Google & Rackspace Back CrowdStrike in $100M Round
Cloud providers make it rain on CrowdStrike.
Célébrer le 14 Juillet avec Marseille, le 36ème point de présence de CloudFlare
What better day than the 14th of July (Bastille Day) to announce the latest addition to our network in Marseille, France? Our data center in the southern city of Marseille is our 2nd in France, 12th in Europe and 36th globally.
Pourquoi Marseille?
Marseille, France’s second largest city following Paris, is home to 2 million Internet users across the surrounding metropolitan area. It also serves as another point of redundancy to our Paris data center, one of our most trafficked facilities in the whole of Europe.
However, the true importance of Marseille is not just redundancy or its size. Marseille’s southern location makes it a major Internet gateway for networks throughout the Mediterranean, including many African and Middle Eastern countries. This is reflected by the fact that a substantial number of undersea submarine cables carrying Internet traffic are routed through Marseille (7 to be exact, and for those fastidious followers of our blog).
Marseille: a key interconnection point for traffic throughout the Mediterranean
These undersea cables are the principal means by which many countries are able to access the rest of the Internet—that is to say, access all of the other global networks that make up this big Continue reading
How to build your own ProxyHam
"ProxyHam" created controversy because the talk was supposedly suppressed by the US government. In this post, I'll describe how you can build your own, with off-the-shelf devices, without any code.First, head on over to NewEgg. For a total of $290.96, buy two locoM9 repeaters (for $125.49 each), and two WiFi routers, like the TL-WR700N for $19.99 each.
Grab your first WiFi device. Configure it in "client" mode, connecting it to the "Starbucks" SSID. In this mode, you can then connect your laptop via Ethernet to this device, and you'll have access to the Internet via your WiFi device to Starbucks. In other words, it acts as a WiFi dongle, but one that you attach via Ethernet instead of USB.
Now grab your two locoM9 devices and configure them for "transparent bridging". In this mode, whatever Ethernet packets that are received on one end get sent over the air to the other end. Connect each localM9 via the TL-WR700N via the supplied Ethernet cable.
Now grab the second WiFi device and configure it as a normal WiFi router.
Now, assuming you aim the localM9's correct toward each other with reasonable line-of-sight, you've got a "ProxyHam".
The reason Continue reading
Technology Short Take #52
Welcome to Technology Short Take #52, the latest collection of news, links, and articles from around the web on data center technologies.
Networking
- Want to know a bit more about how OVN (Open Virtual Network) plans to integrate support for containers? See this. You might also find it useful to review this OVN presentation from the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. A video recording of the presentation is also available on YouTube.
- QualiSystems has a series of articles on open networking standards. A couple of the articles really jumped out at me—part 2 covers Open vSwitch, part 3 discusses OpenStack, part 4 discusses OpenFlow, and part 6 talks about OVSDB. There are also posts on OpenDaylight and OpFlex as well.
- P4 is getting all the attention in the SDN world these days. What is P4? Craig Matsumoto has an overview at SDx Central; the “TL;DR” is that P4 is a high-level language aimed at describing how data plane devices process packets. If you want even more detail, then head over to the P4.org site for more information.
- Jason Edelman, whose focus has been on network automation, recently posted an article on programming an ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) Continue reading
CloudFlare Lands a New Office in Singapore
After months of preparation, my teammates Algin, Marty, Adam, Jono and I touched down in Singapore and were greeted by skyscrapers, malls, Singlish, chili crab, and Marty’s special sweet and sour chicken. It immediately hit us that we were no longer in San Francisco.
The Internet never sleeps, which means it is crucial for us to have a presence in Asia to operate our globally distributed network. Singapore was a natural choice for us given the thriving tech community, the business friendliness of the country, the delicious hawker stalls, and our harbor view rooftop hangout:
Since we are new in town, if there are meetups or groups in Singapore that you think we should be part of (or any good restaurants we should try) – let us know. We will be at RSA Asia Pacific & Japan on Friday July 24 here in Singapore. Come meet us in person and learn more about CloudFlare during Nick Sullivan’s session on The New Key Management - Unlocking the Safeguards of Keeping Keys Private.
