UT Dallas researcher gets introspective about virtual machines

A University of Texas at Dallas researcher has come up with a way for virtual machines to have each others' backs in the name of better cloud network security.Dr. Zhiqiang Lin, an assistant professor of computer science at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas, has earned a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to support his efforts in the area of virtual machine introspection. The award includes $500,000 in funding for five years.MORE: Will containers kill virtual machines?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Your privacy and Apple, Microsoft and Google

Within a span of a few days, two of three giants in the tech industry made changes that could directly affect your privacy; the third tried to clear up "privacy and Windows 10."Apple updates privacy policy, releases iOS security guideToday Apple published an updated privacy policy that explains, in detailed but easy-to-understand language, how it uses customers’ data. It begins with a message about Apple’s commitment to your privacy from Apple CEO Tim Cook. He promised Apple never "worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will." Apple also revealed that 94% of the government data requests it receives deal with cops trying to find stolen iPhones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Who's Hiring?

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  • Close.io is a *profitable* fast-growing SaaS startup looking for a Lead DevOps/Infrastructure engineer to join our ~10 person team in Palo Alto or *remotely*. Come help us improve API performance, tune our databases, tighten up security, setup autoscaling, make deployments faster and safer, scale our MongoDB/Elasticsearch/MySQL/Redis data stores, setup centralized logging, instrument our app with metric collection, set up better monitoring, etc. Learn more and apply here.

  • Location Labs is Continue reading

Bridging Between Cisco VIRL and GNS3 for L2 and Serial Support

One of the known issue for anyone preparing for a Cisco exam is that the solutions available today don’t support all the needed features.  Cisco VIRL supports L2 switching out of the box, whereas GNS3 does not.  GNS3 supports the configuration of serial interfaces on routers whereas Cisco VIRL does not.  For someone starting out in this […]

The post Bridging Between Cisco VIRL and GNS3 for L2 and Serial Support appeared first on Packet Pushers.

GRE Tunnel Between Cisco and Linux

Generic Routing Encapsulation - GRE is a tunneling protocol originally developed by Cisco that encapsulates various network protocols inside virtual point-to-point tunnel. It transports multicast traffic via GRE tunnel so it allows passing of routing information between connected networks. As it lacks of security it is very often used in conjunction IP SEC VPN that on the other hand is not capable to pass multicast traffic.

The goal of the tutorial it to show configuration of GRE tunnel on a Cisco router and a device with OS Linux. I have created GNS3 lab consisting of two local networks - 192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24 connected via GRE tunnel. GRE tunnel interface is configured on router R1 (Cisco 7206VXR) and Core Router (Core Linux with Quagga routing daemon installed). The both routers have their outside interfaces connected to a router R3 that is located in the "Internet". To prove that GRE tunnel is working and transporting multicast traffic, the OSPF routing protocol is started on R1 and Core routers and configured on tunnel interfaces and interfaces pointing to local networks.

Note: The Core Linux vmdk image is available for download here.

Picture1-TopologyPicture 1 - Topology

1. Initial Configuration

First we assign hostnames and Continue reading

Reaction: Openstack, snowflakes, and complexity

More recently, OpenStack luminary Randy Bias has candidly derided the silos that different vendors impose on OpenStack, containing “special features that only you have.” The result? “Every OpenStack deployment is its own unique snowflake,” Bias notes, due to the “hundreds upon hundreds of configuration options.” via infoworld

For all those who think opensource is going to take over the world, cleaning up (and destroying) the mess open standards have made, there is a lesson in here.

It won’t.

The problem isn’t open standards. The problem isn’t open source. We have met the problem, and it is… us. We are the problem here. What we keep thinking is that we can “solve” complexity in some way. Each time a new unicorn comes on the scene, we think, “here, at least, is the magical unicorn that will make the physical world work the way I always wanted it to.” But like real life unicorns, you won’t find one in your rose garden. Or any other garden, for that matter. Unicorns don’t exist. Get over it.

