PlexxiPulse—Happy 4th of July!

Wishing you a safe and happy Fourth of July from the entire team here at Plexxi. Enjoy the celebrations this weekend!

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Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

Network Computing: Why Hardware Still Counts In Networking
By Ethan Banks
As a host of the networking podcast Packet Pushers, I receive lots of interesting e-mail. Listeners tell us how we’re doing, share their knowledge, and voice opinions. One opinion that’s come up lately I will describe as an aversion to hardware. In the minds of some, software is king; code is a networking cure-all that will take us into the future. Chris Wahl, a fellow writer and engineer, told me he’s also heard this anti-hardware sentiment. “Did the bad ASIC hurt you?” he joked, as we tried to understand the software bias.

Network World: Can Converged Infrastructure Help IT Get Its Mojo Back?
By Colm Keegan
In “Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back,” Yoda implores an impetuous Luke Skywalker to “unlearn what you have learned.” IT administrators who wish to stay relevant in a shadow IT universe, may want to heed the words of the legendary Jedi Continue reading

Sprint drops 600 Kbps video-streaming limit after outcry

Sprint this week quickly reversed plans to impose a 600 Kbps limit on streaming video as part of a promotion called "All-In" that charges $80 a month for unlimited talk, text and high-speed data.The All-In plan, announced Tuesday, ironically was intended to "end consumer confusion & frustration," according to a press release.But the 600 Kbps video stream cap, originally contained in a footnote about the plan, incited widespread frustration and anger on social media sites and elsewhere.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch The 600 Kbps limitation was interpreted by Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics, as a violation of Title II net neutrality rules, which Sprint had supported before the Federal Communications Commission. "To throttle video is such a clearcut violation of Title II," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sprint drops 600 Kbps video-streaming limit after outcry

Sprint this week quickly reversed plans to impose a 600 Kbps limit on streaming video as part of a promotion called "All-In" that charges $80 a month for unlimited talk, text and high-speed data.The All-In plan, announced Tuesday, ironically was intended to "end consumer confusion & frustration," according to a press release.But the 600 Kbps video stream cap, originally contained in a footnote about the plan, incited widespread frustration and anger on social media sites and elsewhere.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch The 600 Kbps limitation was interpreted by Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics, as a violation of Title II net neutrality rules, which Sprint had supported before the Federal Communications Commission. "To throttle video is such a clearcut violation of Title II," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some notes when ordering Google’s Project Fi

I just ordered my "Project Fi" phone. You probably should, too. Here are some notes (especially near the bottom on getting a new phone number).

Project Fi is Google's MVNO. An "MVNO" is a virtual mobile phone company -- they don't have any of their own network backbone or cell towers, but just rent them from the real mobile phone companies (like AT&T or T-Mobile). Most mobile phone companies are actually MVNOs, because building a physical network is expensive.

What makes Google's MVNO interesting:
  • Straightforward pricing. It's $20 a month for unlimited calling/texting, plus $10 per gigabyte of data used during the month. It includes tethering.
  • No roaming charges, in 120 countries. I can fly to Japan, Australia, and France, and still use email, Google maps, texting -- for no extra charge.
The pricing is similar to other phone companies, a little less or a little more depending on exactly what you want. For around 3 gigs a month, Project Fi is cheaper than AT&T, but for 30 gigs, it's more expensive.

There are more and more MVNOs providing easy international roaming (like Ultra.me), and your own phone company is increasingly solving the problem. T-Mobile, for example, Continue reading

VLAN Trunking with Mikrotik RouterOS

In this post, I’m going to show you how to configure VLAN trunking with Mikrotik RouterOS, and along the way provide a brief introduction to this software and some of the functionality it offers. While it is Linux-based, RouterOS operates quite a bit differently than a lot of the other network operating systems with which I’ve worked, and so I hope that this post will help ease the learning curve a bit for others who decide to take the same path.

Background

First, let me provide a quick bit of background. I found myself in need of a switch that was both Layer 2/3 capable with both 10/100/1000Mbps ports as well as 10Gbps SFP+ ports. Of course, this was for my home lab, so budget is a concern. I cast out a quick call on Twitter, asking for some recommendations, and a few folks recommended I have a look at RouterBoard/Mikrotik; specifically, the CRS-24G-2S+IN (see here for more details). The specs looked good, the price was reasonable, and several folks expressed their satisfaction with the product, so I bought one.

Upon receiving it, I found myself trying to unravel RouterOS (their Linux-based operating system). Their wiki is fairly helpful, but Continue reading

Intel shuffles ranks, President Renée James to exit

Intel president Renée James will step down in order to pursue a CEO role at another company, the chip giant announced on Thursday.No successor has been named, but James will remain at Intel through the end of the year to help ease the transition to another executive leader.In the wake of her departure, two groups that were under her purview—Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group and HR—will report to CEO Brian Krzanich instead. The remainder of her direct reports will transition to other internal organizations.James and Krzanich assumed their respective roles in 2013 following the retirement of former CEO Paul Otellini.“When Brian and I were appointed to our current roles, I knew then that being the leader of a company was something that I desired as part of my own leadership journey,” James wrote in a letter to Intel employees. “Now is the right time for me to take that next step.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IP Address Information Collection With Custom Ansible Modules

Ansible has a very neat feature called “fact gathering”, which collects useful information from hosts prior to executing any of the tasks and makes this information available for use within those tasks. Unfortunately, this also relies on Python being available on the remote machine which doesn’t work for Cisco IOS. In this post I’ll show how to write a simple module which will collect IP address information from remote devices and store it in global variable for future use. I’ll also show how to write a module which will convert our human-readable TDD scenarios into YAML structures. As always, full code repository is available on Github

