VIRL versus Junosphere

I’ve been using Junosphere a lot recently, and it’s a great tool – quick and easy creation of topologies without the need to go to a physical lab to try things out. Takes the guesswork out of a lot of things, which is a real bonus. There are obviously a few things you can’t do in a virtual environment that would be possible in a real one (e.g. QoS, MTU greater than 2000 bytes, MS-MIC in an MX), but it caters for 80% of what you need.

I always thought that it put Juniper leagues ahead of Cisco because you can buy credits to use the system right on the front page. Cisco were late to the party with something called VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab.  They were late, but rumour had it that a lot of developers moved from Juniper to Cisco to bring VIRL about.  However Junosphere always had the edge for the networking student (as we all remain, whether we are JNCIE or not) because of its accessibility – with VIRL you had to be a Cisco customer and gain access through your account manager.  I’ll stick with GNS3 thanks!

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VIRL versus Junosphere

I’ve been using Junosphere a lot recently, and it’s a great tool – quick and easy creation of topologies without the need to go to a physical lab to try things out. Takes the guesswork out of a lot of things, which is a real bonus. There are obviously a few things you can’t do in a virtual environment that would be possible in a real one (e.g. QoS, MTU greater than 2000 bytes, MS-MIC in an MX), but it caters for 80% of what you need.

I always thought that it put Juniper leagues ahead of Cisco because you can buy credits to use the system right on the front page. Cisco were late to the party with something called VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab.  They were late, but rumour had it that a lot of developers moved from Juniper to Cisco to bring VIRL about.  However Junosphere always had the edge for the networking student (as we all remain, whether we are JNCIE or not) because of its accessibility – with VIRL you had to be a Cisco customer and gain access through your account manager.  I’ll stick with GNS3 thanks!

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Aruba and HP – The Ecosystem Is King

Aruba-HP-LogoNote: This is part of a multi-post series I am writing that compares Aruba to HP and how the integration of Aruba Networks into HP might play out. You can read my intro post here.

I am a HUGE fan of vendor ecosystems. A HUGE fan. I have written about them before. The last post I wrote on them can be found here. I really do think they are the key to driving a vendor’s success. One could argue that the large vendors have it easy. They have the resources to build those ecosystems. They can spend money that the smaller vendors cannot and can essentially buy loyalty from customers and partners. Of course, at some point, those large vendors were small ones. They did something different to propel them to the large vendor status. Their competition fell by the wayside and either drifted off into obsolescence, or just outright died.

Sorry. There is no TL/DR for this post. Buckle up. It’s a long one.

So let’s get a lay of the land when it comes to ecosystems between HP and Aruba. Let me clear about one thing. This is specific to wireless. This has nothing to do with the Continue reading

US wants to collect bulk call records for six more months

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to continue the bulk collection of call records for another six months, as the new USA Freedom Act allows for this transition period.The filing, made public Monday, was submitted to the court last Tuesday, the same day President Barack Obama approved as law the USA Freedom Act, which puts curbs on the bulk collection of domestic telephone records by the National Security Agency.The new legislation was passed by the Senate following the expiry at midnight of May 31 of the authorization of the bulk collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act. It leaves the phone records database in the hands of the telecommunications operators, while allowing a targeted search of the data by the National Security Agency for investigations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The basics – MTU, MSS, GRE, and PMTU

One of the truly fascinating things about networking is how much of it ‘just works’.  There are so many low level pieces of a network stack that you don’t really have to know (although you should) to be an expert at something like OSPF, BGP, or any other higher level networking protocol.  One of the ones that often gets overlooked is MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit), MSS (Maximum Segment Size) and all of the funs tuff that comes along with it.  So let’s start with the basics…

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Here’s your average looking IP packet encapsulated in an Ethernet Header.  For the sake of conversation, I’ll assume going forward that we are referring to TCP only but I did put the UDP header length in there just for reference.  So a standard IP packet is 1500 bytes long.  There’s 20 bytes for the IP header, 20 bytes for the TCP header, leaving 1460 bytes for the data payload.  This does not include the 18 bytes of Ethernet headersFCS that surround the IP packet.

When we look at this frame layout, we can further categorize components of the frame by MTU and MSS…

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The MTU is defined Continue reading

Apple moves to six-digit passcode in iOS 9

Apple plans to require six-digit passcodes to unlock its latest mobile devices that use iOS 9, its forthcoming mobile operating system. Users already have the option in iOS 8 of setting a much longer passcode than four digits, which is the current minimum requirement. Symbols and letters can also be used. Increasing the minimum number of digits to six means that there will be 1 million possible combinations rather than 10,000, which “will be a lot tougher to crack,” Apple wrote on its website. The move to longer passcodes is not likely to please U.S. authorities, who have expressed fears that stronger security measures, including encryption, may make it more difficult to obtain information for time-sensitive investigations, such as terrorism.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brace yourself for videos on Apple Watch

No screen, apparently, is too small for video, even the one on Apple’s Watch.Twitter’s popular Vine mobile video app will come to Apple’s Internet-connected wrist gizmo later this year. During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, demoed some new functions, including video, that will be possible on the second version of the Watch’s operating system, which arrives in the fall.During the demo, he showed a video of someone clinking drinking glasses on the Vine app. Vine later posted on its Twitter feed that its app would arrive on the Apple Watch later this year. Vine’s app lets people record and share looped videos up to six seconds in length.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brace yourself for videos on Apple Watch

