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Facebook extends Parse to build IoT apps

Facebook is extending Parse, its suite of back-end software development tools, to create Internet of Things apps for items like smart home appliances and activity trackers.By opening Parse to IoT, Facebook hopes to strengthen its ties to a wider group of developers in a growing industry via three new software development kits aimed specifically at IoT, unveiled Wednesday at the company’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco.The tools are aimed at making it easier for outside developers to build apps that interface with Internet-connected devices. Garage door manufacturer Chamberlain, for example, has already used Parse for its app to let people open and lock their garage door from their smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Neutron – The Dirty Network Detail

This post is just a quick response to a comment by Turing Machinæ on Show 227 – OpenStack Neutron Overview with Kyle Mestery, which was “I’ve learnt absolutely NOTHING about openstack from this podcast.” Whilst I don’t agree I have some empathy; time and time again I’ve found myself hitting a brick wall recently when […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, automation, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books, is a regular contributor at DevCentral and was an F5 DevCentral MVP for 2014.

The post OpenStack Neutron – The Dirty Network Detail appeared first on Packet Pushers Continue reading

Centec GoldenGate Chip to Challenge Broadcom Trident II

Centec enters the 10G age with its newest switch chip.

School district gets an HP SDN makeover to address wireless growth, security problems

Faced with exponential growth in wireless devices and an increasingly digital curriculum, Jeff Dietsche, Systems and Infrastructure Manager for the South Washington County Schools in Minnesota, decided his only hope was to deal with a single vendor and use SDN to streamline operations. Dietsche tells the tale to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

A Go Gotcha: When Closures and Goroutines Collide

Here's a small Go gotcha that it's easy to fall into when using goroutines and closures. Here's a simple program that prints out the numbers 0 to 9:

(You can play with this in the Go Playground here)

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {  
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
    }
}

It's output is easy to predict:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

If you decided that it would be nice to run those fmt.Printfs concurrently using goroutines you might be surprised by the result. Here's a version of the code that runs each fmt.Printf in its own goroutine and uses a sync.WaitGroup to wait for the goroutines to terminate.

package main

import (  
    "fmt"
    "runtime"
    "sync"
)

func main() {  
    runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU())

    var wg sync.WaitGroup
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)
        go func() {
            fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
            wg.Done()
        }()
    }

    wg.Wait()
}

(This code is in the Go Playground here). If you're thinking concurrently then you'll likely predict that the output will be the numbers 0 to 9 in some Continue reading

The Facts Behind the Myth

I hate getting into lengthy discussions regarding open networking (or bare-metal) pricing as there are benefits other than price. However, with so many people trying to understand the industry transition, I feel compelled to jump in when I see confusing information.

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness recently published a report called The Myth of White-Box Network Switches which is causing a pretty interesting debate. The discourse forms, as Andre puts it, “I think there is misunderstanding/reading my research. I’m not saying one solution is cheaper. It highlights the cost”; however, the title of the report necessarily creates bias. Luckily, we had a chance to speak with Andre to better understand his perspective and intentions as well as relay our observations.

For the hardcore, we’ve gone through some of the market basics in prior blog posts; most notably Democratizing Capacity and Death of the Multipler Effect. Some of the absolute numbers in those analyses have changed; however, these hold true and directly relate to both the points that Andre was trying to make as well as the gaps in his analysis.

Bill of Materials Cost

The report makes two observations that we completely agree with. One is that, most of Continue reading

What’s the difference between MTP and MPO connectors for 100G?

Cabling up a 100G link for a customer test we discovered we needed to buy a couple of 100G cables. The interfaces involved were multimode, and use parallel optical paths – i.e. 10 parallel fibres each carrying 10Gbps within a single cable.

It turns out the world of such cables is a bit confusing in its terminology. Some people call these cables MTP, and others call them MPO. After a bit of digging, it turns out that they’re basically the same, but MTP is a brand name for a connector that complies with the MPO standard. The brand is owned by a company called USConec. Confusion over…

There’s quite a nice photo close-up of this connector type available on Completeconnect’s website – here. You can see the parallel fibres in the end of the interface. The cable has 24 fibres in, but only 20 are used – 10 in each direction giving full duplex connectivity at 100Gbps.

The male-ness and female-ness of these types of connector is quite difficult to determine. If you see a pair of pins protruding from the connector at either end of the two rows of fibres, Continue reading

Taking a moment to thank the Internet, Google and Howard Johnson’s

Oh, sure, we take this stuff for granted today (except for Howard Johnson’s). Yet every now and then I feel a need to thank the Internet and Google for doing what they do best: finding answers to questions that would otherwise nag me no end.This morning I read a story about the impending closure of the Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Lake Placid, N.Y. As the story noted, this iconic eatery, owned and operated by the same family for more than 50 years, is one of only three HoJo’s restaurants still in operation in the United States.Where are the other two?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Featured F5 Networks White Paper: NFV Implementation Tips to Take, Traps to Avoid

This white paper created for F5 Networks, will focus on useful tips and pitfalls to avoid during NFV implementation.

