FCC releases 400-page net neutrality order

The 400-page net neutrality order released by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission includes a long legal defense of the commission’s vote last month to reclassify broadband as a regulated telecommunications service.The order, released Thursday in the wake of the commission’s vote to approve net neutrality rules in late February, establishes “clear and enforceable rules” to protect consumers, an FCC official said.While the order is long, the actual changes to the Code of Federal Regulations that the FCC approved amount to eight pages, running from pages 283 to 290 in Appendix A of the order. An executive summary describing the changes runs from page 7 to page 18.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware expands desktop virtualization to Linux

VMware’s VMware Horizon desktop virtualization software suite will soon deliver virtual Linux desktops over a network, in addition to the Microsoft Windows desktops it has long provided for remote workers.The company has launched an early access program for customers to test a version of Horizon 6 that can package server-based Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux desktops so they can be accessed from remote computers and mobile devices.Although Windows remains the dominant platform for enterprise desktops, at least a small percentage of organizations use Linux instead, according to market reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hilarious video of Apple engineer explaining the story behind the new MacBook

Apple's new 12-inch MacBook might be a point of controversy for some. In order to attain a certain level of thinness, Apple completely removed all of the familiar ports and replaced it with just one – USB C.Now, in this hilarious parody video, we get an "insider" perspective from an "Apple engineer" on what that development process was like. It's a must watch! To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lyft raises $530 million in latest funding round

Lyft has raised US$530 million in its latest funding round, and plans to use the money to beef up its IT staff, expand its footprint and boost existing services.Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten led the round. With the latest cash infusion, Lyft has raised a total of $862 million from investors. The ride-hailing company is now reportedly valued at $2.5 billion.Lyft, based in San Francisco, said Wednesday it will use the funding to increase its presence in the 65 U.S. cities where it operates and to expand to other markets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cumulus Networks Support — Community Style

Sometimes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Today we launch a new method of support to the Cumulus Networks family, a community question and answer site. This is a place where you can ask either a simple question for which you couldn’t find an answer, or maybe something you’ve always wanted to know. It’s also a place to engage in conversation with other users that may be experiencing things you have seen in the past or may encounter in the future.

To be sure, Cumulus Networks employees will be on hand to assist and direct you to the documentation and knowledge base as appropriate. If a question is too complex, we will assess your needs based upon your support entitlements and work with you to open a ticket so our excellent support team can assist you in figuring out your issue. The community portal is a supplement to the support team, not a replacement.

Our growth is directly related to you, our community, and in that vein, we want to offer more ways that you can be involved — this is just the beginning. Look for more to come in upcoming blog posts.

The post Cumulus Networks Continue reading

BGPMon Joins OpenDNS

Dear BGPmon.net user,

I’m excited to announce that BGPmon has been acquired by OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a leading cloud-delivered network security company known for engineering predictive intelligence technology that stops malicious activity before it can threaten a network.

Over the last few years BGPmon has grown from a community service into a successful business that helps thousands of network engineers from around the world monitor their networks. Throughout this journey, we’ve developed close relationships with many of you and together, worked on some truly fascinating cases.

Becoming a part of OpenDNS is a logical next step for BGPmon. With its engineering resources, massive scale and cloud delivery model, OpenDNS is the right direction to continue growing the BGPmon service. I’m confident that moving forward BGPmon will only get better.

The transition plan is straightforward. OpenDNS will invest in building out the service even more but also is committed to keeping the free features free. Simply put, nothing regarding the service will change other than we’ll continue adding new functionality.

On a personal note, I’d like to thank all of you for your continued support and encouragement. I am excited for the changes ahead and personally being a part of Continue reading

Network Break 31

Over-opinionated analysis on data network and IT Infrastructure. And virtual doughnuts.

Author information

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 31 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Topology Challenge Winners

Production Designs Are Compromise – And That’s Okay

A Quick Update on OpenStack Congress

OpenStack Congress, a project aimed at providing “policy as a service” for OpenStack clouds, is a project I’ve had the privilege of being involved in from very early days. I first mentioned Congress almost a year ago, and since then the developers have been hard at work on the project. Recently, one of the lead developers posted a summary of some pretty impressive performance improvements that have been made with Congress.

