Jeremy Schulman was the driving force behind the Puppet agent that Juniper implemented on some Junos switches (one of the first fully supported Puppet-on-a-switch implementations). In the meantime, he quit Juniper and started his own company focused on a network automation product – more than enough reasons to chat with him on Software Gone Wild.
Read more ...Not that I go out of my way to endorse one project/product over another, there is one that I have recently fallen in love with for streaming my media. Especially when it can use IPv6! So I needed a cross-platform solution for my streaming media needs. I was originally using XBMC, but only had it tied into the TV. I use several other computers and devices, in other locations outside of the house. So I read up on Plex. Got it installed with little to no effort, and could readily access my content where ever I was. I even tested this on my last trip to London, UK and was able to get a decent 1.2mbit/s stream from my house. Only issue was that it wasn’t using IPv6 in the app or accessing via plex.tv (server on that site only comes up with an IPv4 address).
So poking around I discovered 2 things: 1) I could access the Plex server directly at the IP/hostname of the server, and 2) there was a checkbox to enable IPv6!!
Simply browse to your Plex server, click on the settings icon (screwdriver + wrench), select Server, click on Networking and then “Show Continue reading
We’ve announced our partnership to work with Cumulus Networks earlier in 2014 to use Cumulus Linux as a Layer-2 VxLAN Gateway to bridge VLANs in the virtual network world to the VLANs in the physical world.
We’ve shipped that code as part of MidoNet version 1.6.
We now want to talk about how VTEP is not the only way MidoNet customers can use a switch that runs Cumulus Linux as the underlay (physical network) for the virtual, overlay networks. Just don’t think of running a set of gateway switches as the only way to benefit from these devices, we see many opportunities and benefits.
Here are some examples why it makes sense :
Remember that Cumulus Linux IS Linux. It’s not a switch OS that just happens to be based on Linux. It offers cloud automation capabilities that is so crucial to customers who are adopting to move towards building a Cloud. If you listen to Customers, Systems like Chef and Puppet are widely used in the deployment of systems like OpenStack, Continue reading
Yesterday, the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), submitted its final report on Remediation of Server-based DDoS Attacks.
The CSRIC’s Working Group 5 was tasked with developing recommendations for communications providers to enable them to mitigate the impact of high volume DDoS attacks launched from large data center and hosting environments.
The final report includes a comprehensive look at the DDoS threat landscape, covering everything from the massive size of today’s attacks, to the potential for collateral damage. The report describes how DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly complex, how they are being used as a diversion “to distract security resources while other attacks are being attempted, e.g., fraudulent transactions.” The report also discusses how botnet architectures are becoming more sophisticated and difficult to trace.
Given this complex and challenging threat landscape, we were grateful for the opportunity to contribute. The CSRIC has adapted Arbor Networks best practices for DDoS incident response as the Six Phases for DDoS Attack Preparation & Response.
Roland Dobbins, senior analyst with Arbor’s Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT), served as the Internet sub-group chairman of CSRIC IV WG5 – Server-Based Continue reading
At the IDF 2014 conference, Intel made a big song and dance about their Rack Scale Architecture which removes the need for “top of rack” networking and changes the nature of servers in a big way. My initial impression is that this has limited application in the enterprise or cloud providers but might be useful […]
The post PQ Show 33 – Intel Rack Scale Architecture – Real or Impractical ? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
SDN is happening. What questions should you be asking about your own development plan to learn SDN skills?
I’ve been thinking about this question in preparation for an upcoming Interop Debate on October 1st, where we’ll be discussing the options to pursue traditional certifications versus learning about SDN. Today’s post begins a series of posts related to topics surrounding that debate. To begin, we’ll look at three big-picture questions you should ask when you get serious about studying about SDN.
How much of your skill set happened to you, rather than being something you planned? How much of your learning relates to surviving today’s job tasks, versus learning for the future?
Let’s face it, many days, we do the job in front of us, with little time to devote to learning something unrelated. However, that’s a fundamental question for any IT knowledge-based worker. Do you have a development plan? Do you spend time working that plan? And now with SDN happening… how should you revise that plan in light of SDN? In the time you can devote this week/month/year, what should you be learning about SDN?
Some people will wait to learn SDN when the next project Continue reading
Before we go in to observed trends, let’s put some context on this post and definitions around monitoring. Network monitoring and tapping, this can be described as “packet capture, packet and session analysis and NetFlow generation with analytics”. Tap fabrics typically provide a means of extracting packets from a network but not so much the analysis. Tools like Wireshark, Lancope’s Stealth Watch and a good IDP solution are still required.