Facebook app leaks F8 news about Parse, Messenger, ‘teleportation station’

Facebook’s app for its F8 developer conference stole some of the show’s thunder by sending out, ahead of the event, a notification that revealed what products will most likely be discussed.“F8: Just revealed: Parse of IoT, Messenger as a Platform, and the Teleportation Station,” read the message, which several people posted to Twitter. The two-day conference starts Wednesday morning Pacific time.Parse is Facebook’s development platform for creating mobile apps. The message, if correct, implies that Facebook is entering the Internet of Things space, which aims to connect assorted devices to the Web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook app leaks F8 news about Parse, Messenger, ‘teleportation station’

How financial service firms use big data to meet business goals

Most financial service firms, which includes banking and insurance companies, are engaged in a big data project to increase the pace of innovation and uncover game-changing business outcomes. The pressing challenge now is how to drive more continuous value and unearth opportunities more rapidly.

No matter where you might be in your big data journey, the following three-step approach to integrating big data into an analytics strategy can lead to success:

Step One: Outline business objectives and outcomes

To drive continuous and transformational improvements through big data-driven analytics projects, business units – IT, marketing, risk, compliance or finance, for example – should agree on and outline a mutually beneficial business objective. For instance, driving a better customer experience or improving customer value management. While developing the common objective, financial services firms should also determine the aligned and desired outcomes, such as decreasing fraud and offering more personalized services to customers in real-time.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft blacklists latest rogue SSL certificates, Mozilla mulls sanctions for issuer

Microsoft has blacklisted a subordinate CA certificate that was wrongfully used to issue SSL certificates for several Google websites. The action will prevent those certificates from being used in Google website spoofing attacks against Internet Explorer users.Microsoft’s move, taken on Tuesday, came after Google reported that the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a certificate authority (CA) trusted by most browsers and operating systems, issued an intermediate certificate to an Egyptian company called MCS Holdings. The company then used it to generate SSL certificates for Google-owned websites without authorization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Tutorial 2 – Docker Run Command Basics

This is a casual Docker tutorial series. We will start out first with very simple sessions on how to install and use the docker run command. In future videos we will hit more advanced topics. In this second video we … Continued

Apple database acquisition could help improve performance of its services

Apple has reportedly acquired database company FoundationDB, a move that would allow the company to improve the underpinnings of its existing services and also lay the groundwork for an Internet of Things (IoT) expansion.Asked to confirm the deal, first reported by TechCrunch, Apple responded by saying that it from time to time buys smaller companies but doesn’t discuss its plans. On its part, FoundationDB said that it will no longer offer downloads of its database, and that “we have made the decision to evolve our company mission.”Apple could use FoundationDB’s technology to improve the performance of its own infrastructure. The reported acquisition comes just a couple of months after FoundationDB announced a major upgrade of its flagship NoSQL database. The database was redesigned to handle millions of random writes per second and make it a better fit for IoT systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bah’rain

MX with enhanced SCB2 – cards not coming online

We just installed an MX in the lab for a customer type-approval test (TAT) and none of the cards came online.

The output of “show chassis hardware” showed that there were FPCs installed, but not the MICs that were in them:

[email protected]> show chassis hardware
Hardware inventory:
Item             Version  Part number  Serial number     Description
Chassis                                JN1249BDBAFA      MX960
Midplane         REV 04   750-047849   ACRD2400          Enhanced MX960 Backplane
FPM Board        REV 03   710-014974   CADE9287          Front Panel Display
PDM              Rev 03   740-013110   QCS181650BM       Power Distribution Module
PEM 0            Rev 11   740-027760   QCS1806N0MP       PS 4.1kW; 200-240V AC in
PEM 1            Rev 11   740-027760   QCS1806N0SK       PS 4.1kW; 200-240V AC in
PEM 2            Rev 11   740-027760   QCS1806N07S       PS 4.1kW; 200-240V AC in
PEM 3            Rev 11   740-027760   QCS1812N02D       PS 4.1kW; 200-240V AC in
Routing Engine 0 REV 01   740-051822   9013061577        RE-S-1800x4
Routing Engine 1 REV 01   740-051822   9013056762        RE-S-1800x4
CB 0             REV 01   750-055976   CACX9090          Enhanced MX SCB 2
CB 1             REV 01   750-055976   CACZ4497          Enhanced MX SCB 2
CB 2             REV 01   750-055976   CADA1721          Enhanced MX SCB 2
FPC 0            REV 05   750-044444   CAAM5562          MPCE Type 2 3D P
  CPU
FPC 1            REV 35   750-028467   CAAP9738          MPC 3D 16x  Continue reading

Zero day, Web browser vulnerabilities spike in 2014

The number of zero-day and Web browser vulnerabilities shot up in 2014, but overall software vendors are patching faster.The data comes from Secunia, a Danish security vendor that releases an annual study of trends in software vulnerabilities, which are used by hackers to compromise computers.Zero-day vulnerabilities—which are software flaws actively being used by attackers when publicly disclosed—rose from 14 in 2013 to 25 last year. Those type of flaws are among the most dangerous and prized by attackers since patches aren’t available from vendors.Flaws in Web browser software increased to 1,035 in 2014, up from 728 the prior year, according to Secunia’s report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Availability Zones in Overlay Virtual Networks

Amazon Web Services was (AFAIK) one of the first products that introduced availability zones – islands of infrastructure that are isolated enough from each other to stop the propagation of failure or outage across their boundaries.

Not surprisingly, multiple availability zones shouldn’t rely on a central controller (as Amazon found out a few years back), and there are only few SDN controller vendors that are flexible enough to meet this requirement. For more details, watch the free Availability Zones video on my web site (part of Scaling Overlay Virtual Networking webinar).

Watch the video

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