Rules Shouldn’t Have Exceptions

MerkurRazor

On my way to Virtualization Field Day 4, I ran into a bit of a snafu at the airport that made me think about policy and application. When I put my carry-on luggage through the X-ray, the officer took it to the back and gave it a thorough screening. During that process, I was informed that my double-edged safety razor would not be able to make the trip (or the blade at least). I was vexed, as this razor had flown with me for at least a whole year with nary a peep from security. When I related as much to the officer, the response was “I’m sorry no one caught it before.”

Everyone Is The Same, Except For Me

This incident made me start thinking about polices in networking and security and how often they are arbitrarily enforced. We see it every day. The IT staff comes up with a new plan to reduce mailbox sizes or reduce congestion by enforcing quality of service (QoS). Everyone is all for the plan during the discussion stages. When the time comes to implement the idea, the exceptions start happening. Upper management won’t have mailbox limitations. The accounting department is Continue reading

Internet for the Next 3 Billion

37406-4

Last month, I traveled to Doha, Qatar to participate in the ITU’s Telecom World conference. While there I got to understand how a satellite provider brings Internet access to South Sudan using medium-earth orbit satellites and, amazingly, achieves terrestrial latencies to a region where reliable terrestrial connections simply don’t exist!  The mission of this company is to help close the digital divide by extending Internet access to the estimated three billion people on the planet who are currently not served.  Our measurements show the that performance improvement over traditional satellite can be dramatic.

ITU Telecom World

First, let me say a few words about the conference itself and then I’ll review this intriguing new satellite service.  In Doha, I was on a panel entitled Affordable International Backhaul and chaired by Abu Saaed Kahn of LIRNEAsia, a telecommunications policy institute primarily focused on the Asia-Pacific region.

Panel Session:Affordable International Backhaul
On the panel, Siddhartha Raja of the World Bank and Khaled Naguib Sedrak of NxtVn described creative approaches to the common problem of liberalizing telecom markets in developing countries. While it is an established fact that a liberalized telecom market yields better service for its customers and spurs greater economic growth, Continue reading

Zero Touch Provisioning in a Bare Metal World

Who doesn’t like automation?  If you’re speaking to somebody in IT, then the short answer is “nobody”.

While the term Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) might be increasingly more common to networking, the concept of automation has existed for years in IT.  At its core, ZTP is an automation solution that’s designed to reduce errors and save time when an IT administrator needs to bring new infrastructure online.

This is particularly useful for data center servers, where scale and configuration similarities across systems make automation a necessity.  In the server world, the Linux-based operating system has revolutionized on boarding and provisioning.  Rather than using command-line interfaces (CLI) to configure these systems one at a time, administrators can use automation tools to roll out the operating system software, patches, and packages on new servers with a single command, or the click of a mouse.

Advanced scripting capabilities also allow administrators to tailor the boot configuration of these systems with profiles for specific applications.  So for example, if you need ten servers for a new Hadoop cluster, you can load this with one profile, but if you need six new servers for a new web application, you can Continue reading

phpipam MySQL database optimizations

Having large amount of subnets (and other tables) on unoptimised MySQL database server can significantly increase page loads. To see which parameters need to be change I usually use mysqltuner perl script, which connects to database, analyses data and proposes which parameters need to be changed that are not optimally set based on current load.mysqltuner

Installation is simple:

1.) Fetch mysqltuner on FreeBSD:

cd ~
fetch http://mysqltuner.pl

or wget on linux:

wget http://mysqltuner.com

2.) Make it executable:

chmod +x mysqltuner.pl

3.) And run it to analyse database, you have to provide administrative credentials.

./mysqltuner.pl

 

Any other similar scripts out there you would recommend?

brm

Citrix Acquires Sanbolic

I just saw the news that Citrix has acquired Sanbolic, a storage virtualization company that I’ve written about before. (TechCrunch also has a quick write-up as well.) Early this year, Sanbolic announced their storage virtualization product, completing a pivot from offering a Windows-only solution (file system and volume manager) to a multi-platform solution that encompasses multiple storage tiers, multiple operating systems, and multiple hypervisors.

It will be interesting to see how this acquisition affects the virtualization industry. With the exception of a few major players running open source Xen, Citrix has thus far been unsuccessful (to my knowledge, correct me if I’m wrong) in making any significant inroads with XenServer (either commercial or open source). KVM seems to be the open source hypervisor of choice while VMware’s vSphere continues to dominate (for now) the commercial market—leaving XenServer with leftovers. The same can be said for CloudStack, which—with a few exceptions—is losing to OpenStack on the open source side and VMware’s offerings on the commercial side.

So the big question becomes, “Will the Sanbolic acquisition change things?” Will the addition of a storage virtualization solution that supports multiple operating systems and multiple hypervisors give Citrix an edge that Continue reading

Leaky Abstractions

Much of our life, as engineers, is about building, manipulating, and using abstractions. For instance, C is nothing but an abstraction on top of the actual register set provided by a particular processor. HTML is nothing but an abstraction for formatting and display (a markup language), implemented in — well, C. There is a lot of power in such abstractions, of course. Without them we couldn’t build operating systems, applications, browsers, web pages — or networks.

