Reaction: Testing to the Cut Score (Certifications)

Tom has an interesting post over at The Networking Nerd on one of my favorite areas of discussion — certifications. To give you a sense —

Perhaps raising the cut scores to more than 900 points isn’t the answer. Maybe instead more complex questions or more hands-on simulations are required to better test the knowledge of the candidates. These are better solutions that take time and research. They aren’t the false panacea of raising the passing score. The rising tide can’t be fixed by making the buoys float just a little higher.

I think the problem exam writers face is the defensibility problem. The problem of defensibility has been so strongly pushed into my head, from my years working on the CCDE and CCAr, that I tend to apply the problem to just about everything I do any longer. To state the problem, within the certification space, as succinctly as possible —

If someone sues me because they failed this exam, what evidence can I bring forward to prove this specific person should not have passed the exam.

It’s actually not as easy of a question to answer as it might appear. Why is your cut score set to x? Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Uber Imperative

Silicon Valley likes nothing better than to “disrupt” existing systems. But they think they’re disrupting economic system. What they don’t realize is what they’re disrupting is a political system, and not just one part of it, but the core of it. And it’s a political system they’re not really ideologically prepared to take on. -via the Federalist

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The post Worth Reading: The Uber Imperative appeared first on 'net work.

Alibaba eyes cloud computing expansion with $1 billion investment

Enterprise customers can expect to hear more from e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. The Chinese company is accelerating the global expansion of its cloud computing business, with a US$1 billion investment.Alibaba announced the move on Wednesday, months after it opened its first data center in the U.S., in an effort to target customers there.The Chinese company clearly has more in store. Part of the $1 billion investment will go toward the international expansion. The rest will go to developing new products, and building up partnerships with other companies in the industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plexxi and Arrow Electronics Announce Distribution Agreement

To read the CRN Exclusive article on this announcement, please go here.

At Plexxi, we believe every network will be re-architected, not just upgraded to meet the needs of the changing IT application landscape. Seizing this opportunity requires more than great technology, you need strategic partners aligned and committed to this vision. Our partnership with Arrow Electronics

provides a game changing opportunity for Plexxi to deliver value to our partners and customers as we scale our business.

We’re pleased to announce today an exclusive distribution agreement with Arrow Electronics. Under this agreement, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Business will become the sole distributor of our next-generation networking products and solutions for scale-out applications, agile datacenters and distributed cloud environments.

We are excited to have Arrow distribute Plexxi products and services to help accelerate the growth of our channel in the United States and Canada. This agreement opens the door to the next great era of IT for businesses to leverage and gain significant efficiencies and market growth.

Arrow is the perfect partner for this agreement. Aside from being one of the largest and most efficient distributors in the industry, the company prides itself on being forward thinking and innovative.

In their own Continue reading

3 Months on the Road: What I heard from VMware NSX Customers

After three consecutive months attending 75 customer meetings throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia, I came away Around-The-Worldwith plenty of frequent flyer miles and, more importantly, tons of insight to share with you.

What I learned from customers is that VMware NSX is truly a game-changer. And as we exit the second quarter, the list of customers excited about NSX is only getting bigger. We recently announced that we have grown from more than 150 VMware NSX customers a year ago, to more than 700 customers today. These customers are setting the stage for others to follow. They are providing best practices that we are feeding back to others, and giving us valuable insight into challenges they encounter along the way.

So as I promised, I’ve pulled together highlights from these meetings and condensed them into three key themes that emerged.  For you IT pros out there reading this, let me know if any of this sounds familiar.

1. The story remains the same

For years, IT has been complaining that it takes minutes to spin up applications, and weeks or months to provision the network and its associated services to support the application.  As one Continue reading

How should the U.S. respond to state-sponsored cyberattacks?

It's no secret that U.S. government agencies and businesses are the target of around-the-clock cyber intrusions, many carried out by or at the behest of foreign nation-states.But how exactly should the feds respond to those incursions?Ask a random sample of Americans and you'll likely get a very different answer than if you polled the State Department.In a recent flash survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults commissioned by the security vendor Vormetric, a quarter of the respondents said that the United States should cut off all ties to any nation responsible for compromising U.S. government data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, July 29

Intel and Micron unveil a new class of memory with 3D XPointIntel and Micron say they’ve developed the first new kind of memory since NAND flash was introduced in 1989. The new technology, 3D XPoint, is a form of non-volatile memory that’s as much as 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, the companies say. 3D XPoint should arrive in products next year, and it could change computing as much as SSDs have by powering better speech recognition, biometrics, and gesture-based interfaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mitigate DoS Attack using TCP Intercept on Cisco Router

How does Internet work - We know what is networking

This is really cool feature on Cisco router not usually mentioned until you dig a little deeper inside Cisco IOS. But first a bit of theory… What is TCP SYN flood attack TCP 3-way handshake SYN flood DoS attack happens when many sources start to send a flood of TCP SYN packets usually with fake source IP. This attack uses TCP 3-way handshake to reserve all server available resources with fake SYN requests thus not allowing legitimate users to establish connection to the server. SYN packet is the first step in TCP 3-way handshake where client sends connection synchronization request

Mitigate DoS Attack using TCP Intercept on Cisco Router

Ink-shooting game ‘Splatoon’ helps power Nintendo to profit

Japanese gaming icon Nintendo posted a profit for the April-June quarter on Wednesday thanks in part to surging sales of a game in which players can squirt ink all over the place and transform into squids.“Splatoon” for the Wii U console launched globally in May and has since sold over 1.62 million units, Nintendo said as it notched a profit of ¥8.3 billion (US$67 million) for the three months to June 30, a reversal of a ¥9.9 billion loss a year earlier.Hardware in the Nintendo 3DS lineup saw global sales reach 1.01 million units in the quarter and associated software reached 7.92 million units. Other factors that buoyed the company’s business were the weakness of the yen and strong sales of Amiibo, which are figurines that are designed to wirelessly communicate with the Wii U and 3DS, triggering in-game benefits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Flowering Things and Lego Bricks

Matt Oswalt wrote a great blog post complaining about vendors launching ocean-boiling solutions instead of focused reusable components, and one of the comments his opinion generated was along the lines of “I thought one of the reasons people wanted SDN, is because they wanted to deal with The Network – think about The Network's Performance, Robustness and Services instead of dealing with 100s or 1000s of individual boxes.”

