Ubuntu, cloud-init, and OpenStack Heat

In this post I’d like to share a couple of things I recently learned about the interaction between cloud-init and OpenStack Orchestration (aka “Heat”). This may be stuff that you already know, but in the interest of helping others who may not know I’m posting it here.

One issue that I’d been repeatedly running into was an apparent “failure” on the part of Heat to properly apply cloud-init configurations to deployed Ubuntu instances. So, using a Heat template with an OS::Nova::Server resource defined like this would result in an instance that apparently wasn’t reachable via SSH (I’d get back Permission denied (publickey)):

resources:
  instance0:
    type: OS::Nova::Server
    properties:
      name: cloud-init-test-01
      image: { get_param: image_id }
      flavor: m1.xsmall
      networks:
        - port: { get_resource: instance0_port0 }
      key_name: lab

Deploying an instance manually from the same image worked perfectly. So what was the deal?

The first thing I learned was that, in some circumstances (more on this in a moment) defaults to injecting SSH keys (like the key named lab specified in the template) to a user account named “ec2-user”. Ah! I’d been using the default “ubuntu” account specified in Continue reading

Cisco VIRL NXOSv NXAPI Update

Cisco officially announced the April release of VIRL the announcement and upgrade instructions can be found here. Some of the highlights from the upgrade are: ISOv is now up to version 15.2(2)T ...

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How your smartphone use could affect your credit

For prospective borrowers who have no credit history, a common problem for immigrants whose credit starts anew when they move to the U.S., economists and startups are using metadata from smartphones to see how reliable a borrower is in other areas of their lives to help determine their likelihood of paying back a loan.A recent article in the New Scientist cites research conducted by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren and the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab which involved combing through cellphone data of 3,000 borrowers from a Haitian bank to identify such trends as how often they pay their cellphone bills, how quickly they return important phone calls, and travel behavior based on location data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PCE Topology Notifications with OpenDaylight Helium

PCE Topology Notifications with OpenDaylight Helium

by Hariharan Ananthakrishnan, Distinguished Engineer - April 23, 2015

Helium SR3

OpenDaylight released its third maintenance release for Helium last month. Helium SR3 included a lot of bug fixes across OpenDaylight projects. In this blog, I would like to share my experience with PCE topology notifications available in SR3. 

Notifications 

The OpenDaylight controller sal-remote YANG model defines the RPC notification subscription service and data change notification constructs. Change-event notification subscription makes it possible to obtain notifications about data manipulations (inserting, changing, deleting) that are done on any specified part of any specified data store with specific scope. 

PCE Topology Notifications 

PCE topology notification is available in Helium SR3. This feature allows the user to subscribe to a notification stream and listen for asynchronous remote notifications through WebSocket. The changes that get notified are:

  • Addition, update, deletion of Path Computation Clients (PCC)
  • Addition, update, deletion of Label Switched Paths (LSP) 

Test Setup 

The setup has four routers running the IOS XRv 5.3 image, a CentOS 7 VM hosting OpenDaylight Helium SR3, and Packet Design’s SDN Service Assurance Platform acting Continue reading

iPhone 7, Apple Watch mashup: Brangelina of tech gadgets

An elegant new iPhone 7 design concept blends an advanced Apple smartphone with a key component of the new Apple Watch, resulting in something of a Brangelina of tech gadgets.Italy's Antonio De Rosa contributed his iPhone 7 design concept to the Behance portfolio site, where he takes on the challenge "to improve something that is already perfect" in the iPhone. + MORE: Why the gold Apple Watch costs $10K +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To compete with Silicon Valley, European startups need to grow fast

Europe is still lacking real tech giants like Google, Facebook or Amazon, but it looks like things are slowly changing. However, if European companies want to start competing with Silicon Valley, they have to start thinking internationally from the beginning, says BlaBlaCar COO Nicolas Brusson.BlaBlaCar is a French ride-sharing startup. It has about 20 million users and is active in 18 countries, where its users can offer empty seats in their cars on a trip for a fee, allowing them to save costs while others can arrange a relatively cheap trip.Brusson, who spent years in Silicon Valley and worked as a venture capitalist before co-founding BlaBlaCar, is responsible for the international growth of the company. At The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on Thursday he gave fellow European entrepreneurs some tips on how to become a big company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Terminology from RFCs?

80% of your job in networking is getting you and your co-worker to agree to what the terms mean.

That paraphrase comes from one of my three networking profs in college, from literally 30 years ago. But that statement is still true today. Getting to a shared understanding of what we mean helps in any conversation about networking, and failing to truly understand the terminology can cause problems.

SDN promises many things, but it certainly has a big impact on networking terminology. SDN introduces many new terms, but it also redefines some terms and reemphasizes the underlying concepts behind other long-used terms.

And then there are no terminology police to run around and make us all use terms the same way. It’s enough to drive you crazy!

Today’s post (and possibly a few more) explores some attempts to answer some of the questions about what SDN terms to use and what they mean. In this post, I’ll look at a relatively new Internet RFC: the SDN Layers and Architecture Terminology RFC.

 

Overview: Terminology is a Challenge

What’s a network? Is it a class A, B, or C network, as defined by IPv4? Any subset of an IPv4 class A, Continue reading

IT/IT: Merge Lane

You’re probably living in a bubble (or sleeping on a mat in the data center — remind me to tell you about the sleeping bag I carried in the back of my truck for a while…) if you’ve not heard about the Nokia/Alcatel merger. What’s interesting, from a network engineering perspective, is what this means. To get a better idea, it’s important to consider another story posted this last week.

The white box switching market could see some monumental change within even one year, according to Dell’Oro Group analyst Alan Weckel. That’s mainly because of the rise of hyperscale cloud players — specifically Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Their buying power has grown substantially in the past few years — and white boxes have progressed rapidly during that time, too.