Instead of looking for the next magical unicorn, we need to get to work figuring out which problems need to be solved, which ones Continue reading

Premise vs. Premises

premises-not-premise-300x225

If you’ve listened to a technology presentation in the past two years that included discussion of cloud computing, you’ve probably become embroiled in the ongoing war of the usage of the word premises or the shift of people using the word premise in its stead. This battle has raged for many months now, with the premises side of the argument refusing to give ground and watch a word be totally redefined. So where is this all coming from?

The Premise of Your Premises

The etymology of these two words is actually linked, as you might expect. Premise is the first to appear in the late 14th century. It traces from the Old French premisse which is derived from the Medieval Latin premissa, which are both defined as “a previous proposition from which another follows”.

The appearance of premises comes from the use of premise in legal documents in the 15th century. In those documents, a premise was a “matter previously stated”. More often than not, that referred to some kind of property like a house or a building. Over time, that came to be known as a premises.

Where the breakdown starts happening is recently in technology. We live Continue reading

Worth Reading: Negative vibes on the ICANN transition

It’s an unspoken truth that the reason it has taken 10 years longer than originally anticipated for the US government to hand over control of the “IANA functions” to ICANN is because the govt agency in charge – the National Technology and Information Administration (NTIA) – has always been mildly despairing of how its experiment in representational democracy has turned out. Far from creating an organization that was able to reflect the extraordinary collective effort that made the internet possible, ICANN has become an unwieldy monster: riven with politics, brimming with self-importance, driven almost entirely by status and insider concerns, and never looking outside its own bubble unless under threat. via the register

The post Worth Reading: Negative vibes on the ICANN transition appeared first on 'net work.

Newly found TrueCrypt flaw allows full system compromise

Windows users who rely on TrueCrypt to encrypt their hard drives have a security problem: a researcher has discovered two serious flaws in the program.TrueCrypt may have been abandoned by its original developers, but it remains one of the few encryption options for Windows. That keeps researchers interested in finding holes in the program and its spin-offs.James Forshaw, a member of Google's Project Zero team that regularly finds vulnerabilities in widely used software, has recently discovered two vulnerabilities in the driver that TrueCrypt installs on Windows systems.The flaws, which were apparently missed in an earlier independent audit of the TrueCrypt source code, could allow attackers to obtain elevated privileges on a system if they have access to a limited user account.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed – Another Angle on SD WAN

Riverbed Logo

Riverbed’s entry –or perhaps “expansion”– into the SD WAN market is interesting to me primarily because the approach being taken is a little different from the other solutions I have seen so far.

The Rest

The solutions I’ve seen from vendors like Viptela, Silver Peak, Cisco, CloudGenix and VeloCloud mainly focus on providing reliable and optimized transport from spoke site to hub site, and in some cases also from spoke to spoke, and in fewer still, spoke to Internet. The underlying approach is to monitor various statistics for each of the available WAN links, and intelligently route data flows over the link that will best meet the application’s needs. Some solutions add error correction and/or packet duplication techniques to overcome packet corruption and loss as well. Let’s call this Link Selection, noting that both links are used so it’s not a “one or the other” kind of thing.

Riverbed SD WAN

Riverbed has come at this problem from the angle they know best, WAN optimization. The presentation Riverbed gave at Networking Field Day 10 was not about how to choose which link to use, but more about how to effectively manage a hybrid WAN (say, MPLS for corporate access in Continue reading

Takeaways from VMUG in Chicago

Bob getting ready - blog

Last week, I had the opportunity to travel to Chicago to attend the VMware User Group conference. It was a great event where I had the opportunity to meet and speak with many server, storage and network team members. One point that struck me was that the importance of the network is becoming clearer to everyone with a stake in the data center — and we couldn’t be happier to be leading the way.

Here are a couple of my observations from Chicago’s installation of the show:

  • Beyond applications: In the past, VMUG conferences have been heavily attended by application and server teams. This year, I found that many of the attendees were networking and storage decision-makers and administrators. To me, that signals how much storage is being virtualized and how important the network has become in virtualized environments. The success of these environments will soon depend on the network and the need for cooperation and interdependency of the applications, storage and networking teams is clear.
  • Hyperconverged layers: There’s a continued emphasis on the hyperconvergence of storage and compute—and the network is getting into the mix. I had a lot of conversations on why a converged network is a Continue reading
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