Current Situation and Legacy Methodology
In days of past (and most current networks), if you want/ed to harvest packets from a network the quickest route was to mirror a port to a server running Wireshark and filter the results to make sense of what was going on from a protocol and application point of view. Cisco have tools like the NAM, which comes in several forms such as a server, Catalyst 6500 switch module and ISR module. The NAM allows you to visually observe network trends and network conversations via generated graphs but also inspect by download the PCAP files. Probably one of the most pleasant experiences most people have in addition to Wireshark.
Some shortcomings exist with this approach in so much as the device that receives the mirrored Continue reading
In a blog week dedicated to the application and the policies that govern them, I wanted to add some detail on a discussion I have with customers quite often. It should be clear that we at Plexxi believe in application policy driven network behaviors. Our Affinities allow you to specify desired behavior between network endpoints, which will evolve with the enormous amount of policy work Mat described in his 3 piece article earlier this week.
Many times when I discuss Affinities and policies with customers or more generically with network engineering types, the explanation almost always lands at Access Control Lists (ACLs). Cisco created the concept of ACLs (and its many variations used for other policy constructs) way way back as a mechanism to instruct the switching chips inside their routers to accept or drop traffic. It started with a very simple “traffic from this source to this destination is dropped” and has very significantly evolved since then in Cisco’s implementation and many other of the router and switch vendors.
There are 2 basic components in an ACL:
1. what should I match a packet on
2. what is the action I take once I found a match.
Both Continue reading
I’m running or participating in five workshops or sessions during next week’s Interop New York. Three of them build on each other, so you might want to attend all of them in sequence:
Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds starts with requirements gathering phase and focuses on physical infrastructure design decisions covering compute, storage, physical and virtual networking, and network services. If you plan to build a private (or a reasonable small public) cloud, start here.
Read more ...
With Docker containers fast becoming the standard for building blocks for distributed apps, we’re working with the Docker community to make it easier for users to quickly code and assemble their projects. Official Repos, publicly downloadable for free from the Docker Hub Registry, are curated images informed by user feedback and best practices. They represent a focused community effort to provide great base images for applications, so developers and sysadmins can focus on building new features and functionality while minimizing repetitive work on commodity scaffolding and plumbing.
At DockerCon last June, we announced the first batch of Official Repos which covered many standard tools like OS distributions, web servers, and databases. At the time, we had several organizations join us to curate Official Repos for their particular project, including Fedora, CentOS, and Canonical. And the community responded enthusiastically as well: in the three months since they launched, Official Repos have so grown in popularity that they now account for almost 20% of all image downloads.
Parlez-vous…?
Based on the search queries on the Docker Hub Registry and discussions with many of you, we determined that the community wants pre-built stacks of their favorite programming languages. Specifically, developers Continue reading
It has been a while since Cisco acquired Tail-F but no one seems to have noticed how this acquisition impacts Cisco's competitors by upsetting the software development plans.
The post Musing: Cisco Buys Tail-F and Disrupts Competitor Product Development appeared first on EtherealMind.
This morning, Stephane Chazelas disclosed a vulnerability in the program bash, the GNU Bourne-Again-Shell. This software is widely used, especially on Linux servers, such as the servers used to provide CloudFlare’s performance and security cloud services.
This vulnerability is a serious risk to Internet infrastructure, as it allows remote code execution in many common configurations, and the severity is heightened due to bash being in the default configuration of most Linux servers. While bash is not directly used by remote users, it is used internally by popular software packages such as web, mail, and administration servers. In the case of a web server, a specially formatted web request, when passed by the web server to the bash application, can cause the bash software to run commands on the server for the attacker. More technical information was posted on the oss-sec mailing list.
The security community has assigned this bash vulnerability the ID CVE-2014-6271.
As soon as we became aware of this vulnerability, CloudFlare’s engineering and operations teams tested a patch to protect our servers, and deployed it across our infrastructure. As of now, all CloudFlare servers are protected against CVS-2014-6271.
Everyone who is using the bash software package should upgrade Continue reading
Necessity of Monitoring and Analytics in the SDN Era
A recent SDNCentral article about the Five Habits of Highly Effective SDN Startups asserts that achieving success in the SDN landscape will require creating focused products that solve real-world problems. In addition, the article emphasizes the need to build a sales channel with great partners, market strategically but be lean and mean, and adopt a slow and steady route into the SDN world.
The article quoted the new landscape of SDN as we know it. Take a look at the diagram below. The building blocks range from controllers to network operating systems to monitoring and analytics.
As the above diagram illustrates, monitoring and analytics are key. With SDN, the network self-adapts to the new demands of the application, and without visibility into these changes it’s very hard to say if an SDN application is doing the right things to your network. Understanding the programmable events that happen in real time requires mature analytics technology that can correlate service delivery to physical and virtual resource states.
At Packet Design, we have been working on a solution for SDN analytics Continue reading
