We Have to Get Away from the Box-Focused Mentality

I had a great SDN-focused conversation with Terry Slattery during last Interop New York, ago and of course we came to the argument that the CLI is the root of all evil, which started my usual rant. Guess what: not surprisingly that wasn’t what Terry had in mind. He was using the “CLI mentality is bad” as a synonym for “we’re used to configuring our networks one box at a time” (so we should really be talking about box-focused mentality).

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Alibaba uses facial recognition tech for online payments

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group and affiliated online payment service Alipay are aiming to use facial recognition technology to take the place of passwords.On Sunday, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma showed off the new feature while speaking at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover, Germany.Using Alipay, Ma bought a souvenir stamp from Alibaba’s e-commerce site in China. But to confirm the purchase, Ma scanned his face using the front camera on his smartphone.“Online payment to buy things is always a big headache,” he said. “You forget your password, you worry about your security. Today we show you a new technology.”Alibaba, which reigns as China’s largest e-commerce player, said Monday that the facial recognition feature was still under development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alibaba uses facial recognition tech for online payments

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group and affiliated online payment service Alipay are aiming to use facial recognition technology to take the place of passwords.On Sunday, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma showed off the new feature while speaking at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover, Germany.Using Alipay, Ma bought a souvenir stamp from Alibaba’s e-commerce site in China. But to confirm the purchase, Ma scanned his face using the front camera on his smartphone.“Online payment to buy things is always a big headache,” he said. “You forget your password, you worry about your security. Today we show you a new technology.”Alibaba, which reigns as China’s largest e-commerce player, said Monday that the facial recognition feature was still under development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP RR Design – Part 2

This is a continuation from Part 1 9. ACME VPN RR’s Design: So the current total number of PE’s dedicated for VPN functionality is around 400 (2 PE’s in each POP x 200). A full iBGP mesh between 400 PE’s comes around 79,800 sessions ((400×399) /2). By introducing two  VPN RR’s each PE will have only two iBGP sessions […]

Author information

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh,(3xCCIE,CCDE) is a Sr. Engineer mostly focused on service providers , data center and security. He is a network enthusiast passionate about network technologies so not only is it his profession, but something of a hobby as well.
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The post BGP RR Design – Part 2 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.

BGP RR Design – Part 1

1. Introduction In this post we will be looking at large scale RR design by using a fictional ISP ACME  as a reference. As usual, I am assuming that the reader has familiarity with BGP and basic RR concepts. 2. Setting the Stage ACME is a communications company providing communications and data services to residential, business, governmental and wholesale customers. […]

Author information

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh,(3xCCIE,CCDE) is a Sr. Engineer mostly focused on service providers , data center and security. He is a network enthusiast passionate about network technologies so not only is it his profession, but something of a hobby as well.
LinkedIn

The post BGP RR Design – Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.

Yahoo puts email encryption plugin source code up for review

Yahoo released the source code for a plugin that will enable end-to-end encryption of email messages, a planned data-security improvement prompted by disclosures of U.S. National Security Agency snooping.The company is asking security experts to look at its code, published on GitHub, and report vulnerabilities, wrote Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s chief information security officer, in a blog post.The plugin should be ready by year end, wrote Stamos, who gave a presentation on Sunday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

German industry is poised to exploit rural broadband

Internet speeds of 50Mbps are nothing but a pipe dream for most inhabitants of Britain, while even 5Mbps would be a welcome boost for many living in remote areas.Yet by 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants all Germans, even those in rural communities, to have access to 50Mbps broadband connections, she said at the opening ceremony of the Cebit trade show on Sunday.This ambitious goal, if attained, could revolutionize many aspects of farming and forestry, allowing a transition from practices based on intuition and tradition to those based on big data and analytics.And German businesses, including century-old agricultural machinery maker Claas, enterprise software specialist SAP, and a new generation of mobile app developers, are ready to take advantage of it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Access Point Default Password

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
The Cisco Access Point Default Password is – Cisco / Cisco You could probably have guessed that, but if you are configuring a cisco wireless access point out of the box for the first time you are going to want to know the default password and if you are reading this then you haven’t been... [Read More]

Other pages of interest:

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post Cisco Access Point Default Password

Kubernetes and Google container engine

In this blog, I will cover the Google container engine service that I tried out. Pre-requisites: Need Google cloud account. Install Google cloud SDK. Google container engine is not available in the normal gcloud SDK installation. To use container engine service, we need to update preview component. $ gcloud components update preview I followed the … Continue reading Kubernetes and Google container engine →

Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom put mobile security in the spotlight

Telecom operators Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are betting that in a post-Snowden world, “made in Germany” is more attractive than “made in U.S.A.”The need for more secure communications has been a hot topic in Germany since former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden made his revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping.The operators see the revelations, rightly or wrongly, as a golden opportunity to differentiate their products from competing U.S. offerings. As often as they can, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are highlighting that the German credentials of two new security products that were announced on Sunday at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Opencompute Networking – Facebook Contributions