Continue reading

Attackers abuse legacy routing protocol to amplify distributed denial-of-service attacks

Servers could be haunted by a ghost from the 1980s, as hackers have started abusing an obsolete routing protocol to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.DDoS attacks observed in May by the research team at Akamai abused home and small business (SOHO) routers that still support Routing Information Protocol version 1 (RIPv1). This protocol is designed to allow routers on small networks to exchange information about routes.RIPv1 was first introduced in 1988 and was retired as an Internet standard in 1996 due to multiple deficiencies, including lack of authentication. These were addressed in RIP version 2, which is still in use today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silver Peak’s SD WAN solution boosts application performance

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  In recent weeks I've written about several vendors in the software defined wide area networking (SD WAN) space. There's one thing I've learned as I've talked with these companies: each one takes an approach to wide area networking that plays to the company's strengths. Silver Peak just had a major announcement pertaining to SD WAN, and not surprisingly, this company is building on its deep expertise in WAN acceleration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silver Peak’s SD WAN solution boosts application performance

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  In recent weeks I've written about several vendors in the software defined wide area networking (SD WAN) space. There's one thing I've learned as I've talked with these companies: each one takes an approach to wide area networking that plays to the company's strengths. Silver Peak just had a major announcement pertaining to SD WAN, and not surprisingly, this company is building on its deep expertise in WAN acceleration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A mobile toolkit for the road

The road warrior's essential mobile toolkit: Summer editionImage by ThinkstockSummer is full swing, which means millions of Americans will be cashing in their vacation days and enjoying time away from the office. But for those road warriors who can't disconnect entirely, we've augmented our road warrior's essential mobile toolkit with some of this summer’s best options to stay connected, protected, and productive no matter how far you roam. So hit the beach, pool, or trail this summer without missing a beat from your digital life.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, July 2

Want an IPv4 address? Get in lineCould IPv6’s day be near? The stockpile of unused IPv4 addresses in North America has fallen so low that there’s now a waiting list. On Wednesday, for the first time, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) had to tell an applicant for new Internet addresses to wait. ARIN simply didn’t have any blocks of addresses big enough to satisfy that applicant’s needs.HP makes its PC/enterprise split officialHewlett-Packard has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to register HP Enterprise as an independent company, an official step on the path to splitting itself in two. The filing shows that HP Enterprise made a profit of $1.6 billion last year on revenue of $55.1 billion, down from a profit of $2.1 billion on revenue of $57.4 billion in 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, July 2

Want an IPv4 address? Get in lineCould IPv6’s day be near? The stockpile of unused IPv4 addresses in North America has fallen so low that there’s now a waiting list. On Wednesday, for the first time, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) had to tell an applicant for new Internet addresses to wait. ARIN simply didn’t have any blocks of addresses big enough to satisfy that applicant’s needs.HP makes its PC/enterprise split officialHewlett-Packard has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to register HP Enterprise as an independent company, an official step on the path to splitting itself in two. The filing shows that HP Enterprise made a profit of $1.6 billion last year on revenue of $55.1 billion, down from a profit of $2.1 billion on revenue of $57.4 billion in 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Config error at Boston-area hosting company takes down Reddit, others

A Boston-area hosting provider briefly knocked several large services and websites dependent on Amazon and AWS offline on Tuesday night, thanks to a configuration error.Somerville, Mass-based Axcelx said in a tweet that the problem was caused by a route leak, which is an issue that can cause a small service provider to advertise itself as a different and much, much larger one, attempting to route huge amounts of traffic across its routers and generally causing the traffic in question to grind to a halt.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How Cisco brings communications to disaster relief efforts + One third of enterprise iOS devices vulnerable to app, data hijacking attacks +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Xiaomi faces challenge to reach sales goal, amid slowing smartphone growth

Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi has hopes of selling at least 80 million smartphones this year, but that goal may harder to reach than originally thought.On Thursday, the fast-rising company announced it had sold 34.7 million smartphones for the first six months of 2015. Although the figure means that sales were up 33 percent year-over-year, Xiaomi still has its work cut out to reach that 80 million number.Given that Xiaomi sold its first phone only four years ago, the company has made astonishing progress to become one of China’s top smartphone brands. It was even briefly the country’s largest vendor, before falling behind the new market leader, Apple, in this year’s first quarter, according to research firm IDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Business Case for SD-WAN

An anonymous commenter wrote this comment to my initial SD-WAN post:

I can still hardly imagine the business case behind SD-WAN. Any thoughts?

This question is really easy to answer. There’s a huge business case that SD-WAN products are aiming to solve: replacing traditional MPLS/VPN networks with encrypted transport over public Internet. However…

Read more ...

After Uber ruling, pressure mounts on companies to reclassify contractors

The pressure on app-based companies to reclassify their contractors as employees is picking up, with more of them getting sued this week.The California Labor Commission ruled last month that a driver of Uber Technologies was an employee and not a contractor, when driving for the company, and was hence entitled to reimbursement on certain expenses. The ride-hailing company said it had appealed the decision.Postmates, Shyp, and Washio were sued by workers this week, arguing that they should be classified as employees and not independent contractors, according to Shannon Liss-Riordan who is an attorney in these cases. The actions against Shyp and Postmates were filed as “class action arbitration” demands in arbitration courts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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