RFCs You Should Know: 5218

Quite often RFCs in the “earlier days” discussed not only process but also design. Looking back now, considering the complexity of the network engineering world, these RFCs might seem even a little trite. But these “architectural RFCs” often still carry thoughts and records of experience that are important, even if they aren’t so much followed […]

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Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, and his author page on Amazon.
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The post RFCs You Should Know: 5218 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

Sprint offers home delivery and setup of smartphones, tablets

Faced with a highly competitive market, U.S. wireless operator Sprint is now offering to deliver and set up phones, tablets and other connected devices for free at homes, offices and other locations chosen by the customer.The offer is currently limited to eligible upgrade customers, but starting September, new customers in selected markets will be able to choose the new Direct 2 You option, when buying online or through call centers.Launching in Kansas City metropolitan area on Monday, the program will be expanded across the country using about 5,000 branded cars and employing 5,000 staff by year end. A rollout in Miami and Chicago is scheduled for April 20.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Watch orders nearly topped 1 million on first day – Report

While we won't have official figures on Apple Watch orders until Apple issues a statement, some preliminary figures suggest paint a rosy picture for Apple.According to the research firm Slice Intelligence, Apple Watch orders on day 1 nearly topped one million units. The report was initially relayed by QZ which summarized pertinent portions of the report as follows: Almost two-thirds of pre-orders were for the less expensive, aluminum Sport line, which starts at $349. About one-third of pre-orders were for the stainless-steel Apple Watch collection, which starts at $549. The gold “Edition” series, which starts at $10,000, didn’t represent enough US pre-orders to show up in Slice’s report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC net neutrality rules published to Federal Register

The new net neutrality rule of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission was published over the weekend to the Federal Register, the daily journal of U.S. government actions, raising the possibility of a spate of lawsuits from broadband companies that oppose the rule.The FCC decided in a 3-2 vote in February to reclassify broadband as a regulated public utility, by invoking Title II of the Communications Act, thus prohibiting providers from selectively blocking or throttling or offering paid prioritization of Internet traffic.The new rules apply to both fixed and mobile broadband Internet access services. They aim to regulate both services on the lines of traditional telephone companies, which are required to deliver service at “just and reasonable” rates and interconnect with each other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chinese hacker group among first to target networks isolated from Internet

An otherwise unremarkable hacking group likely aligned with China appears to be one of the first to have targeted so-called air-gapped networks that are not directly connected to the Internet, according to FireEye.The computer security firm released a 69-page technical report on Sunday on the group, which it calls APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 30, which targeted organizations in southeast Asia and India.FireEye picked up on it after some of the malware used by the group was found to have infected defense-related clients in the U.S., said Jen Weedon, manager of strategic analysis with FireEye.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: May the Force Touch be with you

Perhaps because of this past week’s buzz about Apple Watch going on sale, the iPhone 7 rumor mill has spit out relatively little for Apple fans and the media to overreact about. About the biggest excitement has been figuring out if the next phone will be called the iPhone 6C, 6S or 7. Although the reason for that renaming is of interest. Namely, that Apple might be planning to fit its next iPhone with a variation of the Force Touch technology going into its Apple Watch and 12-inch Retina MacBook. Comments to this effect from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo made the rounds after he issued a note to clients and the note was quoted by MacRumors: “We believe that iPhone’s Force Touch sensor doesn’t directly detect the pressure applied by fingers. Instead, it monitors the contact area on which the finger touches the screen to decide how big the pressure is.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The oldest trick in the ASCII book

If you're old enough (or interested enough) to have spent a lot of time messing around with the ASCII table then you might have run into a strange fact: it's possible to uppercase ASCII text using just bitwise AND.

And it turns out that in some situations this isn't just a curiosity, but actually useful. Here are the ASCII characters 0x20 (space) to 0x7E (tilde).

     0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF
    +--------------------------------
0x20| !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
0x40|@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[]^_
0x60|`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

It's immediately obvious that each lowercase letter has an ASCII code 0x20 more than the corresponding uppercase letter. For example, lowercase m is 0x6D and uppercase M is 0x4D. And since 0x20 is a single bit then it's possible to uppercase an ASCII letter by taking its code and applying AND 0xDF (masking out the 0x20 bit).

Performing AND 0xDF has no effect on the first two rows above: they, including the uppercase letters, are unchanged. Only the third row is affected. There the lowercase letters get uppercased but there's some collateral damage: ` { | } ~ change to @ [ ] ^.