So what does white box have to do with the Nokia/ALU merger? Just about everything, most likely. To better understand, we need to first posit that the world is going software. Not that we won’t have hardware any longer, but rather that the hardware is going to become much less interesting over the next five to ten years as the software used to run the hardware is separated out and Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Survey: Employees will only embrace smartwatches if they improve work environment

As Apple ships its first pre-order smartwatches to customers this week, a new people-analytics survey indicates that more than half of workers would consider wearing an enterprise-supplied smartwatch if it provided a better work environment.PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC, surveyed over 2,000 adults in the UK and found that 40% would wear technology supplied by their employer.However, the number rose to over half, at 56%, if the information gathered was used to make the work environment better.Big Brother As one might imagine, trust was a big sticking point for the idea of an enterprise-supplied smartwatch. There was resistance to sharing data, in part because employees think the data will be used against them "in some way." A significant 41% of respondents said they were worried about this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Xiaomi Mi 4i combines impressive specs with a $200 price tag

Xiaomi is hoping the well-equipped Mi 4i will help the company grab a larger smartphone market share, but it’s still holding off entering the U.S, and Europe.Launching the smartphone at an event in India is a departure for the company, which thus far has launched its smartphones in China.The Mi 4i can be summed up as a souped-up midrange smartphone with a low-end price tag at 12,999 rupees (US$205) without a contract. It has a 5-inch, 1080 x 1920 pixel screen and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615, an octa-core processor with integrated support for LTE. The processor is a step below the Snapdragon 800 family, which is used to power high-end products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

21 tips for making Android a better personal assistant

Android devices can do all sorts of wizardry these days -- everything from taking your heartbeat to turning off the lights in your bedroom. But sometimes, it's the simple stuff that matters the most.For business users in particular, a top-notch experience is crucial in three core areas: email, for keeping up with correspondence on the go; calendar, for making sure you don't miss important appointments (like your weekly podiatrist session -- hey, I'm not here to judge); and contacts, for having easy access to the people you need to reach, podiatrist or otherwise. No matter how many impressive feats your phone can perform, it won't do you much good if it doesn't deliver in those domains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wi-Fi client vulnerability could expose Android, Linux, BSD, other systems to attacks

A serious flaw in a component that’s used to authenticate clients on Wi-Fi networks could expose Android, Linux, BSD, and possibly Windows and Mac OS X systems to attacks.The vulnerability is in wpa_supplicant, an open-source software implementation of the IEEE 802.11i specifications for wireless clients.The component is cross-platform and is used to control WPA and WPA2 wireless connections on Android, Linux and BSD systems. It can also be used by some third-party wireless software on Mac OS X and Windows, but these operating systems have their own built-in supplicant implementations that are used by default.The vulnerability stems from how wpa_supplicant parses SSID (Service Set Identifier) information from wireless network frames when the CONFIG_P2P option is enabled. If exploited, the flaw can allow attackers to crash the client (denial of service), read contents from the process’s memory or inject arbitrary data into its memory, which could result in arbitrary code execution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, April 23

Facebook’s mobile shift shows through in financial resultsIt doesn’t seem so long ago that analysts were fretting over Facebook’s mobile playbook, but now the social media giant is monetizing a user base that is increasingly on smartphones and tablets. In reporting its financial results Wednesday, it said that a solid majority of its advertising revenue for the first quarter came from users on mobile devices, the New York Times reports.Facebook gives Android phones souped-up caller IDFacebook wants to move even closer to the core functions of your Android smartphone, with a new dialer app called Hello that uses Messenger to call your friends. The company also says it can give you better security with enhanced call-blocking, and uses the Facebook database to identify callers, PC World reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, April 23

Facebook’s mobile shift shows through in financial resultsIt doesn’t seem so long ago that analysts were fretting over Facebook’s mobile playbook, but now the social media giant is monetizing a user base that is increasingly on smartphones and tablets. In reporting its financial results Wednesday, it said that a solid majority of its advertising revenue for the first quarter came from users on mobile devices, the New York Times reports.Facebook gives Android phones souped-up caller IDFacebook wants to move even closer to the core functions of your Android smartphone, with a new dialer app called Hello that uses Messenger to call your friends. The company also says it can give you better security with enhanced call-blocking, and uses the Facebook database to identify callers, PC World reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hardware Gateways in Overlay Virtual Networks

Whenever I’m running an SDDC workshop or doing on-site SDN/SDDC-related consulting, the question of hardware gateways between overlay virtual networks and physical world inevitably pops up.

My usual answer: You have to understand (A) what type of gateway you need, (B) what performance you need and (C) what form factor will give you that performance. For more details, watch the Hardware Gateways video from Scaling Overlay Virtual Networks webinar

Watch the video

SDN Terminology from RFCs?

80% of your job in networking is getting you and your co-worker to agree to what the terms mean.

That paraphrase comes from one of my three networking profs in college, from literally 30 years ago. But that statement is still true today. Getting to a shared understanding of what we mean helps in any conversation about networking, and failing to truly understand the terminology can cause problems.

SDN promises many things, but it certainly has a big impact on networking terminology. SDN introduces many new terms, but it also redefines some terms and reemphasizes the underlying concepts behind other long-used terms.

And then there are no terminology police to run around and make us all use terms the same way. It’s enough to drive you crazy!

Today’s post (and possibly a few more) explores some attempts to answer some of the questions about what SDN terms to use and what they mean. In this post, I’ll look at a relatively new Internet RFC: the SDN Layers and Architecture Terminology RFC.

 

Overview: Terminology is a Challenge

What’s a network? Is it a class A, B, or C network, as defined by IPv4? Any subset of an IPv4 class A, Continue reading

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