Privacy and Security – Five Objectives

It has been a very busy period in the domain of computer security. What with "shellshock", "heartbleed" and NTP monlink adding to the background of open DNS resolvers, port 445 viral nasties, SYN attacks and other forms of vulnerability exploits, it's getting very hard to see the forest for the trees. We are spending large amounts of resources in reacting to various vulnerabilities and attempting to mitigate individual network attacks, but are we making overall progress? What activities would constitute "progress" anyway?

CloudFlare Publishes Semiannual Transparency Report:

Painting by Rene Margritte

Today CloudFlare is publishing its third Transparency Report covering the first half of 2014. This report covers government information requests from January 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014, and updates our two existing transparency reports: partial January 2013 Transparency Report and complete 2013 Transparency Report.

CloudFlare’s Transparency Reports shows how many subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, pen register/trap and trace (PRTT) orders, and national security orders CloudFlare received during the reporting period. In this current Transparency Report, we have also added a separate category for wiretap orders CloudFlare received. CloudFlare’s Transparency Reports also shows how many domains and accounts were affected by our response to those requests during the reporting period. CloudFlare’s Transparency Reports do not include non-governmental requests.

We will continue to update this report on a semiannual basis at Transparency Report.

Special thanks to our legal intern, Murtaza Sajjad, for helping to compile this report.

PlexxiPulse—Mark Your Calendar: DemoFriday is 10/24

Plexxi is teaming up with SDNCentral to host DemoFriday on October 24 at 10 a.m. PST. Tune in to hear our own Ed Henry and Nils Stewart demonstrate how to build scalable and manageable Big Data fabrics that easily integrate with systems such as OpenStack and Cloudera. You can register to attend here.

In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman explains how Plexxi’s Big Data fabric solution is applicable beyond Big Data.

SDN: Unshackling the Network Application Environment

Art Cole claims that SDN will enable the development of a robust ecosystem of network applications in a recent article for Enterprise Networking Planet. As we look at applications, it is worth making the distinction between network apps (things that run on the network) and business apps (apps the network enables). The real value in SDN will permit the business apps to influence the network (whether that is automated or not is an interesting side conversation). To bring this to life there has to be a focus on policy abstraction. This is why Congress (part of OpenStack) and OpenDaylight are potentially powerful. If we can agree on policy abstraction, then the applications can interact with the network and Continue reading

Ansible and using Automation to Assert IT Compliance

Like “orchestration”, compliance is a frequently overloaded phrase in IT -- it means very different things to different people. Ansible is frequently used in all sorts of compliance use cases, which we’ll expand on below.

Compliance can mean checking to see if a system has “drifted” from a known state, pushing a system back into line from a different state, or making it conform with a very specific set of (often security related) standards.

Too Fast, Too Furious

Continue reading

EVPN: Intro to next gen L2VPN

Introduction: With the ascent of DCI, a new set of requirements emerged which are not fully addressed by current L2VPN technologies like VPLS. There are three major options in deploying VPLS LDP based VPLS (RFC 4762) LDP based VPLS with BGP Auto discovery BGP based VPLS (RFC 4761) Each option has its pros and cons. […]

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 EVPN: Intro to next gen L2VPN appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.

U-NII Unlicensed Spectrum Inventory in 5 GHz Bands

Given the recent FCC Report & Order on U-NII (Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure) rule changes in March/April of 2014, I thought it would be helpful to recap the new regulations in the United States regarding the 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum bands. I've put together the following table for quick reference:
U-NII Unlicensed Spectrum in 5 GHz
(Click to Download PDF)

Additionally, here is a graphic of the 5 GHz U-NII bands, both current and proposed, from the NTIA report made in January 2013 (note - this graphic does NOT reflect the change with regards to the extension of U-NII 3 up to 5.850 GHz).

NTIA Graphic of U-NII Unlicensed Spectrum in 5 GHz

Cheers,
Andrew von Nagy

Opening up VXLAN with OpenStack

VXLAN is hot. We constantly hear about VXLAN at conferences, in product announcements, blog posts, and most importantly, we hear about it from our customers.