But if you know that a string has a limited character set then this trick can come in handy. Lots of old protocols Continue reading

Smarter Hosts Would Make A Simpler Network

(or Magical Things I Would Do if Hosts Weren’t Stupid) Introduction I’m a firm believer that many of the apparent problems in networking today are caused by stupid hosts.  The hosts are stupid and, we are told, cannot be fixed. Instead, we are forced to add on more and more “intelligence” to the network. This […]

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Sam Stickland

Sam Stickland

Sam Stickland, CCIE #21455, is a software developer turned network engineer.

The post Smarter Hosts Would Make A Simpler Network appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sam Stickland.

Should billionaires have to disclose their political contributions?

The Intercept has a story about a billionaire sneaking into a Jeb Bush fundraiser. It points out:
"Bush’s campaign operation has taken steps to conceal the names of certain big-money donors. ... Bush’s Right to Rise also formed a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy wing, which, like a Super PAC, can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money — but unlike a Super PAC, never has to reveal donor names."
This leads me to ask two questions:

  1. Should billionaires be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money promoting their politics?
  2. If they can spend unlimited amounts, should they be forced to disclose them?

If you know me, you know that I'm asking a trick question. I'm not referring to venture capitalist Ron Conway, the billionaire mentioned the story. I'm instead referring to Pierre Omidyar the billionaire founder of eBay who funds The Intercept, which blatantly promotes his political views such as those on NSA surveillance. Can Omidyar spend endless amounts on The Intercept? Should he be forced to disclose how much?

This question is at the heart of the Supreme Court decision in Citezen's United. It comes down to this: the Supreme Court was unable to craft rules that could tell Continue reading

Network Break 35

Excerpt: Coffee, doughnuts and networking. A perfect combination with Brocade, CloudRouter, HP, PacketZoom, Pertino, Juniper and much more.

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Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Network Break 35 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Cisco NXAPI

Earlier, I had written about Cisco NXOS device configuration/monitoring using Python and OnePK. Recently, I came across NXAPI approach to configure and monitor NXOS  devices. NXAPI uses either http/https to connect to NXOS devices and talk using NXOS CLI. For configuration, CLI is encoded in XML/JSON. For monitoring, CLI is encoded in XML/JSON and the … Continue reading Cisco NXAPI →

Are your ESXi uplinks saturated?

Iwan Rahabok sent me a link to a nice vRealize setup he put together to measure maximum utilization across all uplinks of a VMware host. Pretty handy when the virtualization people start deploying servers with two 10GE uplinks with all sorts of traffic haphazardly assigned to one or both of them.

Oh, if the previous paragraph sounds like Latin, and you should know a bit about vSphere/ESXi, take a hefty dose of my vSphere 6 webinar ;)

Scalability of the Great Cannon

Here is a great paper on China's Great Cannon, which was used to DDoS GitHub. One question is how scalable such a system can be, or how much resources it would take for China to intercept connections and replace content.

The first question is how much bandwidth China needs to monitor. According to the this website, in early 2015 that's 1.9-terabits/second (1,899,792-mbps).

The second question is how much hardware China needs to buy in order to intercept network traffic, reassemble TCP streams, and insert responses. The answer is about one $1000 desktop computer. In other words, China can deploy the Great Cannon using $200,000 worth of hardware.

This answer is a little controversial. Most people think that a mere desktop computer could not handle 10-gbps of throughput, much less do anything complicated with it like reassembling TCP streams. However, they are wrong. Intel has put an enormous amount of functionality into their hardware to solve precisely this problem. Unfortunately, modern software like Linux or Windows is a decade behind hardware advances, and cannot take advantage of this.

The first step is to bypass the operating system. This sounds a bit odd, but it's not hard to do. Continue reading

The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?

Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?

Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Catching up to other African nations, Zambia plans mobile infrastructure initiative

As an increasing number of people use mobile phones to access the Internet in Africa, Zambia is playing catch-up. To spur Internet and mobile phone connectivity throughout the country, the Zambian government has announced an initiative to build telecom infrastructure.The Zambian government says it will spend $65 million to erect new telecom towers across the country to be used by the country’s three mobile operators in the Southern African country.There’s little doubt than in many African countries, people depend on mobile phones for Internet access. The Mobile Africa 2015 study conducted by survey company GeoPoll and World Wide Worx, a technology analysis organization in South Africa, reports that Internet browsing via mobile phone is on the rise in the countries studied—South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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