No screen, apparently, is too small for video, even the one on Apple’s Watch.Twitter’s popular Vine mobile video app will come to Apple’s Internet-connected wrist gizmo later this year. During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, demoed some new functions, including video, that will be possible on the second version of the Watch’s operating system, which arrives in the fall.During the demo, he showed a video of someone clinking drinking glasses on the Vine app. Vine later posted on its Twitter feed that its app would arrive on the Apple Watch later this year. Vine’s app lets people record and share looped videos up to six seconds in length.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

With Apple Watch OS update, apps are about to get a whole lot more capable

Expect Apple Watch apps to gain a lot more functionality now that Apple is opening its hardware sensors to third party developers and allowing apps to run natively on the device.The changes come with watchOS 2, an update that’s due in the Fall and will also bring new watch faces and other advances to end users. For developers, the highlight is that their apps will be able to make use of Apple Watch hardware features like the digital crown, accelerometer and heart rate sensor.People who use the personal training app BodBot, for example, won’t have to enter as much workout information manually now that the app can gather data from the watch’s sensors, said Sergio Prado, who co-developed the program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

With Apple Watch OS update, apps are about to get a whole lot more capable

Expect Apple Watch apps to gain a lot more functionality now that Apple is opening its hardware sensors to third party developers and allowing apps to run natively on the device. The changes come with watchOS 2, an update that’s due in the Fall and will also bring new watch faces and other advances to end users. For developers, the highlight is that their apps will be able to make use of Apple Watch hardware features like the digital crown, accelerometer and heart rate sensor. People who use the personal training app BodBot, for example, won’t have to enter as much workout information manually now that the app can gather data from the watch’s sensors, said Sergio Prado, who co-developed the program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CTIA sues over another cellphone radiation law

The mobile industry is trying to shoot down another law requiring cellphone radiation warnings.CTIA sued the city of Berkeley, California, on Monday, taking aim at a law passed in May that would force cellphone retailers to post a notice about safety from radiofrequency radiation emitted by handsets. CTIA, the main trade group for U.S. mobile operators, says the law will force its members to pass on an inaccurate message that they don’t agree with.Just a few years ago, CTIA successfully fought a similar law in nearby San Francisco. That law required phone sellers to disclose the emissions produced by each model. The disputes are part of a smoldering debate over whether phones and other wireless devices give off radiation that may be harmful to humans. CTIA, and the Federal Communications Commission, say there is no evidence of a health risk from approved devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CTIA sues over another cellphone radiation law

The mobile industry is trying to shoot down another law requiring cellphone radiation warnings.CTIA sued the city of Berkeley, California, on Monday, taking aim at a law passed in May that would force cellphone retailers to post a notice about safety from radiofrequency radiation emitted by handsets. CTIA, the main trade group for U.S. mobile operators, says the law will force its members to pass on an inaccurate message that they don’t agree with.Just a few years ago, CTIA successfully fought a similar law in nearby San Francisco. That law required phone sellers to disclose the emissions produced by each model. The disputes are part of a smoldering debate over whether phones and other wireless devices give off radiation that may be harmful to humans. CTIA, and the Federal Communications Commission, say there is no evidence of a health risk from approved devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Vagrant to Help Learn Ansible

I’ve been spending some time with Ansible recently, and I have to say that it’s really growing on me. While Ansible doesn’t have a steep learning curve, there is still a learning curve—albeit a smaller/less steep curve—so I wanted to share here a “trick” that I found for using Vagrant to help with learning Ansible. (I say “trick” here because it isn’t that this is complicated or undocumented, but rather that it may not be immediately obvious how to combine these two.)

Note that this is not to be confused with using Ansible from within Vagrant as a provisioner; that’s something different (see the Vagrant docs for more information on that use case). What I’m talking about is having a setup where you can easily explore how Ansible works and iterate through your playbooks using a Vagrant-managed VM.

Here are the key components:

  1. You’ll need a Vagrant environment (you know, a working Vagrantfile and any associated support files).
  2. You’ll need Ansible installed on the system where you’ll be running Vagrant and the appropriate back-end virtualization platform (I tested this with VMware Fusion, but there’s nothing VMware-specific here).
  3. In the same directory as the Vagrantfile, you’ll need an Continue reading

What’s the state of iPhone PIN guessing

I think even some experts have gotten this wrong, so I want to ask everyone: what's the current state-of-the-art for trying to crack Apple PIN codes?

This is how I think it works currently (in iOS 8).

To start with, there is a special "crypto-chip" inside the iPhone that holds your secrets (like a TPM or ARM TrustZone). I think originally it was ARM's TrustZone, but now that Apple designs its own chips, that they've customized it. I think they needed to add stuff to make Touch ID work.

All the data (on the internal flash drive) is encrypted with a random AES key that nobody, not even the NSA, can crack. This random AES key is stored on the crypto-chip. Thus, if your phone is stolen, the robbers cannot steal the data from it -- as long as your phone is locked properly.

To unlock your phone, you type in a 4 digit passcode. This passcode gets sent to the crypto-chip, which verifies the code, then gives you the AES key needed to decrypt the flash drive. This is all invisible, of course, but that's what's going on underneath the scenes. Since the NSA can't crack the AES key Continue reading
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