Earlier, I had written a blog on Opencompute networking project. There were few recent contributions from Facebook to Opencompute. In this blog, I wanted to capture major Opencompute Networking contributions from Facebook. I see these contributions as pretty significant in the context of White box switches. Wedge hardware design for TOR: The goal here was to develop … Continue reading Opencompute Networking – Facebook Contributions →

German IT spending forecast to rise on eve of industry’s biggest trade show

IT spending is forecast to rise faster than previously expected in Germany, a bellwether for European industry, while IT sector jobs there will total almost one million by year-end. However, forthcoming legislation could have a chilling effect, industry association Bitkom warned.The news will put a smile on the faces of exhibitors and visitors at the giant Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, which opens Monday.Last year, 26,000 new jobs were created in the German IT industry, more than the 10,000 expected, Bitkom said. It expects 21,000 more will find employment in the industry by year end, taking the total to 990,000.The faster-than-expected rise in employment last year has prompted the association to raise its forecast for German IT spending on IT, telecommunications and consumer electronics this year to €155.5 billion (US$163 billion), up 1.5 percent year on year compared to an earlier growth forecast of 0.6 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

28 – VxLAN/EVPN MP-BGP in a DCI environment

VxLAN Evolution in the Context of DCI Requirements

Since I posted this article “Is VxLAN a DCI solution for LAN extension ?” clarifying why Multicast-based VxLAN was not suitable to offer a viable DCI solution, the DCI market (Data Center Interconnect) has become a buzz of activity around the evolution of VxLAN based on Control Plane (CP).

In this network overlay context, the Control Plane objective is to leverage Unicast transport while processing VTEP and host discovery and distribution processes. This method significantly reduces flooding for Unknown Unicast traffic within and across the fabrics.

The VxLAN protocol (RFC 7348) is aimed at carrying a virtualized Layer 2 network tunnel established over an IP network, hence from a network overlay point of view there is no restriction to transport a Layer 2 frame over an IP network, because that’s what the network overlays offers.

Consequently a question as previously discussed with MCAST-only transport in regard to a new DCI alternative solution, comes back again;

  • Does a Control Plane suffice to claim that’s VxLAN can be used as a DCI solution?

Consequently, this noise requires a clarification on how reliable a DCI solution can be when based on VxLAN Unicast transport using a Control Continue reading

BlackBerry teams with Samsung and IBM to offer governments a secure tablet

BlackBerry is returning to the tablet market—this time with the help of Samsung Electronics, IBM and Secusmart, the German encryption specialist BlackBerry bought last year.This is not the PlayBook 2 that BlackBerry was rumored to be working on last year, but the SecuTablet, developed by Secusmart and IBM for a German government department.The SecuTablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 LTE 16GB bundled with some software from IBM and SecuSmart’s special MicroSD card, which combines a number of cryptographic chips to protect data in motion and at rest. Samsung’s Knox secure boot technology ensures that the OS on the tablet has not been tampered with, while IBM’s contribution to the security chain is to “wrap” certain apps in an additional layer of code that intercepts and encrypts key data flows using the Secusmart hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ECMP visibility with Cumulus Linux

Demo: Implementing the Big Data Design Guide in the Cumulus Workbench  is a great demonstration of the power of zero touch provisioning and automation. When the switches and servers boot they automatically pick up their operating systems and configurations for the complex Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routed network shown in the diagram.

Topology discovery with Cumulus Linux looked at an alternative Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) configuration and shows how to extract the configuration and monitor traffic on the network using sFlow and Fabric View.

The paper Hedera: Dynamic Flow Scheduling for Data Center Networks describes the impact of colliding flows on effective ECMP cross sectional bandwidth. The paper gives an example which demonstrates that effective cross sectional bandwidth can be reduced by a factor of between 20% to 60%, depending on the number of simultaneous flows per host.

This article uses the workbench to demonstrate the effect of large "Elephant" flow collisions on network throughput. The following script running on each of the servers uses the iperf tool to generate pairs of overlapping Elephant flows:
cumulus@server1:~$ while true; do iperf -c 10.4.2.2 -t 20; sleep 20; done
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.4.2.2, TCP port  Continue reading

Facebook acquires The Find e-commerce search engine

Facebook has acquired The Find, a nine-year-old company with a search engine that indexes products across thousands of e-commerce sites.The deal, the value of which was not disclosed, was announced in a post on The Find’s website.“Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you,” the company said.That probably means the ads Facebook users see will be more relevant to products they’ve been browsing and buying online, perhaps highlighting local retailers. One of The Find’s features is that it attempts to mix online and local stores and says its results are based on “your social profile.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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