PlexxiPulse—Arrow IoT Immersions in Boston 3/26

Last week, we were in Santa Clara, California for Arrow Electronics’ Internet of Things Immersions conference. We demonstrated our big data fabrics, learned about Arrow’s #FiveYearsOut philosophy and conversed with innovators and thought leaders from businesses, government agencies and academia. We will be exhibiting at the last installment of the Immersions conference in Boston on March 26 at the Hynes Convention Center. Come see Plexxi in action and to talk with our team about the next era of IT. You can register to attend here. We can’t wait to see you!

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Have a great weekend!

Channelnomics: SDN and SDS key for CIOs – Walsh
By Jessica Meek
Software defined networking (SDN) and software defined storage (SDS) are key concerns for chief information officers (CIOs), delegates at the ITEX 2015 National Conference and Expo in Fort Lauderdale, FL heard today. In his keynote address, Lawrence M. Walsh, CEO and chief analyst at The 2112 Group, said this was a top concern for CIOs he speaks with. “CIOs consistently tell me that what’s getting them excited is SDN and SDS. This is the ability to Continue reading

How the Apple Watch is made

Apple products are highly touted for being extremely sleek and well-designed. While some companies opt to use cheaper materials in an effort to preserve the bottom line, Apple has a penchant for sparing no expense when it comes to manufacturing.As a result, Apple not only opts to use the best materials available, but it's also willing to expend millions upon millions of dollars on advanced machinery and tooling processes that competitors either a) can't afford to use themselves or b) simply don't want to. Consequently, the build quality on Apple products is typically best in class.Apple's next big game-changing product is the Apple Watch, slated for release on April 24. During Apple's recent media event, the company, as it's prone to do, showcased a video detailing certain aspects of the Apple Watch manufacturing process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel to ship built-to-order Xeon D chips in second half

Intel will start offering custom chips based on the Xeon D starting in the second half of this year, making it easier to tailor servers to process specific workloads.Intel this week announced Xeon D chips for servers, storage and networking, but the four- and eight-core chips have a fixed set of components and features. The built-to-order chips later this year will be tailored to customer specifications, and to needs in storage, networking and web serving.For example, Intel will be able to customize chips to include components such as FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips used for specific tasks. For example, Microsoft uses FPGAs in servers to boost the accuracy of search results in Bing. Bringing FPGAs inside Xeon D could make the chip more versatile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU ministers OK new cross-border data protection plan, sparking criticism

Ministers of European Union countries have agreed on a new plan to deal with cross-border privacy cases. Companies and a variety of critics, though, have called the proposal a mess.The plan, at least originally, was supposed to put in place a “one-stop-shop” mechanism that would make it easier for businesses and citizens to deal with privacy-related complaints. The idea of a streamlined approach to resolving privacy issues is a key pillar of EU data-protection reform and member states agreed on a version of such a plan on Friday, said Vra Jourová, European Commissioner for Justice during a press conference.At the moment, companies operating in the EU like Google, Facebook and Apple can be held responsible for privacy issues by national data protection authorities (DPAs). In Google’s case, for instance, this has led to multiple simultaneous investigations into the privacy policy it introduced in 2012. Enforcement actions related to various complaints have been taken in several EU countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Analysis: CloudFlare Keyless SSL Scales Down Internet Connections

Providing a web application on the Internet can be a risky business. DDOS attacks are commonly exceeding 40 Gigabits per second of data, crackers are web crawling the Internet looking for vulnerabilities and much more. As a result, the data centre Internet connection is scaled for a worst case scenario and not for customer need. […]


The post Analysis: CloudFlare Keyless SSL Scales Down Internet Connections appeared first on EtherealMind.

Why joining APs to a Controller Across a NAT Needs Special Configurations

Many wireless engineers know that having a lightweight AP join up to a controller across a NAT requires some extra configuration. But many don’t understand why it needs the configuration. This article will talk about what the NAT is, why it causes a problem for the normal join process, and what the configuration changes do to make things work.

What is NAT and where do we see it in the wireless world?

NAT stands for Network Address Translation, and it does pretty much what the name implies. It translates addresses from their original values to something new. Let’s take a look at a classic wireless example.

