% Off Your ONUG Fall 2015 Registration

The Packet Pushers will be at the Open Networking User Group fall gathering at the New York University Kimmel Center in Manhattan, November 4 & 5, 2015. We'll be attending most of the open sessions, chatting with real people, and doing some live blogging. If you haven't registered for ONUG yet, you can get 25% off using code Packet25.

The post 25% Off Your ONUG Fall 2015 Registration appeared first on Packet Pushers.

CCNA – Operation Of IP Data Networks 1.5

We move on to the next topic which is

1.5 Predict the data flow between two hosts across a network

This is a very important topic for the CCNA. It may feel a bit overwhelming at first to grasp all the steps of the data flow but as a CCNA you need to learn how this process works. We will start out with an example where two hosts are on the same LAN and then we will look at an example which involves routing as well.

The first topology has two hosts H1 and H2 with IP adresses 10.0.0.10 and 10.0.0.20 respectively.

CCNA Basic LAN 1
CCNA Basic LAN 1

Host 1 and Host 2 are both connected to Switch 1 and has not communicated previously. H1 has the MAC adress 0000.0000.0001 and H2 has the MAC address 0000.0000.0002. H1 wants to send data to H2, which steps are involved?

1. H1 knows the destination IP of H2 (10.0.0.20) and runs AND to determine that they are on the same subnet.
2. H1 checkts its ARP cache which is empty for 10.0.0.20.
3. H1 generates ARP message Continue reading

Joomla releases patch for serious SQLi flaw

Joomla, a popular content management system, released patches on Thursday for a vulnerability that can allow an attacker to get full administrative access to a website.Joomla versions 3.2 through 3.4.4 are vulnerable, and the latest version is 3.4.5.The SQL injection flaw was found by Asaf Orphani, a researcher with Trustwave's SpiderLabs, and Netanel Rubin of PerimeterX.SQL injection flaws occur when a backend database executes a malicious query when it shouldn't. The type of vulnerability is one of the most prevalent ones within web applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MacKeeper buyers ask for refunds in droves following lawsuit

Tens of thousands of people who bought MacKeeper have filed for refunds as part of a proposed class-action settlement against the application's former developer.The number of refund requests has far exceeded what is typical in these type of lawsuits, surprising even experienced class-action lawyers.But the unfortunate side effect of the robust response means those who've applied will probably get a smaller refund.The class-action suit was filed in May 2014 on behalf of Pennsylvania resident Holly Yencha, who contended that MacKeeper falsely flagged security and performance problems in order to coax consumers into paying US$39.95 for the full version.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When it comes to spam, IBM’s SoftLayer is the host with the most

IBM may be the fastest-growing vendor in the worldwide security software market, but it's also the owner of the world's largest source of spam.That's according to a Wednesday report by security expert Brian Krebs, who called out the company's SoftLayer subsidiary for being "the Internet’s most spam-friendly" service provider.SoftLayer currently holds the top position on antispam nonprofit Spamhaus.org's list of the world’s worst spam support ISPs, which it defines as the ISPs with the worst abuse departments and "consequently the worst reputations for knowingly hosting spam operations."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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