Own the Problem

In the late 1990’s, I was on the routing protocols TAC team in Raleigh — which means I answered the phone, and said things like, “This is Russ from Cisco TAC, how can I help you?” Generally what followed was a crash, or, well, just about anything. The design on the left is what we had on the back of our shirts — including what we called ourselves, the Gateway of Last Resort.

Of course it’s a play on words, as you might imagine — where does a host send traffic it doesn’t know what to do with? The gateway of last resort. And what is the gateway of last resort? A router. And what the RP team worked on was, well, routers. But there’s another reason we adopted this slogan for ourselves — because it was, generally speaking, how the CRC (the folks who took the initial call and figured out which backline team to hand it off to) conceived of our little team. The PIX, the 7200, VIP cards, crashes, hangs, tracebacks, any sort of routing protocol problem, lots of hardware problems, anything to do with the forwarding path, memory fragmentation, and just about anything else. A Continue reading

10 apps to take your job search mobile

Apps to take your job search mobileSearching for a new career can feel like a full-time job, but with these 10 mobile apps, you can continue your job search on the go. And you won't be the only one. In 2014 Glassdoor found that 9 out of 10 people reported searching for a job on their mobile device. So trade in some time spent on Candy Crush and Instagram, and move your career forward with these apps. Job Search - Simply HiredSimply Hired's job search app brings job listings to your mobile device and allows you to search by industry, date, relevance, and more. It's a pretty straightforward app and offers most of the common features mentioned in this list of apps. You can track your job search process across devices and the app will let you use your LinkedIn profile to quickly create your resume. Once you set your resume up within the app, you can quickly apply to any job you find. Job Search also allows you to set up alerts for relevant job openings that fit your skills and experience.Google Play iTunesJob AwareJobAware connects you with Indeed's job listings and allows you Continue reading

Cisco names senior VP Robbins as new CEO to replace Chambers

Cisco Systems has appointed Chuck Robbins, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, as CEO, replacing long-time chief executive John Chambers. Robbins will take over as CEO in late July. Chambers, who has been Cisco’s CEO for 20 years, is moving to the role of executive chairman on July 26. He will continue to serve as chairman of the board at the company. Chambers, in a statement, called Robbins a “very strong leader” who has great knowledge of the company. Robbins joined Cisco in 1997 as an account manager and he now leads the company’s global sales and partner team. Before joining Cisco, he held management positions at Bay Networks and Ascend Communications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Walking with Packets: Traceroute Through MPLS Cloud

Think about this for a minute: An MPLS network with a two Provider Edge (PE) routers and some Provider (P) routers. The P routers have no VRFs configured on them and therefore have no routes whatsoever for any of the customer networks. A customer then does a traceroute from one of their sites, across the MPLS cloud, and into one of their other sites. The traceroute output shows the P routers as hops along the path.

How is it possible for the P routers to reply to the traceroute if they don’t have routes back to the customer network?

The Lab Setup

Here’s the network:

Click to Enlarge

Here’s the traceroute output from R21’s loopback0 to R8’s loopback0 (the last octet of each IP address corresponds to the name of each router):

R21#traceroute 10.1.8.8 source loopback0
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 10.1.8.8
VRF info: (vrf in name/id, vrf out name/id)
  1 10.4.4.4 21 msec 18 msec 17 msec
  2 10.2.45.5 [MPLS: Labels 21/24 Exp 0] 19 msec 18 msec 18 msec
  3 10.2.15.1 [MPLS: Labels 21/24 Exp  Continue reading

Researchers play cat and mouse with Google’s anti-phishing Chrome extension

For the past several days security researchers have raced to demonstrate that phishing protections added by a new Google Chrome extension can be bypassed with ease.The Password Alert extension, developed by Google and released Wednesday, is designed to alert Chrome users when they input their Gmail passwords on websites that don’t belong to Google and are therefore part of phishing attacks.By Thursday, an information security consultant named Paul Moore had already devised a method that attackers could use to block the extension’s alerts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco taps veteran Robbins to succeed Chambers as CEO

Cisco Monday named sales executive Chuck Robbins to be its next CEO, replacing John Chambers, who held the title for 20 years. The change takes effect July 26. Chamber will become executive chairman of the company. MORE: How Chambers has kept high profile over the years | Critical Milestones in Cisco's HistoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco taps veteran Robbins to succeed Chambers as CEO

Cisco Monday named sales executive Chuck Robbins to be its next CEO, replacing John Chambers, who held the title for 20 years. The change takes effect July 26. Chamber will become executive chairman of the company. MORE: How Chambers has kept high profile over the years | Critical Milestones in Cisco's HistoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 4

Facebook opens Internet.org platform to (almost) any content serviceStung by criticism that its Internet.org platform is a closed-off, private web masquerading as a philanthropic effort to bridge the digital divide, Facebook is opening the service to developers who meet its technical guidelines. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video that although the company started with just a few content partners, “we’ll work with anyone who wants to join us.” Facebook posted a version of the video subtitled in Hindi, aiming to reach its audience in India where the company was seen by some as trampling principles of net neutrality with Internet.org.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 4

Facebook opens Internet.org platform to (almost) any content serviceStung by criticism that its Internet.org platform is a closed-off, private web masquerading as a philanthropic effort to bridge the digital divide, Facebook is opening the service to developers who meet its technical guidelines. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video that although the company started with just a few content partners, “we’ll work with anyone who wants to join us.” Facebook posted a version of the video subtitled in Hindi, aiming to reach its audience in India where the company was seen by some as trampling principles of net neutrality with Internet.org.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber’s China business could face more regulatory trouble, following police raid