VXLAN exciting technology that’s been integrated into a number of product offerings from networking and cloud vendors. OpenStack® supports VXLAN via a set of Neutron plugins, and Metacloud OpenStack® has supported VXLAN for a few releases already.

One of the challenges with deploying and scaling VXLAN has been the MAC-to-VTEP learning and BUM (Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, Multicast) packet flooding. The VXLAN spec uses a simple multicast solution to solve this problem. Multicast has its own set of scaling challenges, and reliable multicast routing between network segments isn’t always available. The majority of vendors who have VXLAN support have attempted to solve this problem by implementing their own form of learning and flooding. Some of these solutions work well, but all of them require you to operate in a homogenous network environment or pay expensive per CPU or per VM licensing fees.

Until today…

Metacloud, in partnership with our friends at Cumulus Networks®, have been working together on a solution to these problems for the past year. Starting today, VXFLD is open source and freely Continue reading

EIGRP OTP example

In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP).

In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network.

One of the applications of this would be to avoid relying on the SP in an MPLS L3 VPN. You could simply use the L3 VPN for transport between the interfaces directly connected to the Service Provider and run your own adjacency directly between your CPE routers (without the use of a GRE tunnel, which would be another method to do it)

The topology used for this example consists of 4 routers. All 4 of the routers are using OSPF to provide connectivity (you could take this example and do a L3 VPN using MPLS as an exercise). Im simply taking the lazy path and doing it this way :)

EIGRP-OTP-Topology

EIGRP-OTP-Topology

R1 and R4 are running EIGRP in a named process “test”. This process is in Autonomous system 100 and the Loopback 0 interfaces are advertised into the V4 address-family.

Lets verify that we have connectivity between R1’s g1.102 interface and R4’s g1.304 Continue reading

Case Study: Hootsuite

hootsuite-ansible

Hootsuite, the excellent social media management platform used by over 75% of the Fortune 500, is a big fan of Ansible and uses it for app deployment. Beier Cai, the Director of Technology at Hootsuite was kind enough to speak to us about how Hootsuite uses Asnible to overcome their business challenges.

“Our infrastructure is not scripted, repeatable or immutable. Rebuilding a server relies on limited documentation and mostly memory. Lack of repeatability makes automating our infrastructure and application deployment difficult. 


Read the full case study amd learn how Ansible solves their problems here.

Read more about Ansible and App Deployment.

Training Wheels and Protective Gear

Throughout the development cycle of new features and functions for any network platform (or probably most other products not targeted at the mass market consumer) this one question will always come up: should we protect the user of our product from doing this? And “this” is always something that would allow the user of the product to really mess things up if not done right. As a product management organization you almost have to take a philosophical stand when it comes to these questions.

Protect the user

Sure enough, the question came up last week as part of the development of one our features. When putting the finishing touches on a feature that allows very direct control over some of the fundamental portions of what creates a Plexxi fabric, our QA team (very appropriately) raised the concern: if the user does this, bad things can happen, should we not allow the user to change this portion of the feature?

This balancing act is part of what as made networking as complex as it has become. As an industry we have been extremely flexible in what we have exposed to our users. We have given access to portions of our products Continue reading

VXLAN and OTV: The Saga Continues

Randall Greer left a comment on my Revisited: Layer-2 DCI over VXLAN post saying:

Could you please elaborate on how VXLAN is a better option than OTV? As far as I can see, OTV doesn't suffer from the traffic tromboning you get from VXLAN. Sure you have to stretch your VLANs, but you're protected from bridging failures going over your DCI. OTV is also able to have multiple edge devices per site, so there's no single failure domain. It's even integrated with LISP to mitigate any sub-optimal traffic flows.

Before going through the individual points, let’s focus on the big picture: the failure domains.

Read more ...

Show 208 – So, You Want To Work For A Vendor?

Lauren Malhoit, Paul Stewart, and Ed Henry join Packet Pushers hosts Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks for a discussion about what it’s like to work for a networking vendor. Lauren and Paul recently started working at Cisco in two very different roles, while Ed went the startup route, landing at Plexxi. Why did they do it? What […]

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 208 – So, You Want To Work For A Vendor? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

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