The comment is obviously totally valid, so let me try to reiterate what Matt wrote using Lego bricks ;)

Read more ...

No building access card? No problem if you have new Def Con tools

RFID card access systems are used by most companies to let people into their buildings. But over the last few years, researchers have shown how these systems can be easily bypassed.Francis Brown, a partner at the computer security firm Bishop Fox, has been on the forefront of much of the research. In fact, he recognized some of his tools and methods being used in the TV program Mr. Robot, which has been noted for highly accurate technical detail.Lately, he’s been looking closely at breaching high- and ultra-high frequency RFID (radio-frequency identification) systems, which are increasingly being used for physical security systems.He’s due to give a presentation at this year’s Def Con Hacking Conference in Las Vegas early next month with a bevy of new and improved software and hardware goodies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

golang up and running on CentOS7 – take two

After some great feedback and some additional learning/fixes on my end, I wanted to make an updated version of this post. 

This go around, I’ve added some plugins I found helpful as well as made a couple of tweaks that I think (not sure yet) will be helpful to me going forward.  So here is the brand new build script I came up with…

#Install dependancies and neccessary packages
yum -y install golang git vim wget python-devel cmake
yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"

#Modify your bash_profile...
vim ~/.bash_profile
#Add this config...
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
#Source the file
source .bash_profile

#Make the golang workspace
mkdir ~/go
mkdir ~/go/bin
mkdir ~/go/pkg
mkdir ~/go/src

#Install and configure Vundle...
#Pull down Vundle
git clone https://github.com/gmarik/Vundle.vim.git ~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
#Edit your .vimrc file...
vim ~/.vimrc
#Add this config...
set nocompatible
filetype off
colorscheme molokai
set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#rc()
Plugin 'gmarik/Vundle.vim'
Plugin 'nsf/gocode', {'rtp': 'vim/'}
Plugin 'fatih/vim-go'
Plugin 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe'
Plugin 'scrooloose/nerdtree.git'
filetype plugin indent on
"Prevent autocomplete help from staying visisble
autocmd CursorMovedI * if pumvisible() == 0|pclose|endif
autocmd InsertLeave * if pumvisible() == 0|pclose|endif
"Quit VIM if NERDTree is last open Window
autocmd bufenter *  Continue reading

The Correct Mask for a PE’s Loopback0

As I've written about previously (The Importance of BGP NEXT_HOP in L3VPNs), the BGP NEXT_HOP attribute is key to ensuring end to end connectivity in an MPLS L3VPN. In the other article, I examine the different forwarding behavior of the network based on which of the egress PE's IP addresses is used as the NEXT_HOP. In this article I'll look at the subnet mask that's associated with the NEXT_HOP and the differences in forwarding behavior when the mask is configured to different values.

There is a lot of (mis-)information on the web stating that the PE's loopback address — which, as I explain in the previous article, should always be used as the NEXT_HOP — must have a /32 mask. This is not exactly true. I think this is an example of some information that has been passed around incorrectly, and without proper context, and is now taken as a rule. I'll explain more about this further on in the article.

Twitter surprises with a sales gain, but user growth lags

Twitter reported a higher than expected increase in revenue on Tuesday, suggesting progress in the company’s efforts to grow its ad sales.Total revenue for the second quarter ending June 30 was US$502 million, Twitter reported, up 61 percent from the same period last year, and beating estimates of $481 million from analysts polled by the Thomson Financial Network.Twitter also reported decent growth in its users, although with a caveat. For the quarter, the total number of users logging in monthly was 316 million, up 15 percent. But compared to the first quarter, the vast majority of the increase was derived from SMS Fast Followers, people who access Twitter content on mobile devices but do not have accounts on the service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Italian parliament drafts a declaration of Internet rights

The Italian parliament wants to have its say in the creation of an international legal framework promoting freedom, equality and access to cyberspace for all, and on Tuesday it presented a Declaration of Internet Rights that it will bring to the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil in November.“This is the first time that a parliament produces a declaration on Internet rights of constitutional inspiration and international scope,” Laura Boldrini, the speaker of the lower house of parliament and a major backer of the project, told a press conference in Rome. Boldrini said she hoped parliament would pass a motion calling on the Italian government to promote the document in national and international forums. The document was drawn up by a commission headed by Stefano Rodotà, a former politician and jurist.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

With ‘recall,’ Fiat Chrysler makes its car hack worse

After Wired showed two hackers remotely gain access and immobilize a moving Jeep by exploiting software vulnerabilities last week, Fiat Chrysler responded by patching the vulnerability in several Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler models that were equipped with the Uconnect software that was hacked. How they went about issuing the patch, however, may just put the company's customers further at risk.Rather than simply treating the software patch as a traditional recall (i.e. requiring them to visit a service center and have an expert make the fix), Fiat Chrysler is mailing a USB thumb drive to owners of the affected cars. From there, the cars' owners can plug the USB drive into the cars' USB port to patch the software vulnerability. This seems like a convenient way to issue a recall for something that car owners can fix themselves. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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