I won’t repeat all the sordid details here; for all the details, I encourage you to go read the full post over at ruleyourcloud.com. Just to give you a quick highlight of some of the performance gains they’ve been able to realize, consider these numbers:

• A 500x improvement in query performance
• A 20,000x increase in data import speed
• A 6x reduction in memory overhead

Given the nature of Congress—that it must, by its very definition, import data from multiple cloud services and perform queries across that data to determine policy violations—the performance improvements seen in query performance and data import speeds are quite significant.

For the detailed explanation of how the developers were able to see such incredible performance improvements, see the full post. If you’re interested in Continue reading

Routing Leak briefly takes down Google

This morning, users of Google around the world were unable to access many of the company’s services due to a routing leak in India. Beginning at 08:58 UTC Indian broadband provider Hathway (AS17488) incorrectly announced over 300 Google prefixes to its Indian transit provider Bharti Airtel (AS9498).

Bharti in turn announced these routes to the rest of the world, and a number of ISPs accepted these routes including US carriers Cogent (AS174), Level 3 (AS3549) as well as overseas incumbent carriers Orange (France Telecom, AS5511), Singapore Telecom (Singtel, AS7473) and Pakistan Telecom (PTCL, AS17557). Like many providers around the world, Hathway peers with Google so that their customers have more direct connectivity with Google services. But when that private relationship enters the public Internet the result can be accidental global traffic redirection.

Last fall, I wrote two blog posts here and here about the issues surrounding routing leaks such this one. Routing leaks happen regularly and can have the effect of misdirecting global traffic. Last month, I gave a talk in the NANOG 63 Peering Forum entitled “Hidden Risks of Peering” that went over some examples of routing leaks like this one.

Below is a graph showing the Continue reading

What the *, traceroute?

If you’ve ever done a traceroute from one IOS box to another, you’ve undoubtedly seen output like this:

R8# traceroute 192.168.100.7
Tracing the route to 192.168.100.7
VRF info: (vrf in name/id, vrf out name/id)
  1 192.168.0.1 4 msec 3 msec 4 msec
  2 192.168.100.7 4 msec *  0 msec

That “msec * msec” output. Why is the middle packet always lost?? And why only on the last hop??

This was always something curious to me but not something I ever bothered to learn about. Well it turns out that IOS has a rate limiter that meters the generation of ICMP Unreachable messages. The default setting for the rate limiter is 1 ICMP Unreach every 500ms. Since IOS’s traceroute doesn’t put a delay between its probe packets, the delay between when 192.168.100.7 receives the first and second probe packets is much less than 500ms. The second packet violates the rate limiter and so 192.168.100.7 drops it.

Why isn’t the third packet also dropped? Because the traceroute command waits for 3 seconds (by default) before deciding that a probe packet was lost and Continue reading

Intel lowers Q1 revenue outlook, citing sluggish PC sales

Intel lowered its revenue outlook for the first quarter and now expects to bring in about US$12.8 billion, down from its previous forecast of about $13.7 billion.Intel attributed the nearly $1 billion [b] downward revision to sluggish sales of business desktop PCs and lowered inventory levels across the PC supply chain. In particular, the “refresh rate” at which small and medium-size businesses are replacing Windows XP computers with newer ones has been slower than expected. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP last April.Intel also cited “challenging” macroeconomic and currency conditions, particularly in Europe, for the revised outlook. Intel will update other financial expectations on April 14 when it reports first quarter earnings, but for now those prior expectations should be disregarded since they “have been withdrawn,” the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VCE expands its converged infrastructure portfolio

Software and virtualization continues to evolve the data center faster than ever before. As in the case with everything in life, there's never a free lunch, and the price for this rapid evolution has been increased complexity. Historically, data center infrastructure was deployed in nice, neat silos where every application had its own servers, storage, and network resources. The obvious downside of this type of deployment model is poor resource utilization. Now we innovate in software and make everything virtual to maximize utilization, but we also drive up complexity.An argument can be made that no company has been more successful at simplifying this complexity than VCE, particularly for multi-vendor environments. Late last year, VCE was rolled into EMC's federation of companies to give it a single owner and enable it to roll out new products that address a broader set of needs than just its flagship product, VBlock.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scaling Congress

(This post was written by Tim Hinrichs, Shawn Hargan, and Alex Yip.)