Let’s say I have an office Extend AP (OEAP) in my house, and I want it to join the WLC in my company’s DMZ. But I don’t want to actually configure a public IP on my WLC. This is where the NAT comes into play.

Screen Shot 2015-03-13 at 12.12.16 PM

In the image above, the OEAP talks through the firewall in order to talk to the DMZ WLC. In order for the AP to talk to the WLC, it has to target a public IP because it needs to communicate across the Internet. So if the WLC itself doesn’t Continue reading

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 3/13/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert client’s who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

  • Celso Akira Myasaki, CCIE #47386 (Data Center)
  • David Ratcliffe, CCIE #47463 (Wireless)
  • Frederik Schon, CCIE #47321 (Wireless)
  • JP Cedeno, CCIE #47408 (Routing & Switching)
  • Sandeep Choudhary, CCIE #47462 (Wireless)

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

Digital transformation requires a different approach to IT

The digitization of information is impacting businesses faster than ever before. It seems every week a new company pops up and disrupts the status quo. Think of how fast Uber has disrupted the taxicab industry or how rapidly Airbnb is reshaping hospitality. Another good example is how Square has enabled point of sale to be offered on low-cost mobile devices instead of having to pay thousands of dollars for proprietary systems with long installation times.Business disruption used to take decades to happen. Consider how Walmart changed the face of retail over a 20-year period. This was considered fast at the time, but now think of how the companies I mentioned above seemingly changed their industry in just a few years. How is this possible? Well, businesses like Square, Airbnb, and Uber were born in the digital era, where agility is the norm. A traditional retailer using legacy systems can take months or even years to change direction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t trust other people’s USB flash drives, they could fry your laptop

Have you ever heard stories about malicious USB thumb drives frying laptops and thought they were far fetched? An electronics engineer heard them too, and then set out to create a prototype.The “USB Killer” device was created by a do-it-yourself hardware enthusiast who described his project, complete with pictures and technical details, on a Russian blogging platform in February. An English-language version was posted on a different site earlier this week.The malicious USB thumb drive uses an inverting DC-to-DC converter to draw power from the computer’s USB port in order to charge a capacitor bank to -110 Volts (negative voltage). The power is then sent back into the USB interface via a transistor and the process is repeated in a loop.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oldest dot-com address sits sadly underused 30 years after its historic registration

Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet’s first dot-com address: Symbolics.com.Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration.The Cambridge-headquartered company went out of business about a decade ago (though remnants live on) and in August 2009 the Symbolics.com address was sold for an undisclosed sum to XF.com Investments, whose CEO Aron Meystedt said in a press release: “For us to own the first domain is very special to our company, and we feel blessed for having the ability to obtain this unique property."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This isn’t your father’s enterprise software

When Patrick Benson joined Ovation Brands back in September 2013, he was given a tall order: modernize an array of legacy IT systems that could no longer keep up with the restaurant-chain conglomerate’s business processes.“I was strapped to a rocket and shot out of a cannon,” said Benson, the company’s CIO. “My job was to figure out what tools were needed.”Originally founded in 1983 under the name Old Country Buffet, Ovation had grown considerably over the years to comprise more than 300 restaurants in 35 states, operating under brands including Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse and Ryan’s.“We were conducting business in a much different way that was better and faster than our systems could keep up with,” Benson explained.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This isn’t your father’s enterprise software

When Patrick Benson joined Ovation Brands back in September 2013, he was given a tall order: modernize an array of legacy IT systems that could no longer keep up with the restaurant-chain conglomerate’s business processes.“I was strapped to a rocket and shot out of a cannon,” said Benson, the company’s CIO. “My job was to figure out what tools were needed.”Originally founded in 1983 under the name Old Country Buffet, Ovation had grown considerably over the years to comprise more than 300 restaurants in 35 states, operating under brands including Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse and Ryan’s.“We were conducting business in a much different way that was better and faster than our systems could keep up with,” Benson explained.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK traffic diverted through Ukraine

v5

On the heels of the BGP leak yesterday that briefly impaired Google services around the world, comes another routing incident that impacted some other important Internet services.