Facing little work in his regular construction job, Li Gengming has become a big supporter of Uber Technologies in China.He is just one several private drivers who have signed up with the ride-hailing service in Beijing. Each day, Li picks up around 7 or 8 customers, taking about 200 yuan (US$32) from the rides altogether.“There are not enough taxis in the city, so there’s demand,” he said on Monday. “Uber is also much cheaper than taxis.”In China, however, not everyone is a fan of the service. Last Thursday, police reportedly raided Uber’s office in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, for letting private drivers operate without the needed qualifications, according to local media reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber’s China business could face more regulatory trouble, following police raid

Facing little work in his regular construction job, Li Gengming has become a big supporter of Uber Technologies in China.He is just one several private drivers who have signed up with the ride-hailing service in Beijing. Each day, Li picks up around 7 or 8 customers, taking about 200 yuan (US$32) from the rides altogether.“There are not enough taxis in the city, so there’s demand,” he said on Monday. “Uber is also much cheaper than taxis.”In China, however, not everyone is a fan of the service. Last Thursday, police reportedly raided Uber’s office in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, for letting private drivers operate without the needed qualifications, according to local media reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 05.04.15

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.CudaSign for SharePointKey features – CudaSign for Sharepoint speeds up and optimizes workflows by sending documents directly from Sharepoint to your CudaSign account without the need to download files or log into CudaSign. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 05.04.15

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.CudaSign for SharePointKey features – CudaSign for Sharepoint speeds up and optimizes workflows by sending documents directly from Sharepoint to your CudaSign account without the need to download files or log into CudaSign. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IPv4 Address Transfer Prices Down?

Last year I wrote about the IPv4 Address Transfer Process. Recently I was involved in another IPv4 transfer. I was surprised to see that IPv4 prices have fallen in the last year. I have done some rudimentary analysis of the APNIC transfer statistics to try to figure out why.

APNIC publishes statistics on transfers at ftp.apnic.net/public/transfers/apnic. These text files list all resource transfers that have taken place – the to & from organisation, the resource type, the date, etc. I am very interested in looking at the trends. How many transactions take place each month, and how many addresses are being transferred?

I wrote a simple Python script to do this analysis for me. It retrieves the latest statistics, and converts them into a Google chart:

(If you’re reading this via RSS, and the chart doesn’t display, you may need to click here to see the web version).

Note this does not do live updates. It is a point in time, generated using the current data at the time the script is run. If you would like to update the code to do live updates, fork it from Github here. I’d also love to update the script to Continue reading

Imagine an Android/Microsoft Franken-phone

Franken-phoneWhen it was reported that Microsoft might invest in CyanogenMod, the mobile OS built on the open-source release of the Android codebase, speculation arose as to why. Although eventually Microsoft decided not to contribute to Cyanogen, it got us thinking: What if Microsoft or someone else created a smartphone running CyanogenMod, and it had no apps by Google. Instead, it was preloaded with Microsoft equivalents. Could such a Microsoft-dominant Android smartphone be viable? Technically, we would have to say, yes. Here, we compare how Microsoft’s apps would fare as replacements for their Google counterparts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US reviews use of cellphone spying technology

Faced with criticism from lawmakers and civil rights groups, the U.S. Department of Justice has begun a review of the secretive use of cellphone surveillance technology that mimics cellphone towers, and will get more open on its use, according to a newspaper report.The cell-site simulators, also referred to by other names such as “IMSI catchers” or Stingrays, operate by fooling mobile phones into believing that they are communicating with a legitimate cellphone tower, while harvesting data from the phone including its identity, location, metadata and even content of phone transmissions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.One of the complaints of civil rights groups is that even when targeting a single phone, the technology can collect data on other phones in the area that connect to the simulator, raising privacy issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Replacing Central Router with a Next-Generation Firewall?

One of my readers sent me this question:

After reading this blog post and a lot of blog posts about zero trust mode versus security zones, what do you think about replacing L3 Data Center core switches by High Speed Next Generation Firewalls?

Long story short: just because someone writes about an idea doesn’t mean it makes sense. Some things are better left in PowerPoint.

HP promises warranty on overclocked desktops popular with gamers

Gamers will be able to overclock and add more horsepower to HP’s signature gaming desktop without worrying about invalidating their warranties.The Envy Phoenix Desktop is among a number of newly redesigned desktops announced by HP on Monday. The towers have a premium look with an aluminum finish on the chassis, where HP had previously used plastic.For the first time, HP is offering Intel Core i5 and i7 chips that can be overclocked with its top-line Envy Phoenix desktop PC. That means gamers can increase computer performance by raising the CPU clock speed, which can be handy when running demanding games. These chips are often incorporated into home-built PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Walking with Packets: Traceroute Through MPLS Cloud

Think about this for a minute: An MPLS network with a two Provider Edge (PE) routers and some Provider (P) routers. The P routers have no VRFs configured on them and therefore have no routes whatsoever for any of the customer networks. A customer then does a traceroute from one of their sites, across the MPLS cloud, and into one of their other sites. The traceroute output shows the P routers as hops along the path.

How is it possible for the P routers to reply to the traceroute if they don't have routes back to the customer network?

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: Double cameras and Tattoo phobia

 Terry Johnston/Flickr Just as I was deciding between going with an Apple Watch tattoo or one of the old Fantasy Island TV show star Tattoo on my wrist, comes confirmation from Apple that ink on your wrist indeed can much up heart rate readings on your new Apple timepiece. Oh well, back to the iPhone 7 rumor rollup for me...To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here