Ethernet is an abstraction of electronic signals (anyone remember Manchester Encoding?). IP is an abstraction of every physical layer in the world. TCP is an simulation, or abstraction, of a reliable connection oriented link over (completely unreliable) IP. HTTP is an abstraction of a flow of information, a stream, between two computers. It’s all abstractions — as the philosopher might say, “it’s abstractions all the way down.” So what’s wrong with this?

All abstractions are leaky. What do I mean when I say abstractions are leaky? Let’s turn to the originator of the phrase, Joel Spolsky:

Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There’s leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions.

This is the Continue reading

VMware NSX: a short introduction and HOWTO install it

NSX is the SDN solution by VMware. NSX is  available as: NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) NSX Multi-Hypervisor (NSX-MH) NSX-MH is NSX for Multi Hypervisors (ESXi, KVM, Xen, Hyper-V). This post is focused on NSX-V. Acronyms DFW: Distributed FireWall DLR: Distributed Logical Router LIF: Logical InterFace UWA: User World Agent VDS: VSphere Distributed Switch VIB: VSphere Installation Bundle VNID: VXLAN […]

Switching is not working on VMware NSX

In this scenario we have three VMs deployed on a NSX vSwitch with VNI 5002. Two are running on the same hosts and they can ping each other, the other one is running on a separated host and cannot ping the other VMs. Check if at least one interface is configured for VXLAN: ~ # […]

A Call for Better Vulnerability Response

Microsoft forced a self-serving vulnerability disclosure policy on the industry 10 years ago, but cries foul when Google does the same today.

Ten years ago, Microsoft dominated the cybersecurity industry. It employed, directly or through consultancies, the largest chunk of security experts. The ability to grant or withhold business meant influencing those consulting companies -- Microsoft didn't even have to explicitly ask for consulting companies to fire Microsoft critics for that to happen. Every product company depended upon Microsoft's goodwill in order to develop security products for Windows, engineering and marketing help that could be withheld on a whim.

This meant, among other things, that Microsoft dictated the "industry standard" of how security problems ("vulnerabilities") were reported. Cybersecurity researchers who found such bugs were expected to tell the vendor in secret, and give the vendor as much time as they needed in order to fix the bug. Microsoft sometimes sat on bugs for years before fixing them, relying upon their ability to blacklist researchers to keep them quiet. Security researchers who didn't toe the line found bad things happening to them.

I experienced this personally. We found a bug in a product called TippingPoint that allowed us to decrypt their Continue reading

PQ Show 41 – HP Networking’s Sarwar Raza on the Meaning of Open

This sponsored podcast is a continuation of our series recorded at HP Discover Barcelona 2014. Our thanks to Chris Young for organizing the topics and guests. The interesting conversations in Barcelona at HP Discover 2014 continued with a chat about the shifty meaning of “open.” In the world of technology, being open means a lot of different […]

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 3M 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 PQ Show 41 – HP Networking’s Sarwar Raza on the Meaning of Open appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

BGPSEC: Leaks and Leaks

This is the final post in my series on BGPSEC — I will probably follow this up, at some point, with a couple of posts on some alternatives to BGPSEC, and the larger issue of the evolution of BGP. Basic Operation Protections Offered Replays, Timers, and Performance Signatures and Performance In this final post, I […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, 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.
TwitterGoogle+LinkedIn

The post BGPSEC: Leaks and Leaks appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

Taming Netlink

Netlink is a Linux Kernel interface that is used to talk Networking between Kernel processes, or from userland to Kernel processes. This post documents how I tamed Netlink and make working with it in Golang easier.

If you want to create an interface, set an MTU, set an IP address …

Taming Netlink

Netlink is a Linux Kernel interface that is used to talk Networking between Kernel processes, or from userland to Kernel processes. This post documents how I tamed Netlink and make working with it in Golang easier.

If you want to create an interface, set an MTU, set an IP address etc... on a Linux machine then you have to talk Netlink to do it. For Golang, there are a number of libraries, but this one seems to be gaining a lot of traction recently. Honorable mentions go to Tenus and Docker's libcontainer.

Now, this library is good, but it isn't complete and some of the behavior I need is missing. So how does one go about implementing it you might ask?

Here's my process:

1. Browse the iproute2 source code

The iproute2 utility is insanely useful - it replaces ifconfig and route for those with memories long enough. In my case, the feature I wanted was here and I could take a look at the exact message structure required :)

2. Debugging Netlink

Once I'd written my tests and code, I wasn't surprised to see that things were not working. strace will get you part of the way, but it's Continue reading

Taming Netlink

Netlink is a Linux Kernel interface that is used to talk Networking between Kernel processes, or from userland to Kernel processes. This post documents how I tamed Netlink and make working with it in Golang easier.

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