Beginning on Saturday, Ukrainian telecom provider, Vega, began announcing 14 British Telecom (BT) routes, resulting in the redirection of Internet traffic through Ukraine for a handful of British Telecom customers.  Early yesterday morning, Vega announced another 167 BT prefixes for 1.5 hours resulting in the rerouting of additional traffic destined for some of BT’s customers, including the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, the “organization responsible for the design, manufacture and support of warheads for the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent.”


v5

Background

In early 2013, Ukrainian provider Vega (AS12883) became a reseller of BT services, but prior to Saturday had never announced any BT routes.  Then, in the middle of a weekend night in Europe (02:37 UTC on Saturday, March 7th), Vega began announcing 14 prefixes typically announced by AS2856 of BT.  These prefixes are listed below.

109.234.168.0/21 Thales Transport and Security Ltd (Barnet, GB)
109.234.169.0/24 Thales Transport and Security Ltd (Ealing, GB)
144.87.142.0/24  Royal Mail Group Limited (Sheffield, GB)
144.87.143.0/24  Royal Mail Group Limited (Chesterfield, GB)
147.182.214.0/24 Black & Veatch (Manchester, GB)
193.113.245.0/24 BT - 21CN (GB)
193.221.55.0/24  Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget SCA  (GB)
193. Continue reading

Role Based Access Control in IOS

I don’t believe this is well known: Cisco IOS has Role Based Access Control (RBAC) which can be used to create and assign different levels of privileged access to the device. Without RBAC there are two access levels in IOS: a read-only mode with limited access to commands and no ability to modify the running config (also called privilege level 1) and enable mode with full administrative access. There is no middle ground; it’s all or nothing. RBAC allows creation of access levels somewhere between nothing and everything. A common use case is creating a role for the first line NOC analyst which might allow them to view the running config, configure interfaces, and configure named access-lists.

A “role” in IOS is called a “view” and since views control which commands are available in the command line parser, they are configured under the parser. A view can be assigned a password which allows users to “enable” into the view. More typically, the view is assigned by the RADIUS/TACACS server as part of the authorization process when a user is logging into the device.

A view is configured with the “parser view <view-name>” config command after which commands are added/removed to/from Continue reading

If you hate PC bloatware, here are the vendors to avoid

Lenovo may have publicly buried bloatware, but it’s anything but dead. After the company’s Superfish scandal, we shopped Best Buy and found it alive and well on major vendors’ PC offerings. A little research should save you from the worst of it, though. Here’s what we learned. Bloatware is as bloatware does We call it bloatware, but PC executives make clear that they install software on PCs to benefit consumers and pad tiny profit margins. The vast majority is harmless (if obnoxious), and some, such as a year’s subscription to Microsoft’s Office 365, arguably increase a PC’s value without increasing the price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How does Apple Pay work on the Apple Watch?

So, it's April 25, 2015 and the delivery man has just delivered your new Apple Watch. Your first instinct: Spend more hard-earned cash trying out Apple's mobile payment system, Apple Pay.The question is, how?Although Apple Pay has been available for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users since October, it works differently with Apple Watch, which arrives in retail on April 24. (Pre-orders for the Watch, which start at $349 and rise into the thousands of dollars from there, begin April 10.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fujitsu’s thin heat pipe could let smartphone chips run cooler

If parts of your phone are sometimes too hot to handle, Fujitsu may have the answer: a thin heat pipe that can spread heat around mobile devices, reducing extremes of temperature.Fujitsu Laboratories created a heat pipe in the form of a loop that’s less than 1mm thick. The device can transfer about 20W, about five times more heat than current thin heat pipes or thermal materials, the company said.The technology could improve smartphones’ performance by helping cool their CPUs and other heat-producing components, spreading that heat more evenly across other parts of the phone.Overheating has been an issue with some Samsung Galaxy smartphones, and the Korean manufacturer apparently dropped Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor from the Galaxy S6 due to excessive heat concerns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC girds for legal attacks on net neutrality order

The Federal Communication Commission's 400-page official order on net neutrality, released Thursday, will undoubtedly elicit lawsuits on various fronts once it is officially published in the Federal Register.Attacks are expected to range from whether current law allows the agency to legally act as it has to whether carriers feel they can be treated fairly in setting up services in the future. One of the biggest areas of dispute will likely revolve around the FCC's new authority to oversee interconnection deals struck between broadband providers like Comcast and content providers like Netflix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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