Policy is a topic that we’ve touched on before here at Network Heresy. In fact, policy was the focus of a series of blog posts: first describing the policy problem and why policy is so important, then describing the range of potential solutions, followed by a comparison of policy efforts within OpenStack, and finally culminating in a detailed description of Congress: a project aimed at providing “policy as a service” to OpenStack clouds. (Check out the OpenStack wiki page on Congress for more details on the Congress project itself.)

Like other OpenStack projects, Congress is moving very quickly. Recently, one of the lead developers of Congress summarized some of the performance improvements that have been realized in recent builds of Congress. These performance improvements include things like much faster query performance, massive reductions in data import speeds, and significant reductions in memory overhead.

If you’re interested in the full details on the performance improvements that the Congress team is seeing, go read the full post on scaling the performance of Congress over at ruleyourcloud.com. (You can also subscribe to the RSS feed Continue reading

Networking Basics – Test 1

There are 10 basic questions below. Most of them relatively basic networking questions. This test can be taken only one time, so take your time, provide your Name and Email so you can be in Leaderboard. If you like this networking basics test,please leave a comment, so I continue to prepare similar tests. After solving this test… Read More »

The post Networking Basics – Test 1 appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

When SSL Certificates Go Wild

You’ve set up your website and secured it with an SSL certificate that you bought through your ISP. Everything works fine and the chain of trust is just fine in your browser, but when you try accessing your secured site using a command line tool, the connection fails. Why? There’s a good chance that you are not sending your intermediate certificate(s) along with the server certificate.

PKI Trust Review

As a quick reminder, the whole point of SSL certificates and the Public Key Infrastructure is to prove that the site you connected to is the one it says it is. How do we know? The server sends you a certificate with its name in it, digitally signed by an Issuer. If you choose to trust that Issuer’s honesty and believe that they made sure they issued to the right site, you implicitly trust that the end site is the right one; it’s a “Chain of Trust.”

In reality, we don’t typically trust many Issuers. Look in the Trusted Root certificates for your browser, or on a Mac, open Keychain Access and look in System Roots, and you’ll see that for Yosemite in this case, globally – to establish SSL Continue reading

EU law makers to discuss whether Facebook qualifies as critical infrastructure

European legislators are about to reopen a debate on whether Facebook and Twitter should be subject to the same rules as power grids and payment services for protecting critical IT infrastructure and the data it carries.The proposed rules require providers of essential energy, transport, banking and healthcare services to protect their communications networks from hacking and intrusion, and to disclose security breaches. “Key Internet enablers” such as e-commerce platforms and search engines might also have to comply with the rules.Which companies the new law will cover, though, is a focus of upcoming negotiations between the three European Union law-making bodies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why is Apple avoiding wireless charging?

First, the iPhone 6 arrived last year without it. Now, comes the Apple Watch. Same story. Wireless charging seems to be something Apple's going to wait on even as major mobile manufacturers adopt it.Last week, Samsung announced that its Galaxy 6 and S6 Edge smartphones will have wireless charging. Two years ago, the Windows Phone 8-based Lumia 920 smartphone had wireless charging. So it's not as if it's not becoming a more mainstream technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What caused the Google service interruption?

This morning people on twitter reported that they were unable to reach Google services. Businessinsider followed up with a story in which they mentioned that the Google service interruption primarily involved European and Indian users.

In this blog we’ll take a quick look at what exactly happened by looking at our BGP data. The first clue comes from David Roy and Franck Klopfenstein ‏on twitter who noticed traffic was re-routed towards AS9498 in India. Digging through our BGP data we are able to indeed confirm that routing paths for many google prefixes changed to a path that includes the Indian AS 9498 between 08:58 UTC and 09:14 UTC.

Let’s take a look at an example. In my case www.google.com resolves to the following addresses:
www.google.com has address 74.125.226.19
www.google.com has address 74.125.226.20
www.google.com has address 74.125.226.17
www.google.com has address 74.125.226.16
www.google.com has address 74.125.226.18
www.google.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4006:806::1014

The IPv4 addresses are all in the 74.125.226.0/24 range. If we now look at the BGP announcements for that Continue reading