As one global company, we took team members from both our San Francisco and London offices to be the foundation for the local team. We are actively looking to Continue reading
Extracting Traffic from Rolling Capture Files
Every so often I need to extract a subset of traffic from a set of rolling timestamped pcap files. One common place I do this is with Security Onion; one of the great features of SO is its full-packet-capture feature: you can easily pivot from Snort, Suricata, or Bro logs to a full packet capture view, or download the associated pcap file.But what if you don't have an associated alert or Bro log entry? Or if you're doing pcap on some system that's not as user-friendly as Security Onion, but nonetheless supports rolling captures?
The way I usually do this is with find and xargs. Here's an example of my most common workflow, using timestamps as the filtering criteria for find:
> find . -newerct "16:07" ! -newerct "16:10" | xargs -I {} tcpdump -r {} -w /tmp/{} host 8.8.8.8
> cd /tmp
> mergecap -w merged.pcap *.pcap
Translated:
- Find all files in the current directory created after 16:07 but not created after 16:10. This requires GNU find 4.3.3 or later. It supports many different time and date formats.
- Using xargs, filter each file with the "host 8.8.8. Continue reading
Extracting Traffic from Rolling Capture Files
Every so often I need to extract a subset of traffic from a set of rolling timestamped pcap files. One common place I do this is with Security Onion; one of the great features of SO is its full-packet-capture feature: you can easily pivot from Snort, Suricata, or Bro logs to a full packet capture view, or download the associated pcap file.But what if you don't have an associated alert or Bro log entry? Or if you're doing pcap on some system that's not as user-friendly as Security Onion, but nonetheless supports rolling captures?
The way I usually do this is with find and xargs. Here's an example of my most common workflow, using timestamps as the filtering criteria for find:
> find . -newerct "16:07" ! -newerct "16:10" | xargs -I {} tcpdump -r {} -w /tmp/{} host 8.8.8.8
> cd /tmp
> mergecap -w merged.pcap *.pcap
Translated:
- Find all files in the current directory created after 16:07 but not created after 16:10. This requires GNU find 4.3.3 or later. It supports many different time and date formats.
- Using xargs, filter each file with the "host 8.8.8. Continue reading
LTE’s Move into the Unlicensed Spectrum Continues
A lot has been going on with the proposals for LTE Operation in Unlicensed Spectrum . The FCC recently requested industry input on LTE-U (LTE Unlicensed) and LAA (LTE Licensed-Assisted Access), 3GPP’s formal action to move both the LAA and...SK Telecom Chooses Accedian for Performance Monitoring
SK Telecom looks to Accedian Networks for help with its mobile network.
Revisiting Apple and IPv6
A few weeks ago I wrote about Apple's IPv6 announcements at the Apple Developers Conference. While I thought that in IPv6 terms Apple gets it, the story was not complete and there were a number of aspects of Apple's systems that were not quite there with IPv6. So I gave them a 7/10 for their IPv6 efforts. Time to reassess that score in the light of a few recent posts from Apple.SDN router using merchant silicon top of rack switch
The talk from David Barroso describes how Spotify optimizes hardware routing on a commodity switch by using sFlow analytics to identify the routes carrying the most traffic. The full Internet routing table contains nearly 600,000 entries, too many for commodity switch hardware to handle. However, not all entries are active all the time. The Spotify solution uses traffic analytics to track the 30,000 most active routes (representing 6% of the full routing table) and push them into hardware. Based on Spotify's experience, offloading the active 30,000 routes to the switch provides hardware routing for 99% of their traffic.David is interviewed by Ivan Pepelnjak, SDN ROUTER @ SPOTIFY ON SOFTWARE GONE WILD. The SDN Internet Router (SIR) source code and documentation is available on GitHub.
