FYI: Snowden made things worse

Snowden appeared at a #CatoSpyCon, and cited evidence of how things have improved since his disclosures (dislaimer: as Libertarian, I'm a fan of both CATO and Snowden). He cited some pretty compelling graphs, such as a sharp increase of SSL encryption. However, at the moment, I'm pretty sure he's made things worse.

The thing is, governments didn't know such surveillance was possible. Now that Snowden showed what the NSA was doing, governments around the world are following that blueprint, dramatically increasing their Internet surveillance. Not only do they now know how to do it, they are given good justifications. If the United States (the moral leader in "freedoms") says it's okay, then it must be okay for more repressive governments (like France). There is also the sense of competition, that if the NSA knows what's going on across the Internet, then they need to know, too.

This is a problem within the United Sates, too. The NSA collected everyone's phone records over the last 7 years. Before Snowden, that database was accessed rarely, and really for only terrorism purposes. However, now that everyone else in government knows the database exists, they are showing up at the NSA with warrants to Continue reading

EFF: We’ve always been at war with EastAsia

As a populist organization, the EFF is frequently Orwellian. That's demonstrated in their recent post about the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace", where they say:

"The Declaration resounds eerily today. We live in an era where net neutrality is threatened by corporations that want to remove competition and force customers to pay more to have equal access to some sites."

This is self-contradictory. The Declaration says, unequivocally, that governments should not regulate cyberspace ("You have no sovereignty where we gather"), and should not make it into a public utility. The current EFF position is exactly the opposite, that government needs to regulate cyberspace as a public utility.

It is like that bit in 1984 where Orwell's government changes allegiances, going from being an ally with Eastasia to becoming their enemy, and then claim that they had always been at war with Eastasia. They made the change in mid-rally. Orwell describes how the mob quickly switched their beliefs, agreeing that they'd always been at war with Eastasia.

When I read 1984, I thought this was a bit over the top, that the mob would not behave so illogically. But we see the EFF mob today acts exactly that way Continue reading

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 12/12/2014

Please Join us in congratulating the following iPexpert clients who have passed their CCIE lab!

  • Chris Hayden, CCIE #45781 (Collaboration)
  • Ahmed Samir , CCIE #45697 (Wireless)

We Want to Hear From You!

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

On Policy in the Data Center: Congress

By Tim Hinrichs and Scott Lowe with contributions from Alex Yip, Dmitri Kalintsev, and Peter Balland

(Note: this post is also cross-published at RuleYourCloud.com, a new site focused on policy.)

In the first few parts of this series, we discussed the policy problem, we outlined dimensions of the solution space, and we gave a brief overview of the existing OpenStack policy efforts. In this post we do a deep dive into one of the (not yet incubated) OpenStack policy efforts: Congress.

Overview

Remember that to solve the policy problem, people take ideas in their head about how the data center ought to behave (“policy”) and codify them in a language the computer system can understand. That is, the policy problem is really a programming languages problem. Not surprisingly Congress is, at its core, a policy language plus an implementation of that language.

Congress is a standard cloud service; you install it on a server, give it some inputs, and interact with it via a RESTful API. Congress has two kinds of inputs:

  • The other cloud services you’d like it to manage (for example, a compute manager like OpenStack Nova and a network manager like OpenStack Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—Reflections in Networking

2014 was a busy year in networking, and our friend Marcia Savage did a great job of summarizing the industry highs and lows – from ACI to white box switches – this week in a slideshow for Network Computing. It’s definitely worth a read before you head out for the weekend. Check out Marcia’s year end wrap up below as well as other happenings in the networking space this week.

In this week’s PlexxiTube video of the week, Dan Bachman explains how Plexxi incorporates optical transport into datacenter transport fabrics.

Computer Weekly: Cisco is missing the transition to software-defined networks
By Alex Scroxton
Little doubt remains that the future of networking will be defined by software, but market-watchers warn Cisco is missing this move. Cisco’s hardware forms the backbone of most enterprise networks around the world. But this world is changing and many buyers no longer see compute, storage and networking as distinct silos… Software-defined networking (SDN) company Plexxi, which recently appointed former EMC executive Richard Napolitano as its CEO, is one such company looking at the networking industry’s transition from networking towards an application and data-focused world. “We stand today at a transition point in the IT landscape,” says Continue reading

Basic Python Multithreading

The first ‘proper’ Python app I made logged onto a list of devices and pulled out OSPF state. This worked perfectly fine. The app correctly works out whether it can log into a device or not, and waits a few seconds to ensure a device actually responds. The issue is that if I have a […]

Big Switch Chaos Monkey Network Testing

Whenever you build a complex system, you need to test that it works as expected, including properly handling failures. It’s easy enough to do simple component failure testing, but harder to do rapid automated failure tests. Big Switch is showing that it can be done though. Hopefully we can keep improving our testing to pick up some more of the software failures.

Testing is hard

Over the course of my career I’ve built many clustered systems – HP-UX Serviceguard, firewalls, routers, load balancers, RedHat Clusters, etc. Good clusters have redundant everything – servers, power supplies, disks, NICs, etc.

The commissioning process always included testing. We’d go through each of the components, trying to simulate failures. Unplug each of the power cables, the network cables, unseat a hard drive, remove a hot-swappable fan, etc. That would test out the redundant components within each server, and then of course you’d simulate a complete system failure, forcing full failover.

This is all important stuff, but it doesn’t pick up all the failures – e.g. What happens if you’ve got a faulty patch lead, and the link starts flapping? Sometimes a simple failure gets messy when it happens repeatedly over a short Continue reading

phpipam 1.1.010 update released

phpipam 1.1.010 update released with following fixes:

== 1.1.010

Bugfixes:
----------------------------
+ Fixed login fails with LDAP when escape characters are in password;
+ Fixed login not working with spaces in password for AD login;
+ Fixed Ivalid action when adding vlans from subnet popup menu;
+ Fixed custom fields not appearing properly on IP request editing;
+ Fixed Invalid ID error for IP address details on sorting;
+ Fixed warnings if no VLAN search results are present;
+ Fixed test mail not sending;
+ Fixed unable to login if $phpsessname not defined;
+ Fixed unable to login after upgrade;

I apologise for any inconvenience some users experienced with upgrade.

brm

Show 216 – HP & SDN In The Campus – Sponsored

At HP Discover Barcelona 2014, the Packet Pushers had the chance to chat with Heather Giovanni, Craig Mills, and Chris Young about the HP 5400R and SDN in the campus. HP has a full line of switches and routers that some know about, and some just haven’t yet explored. The 5400R is a multi-slot chassis […]

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 2M 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 Show 216 – HP & SDN In The Campus – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

CoreOS – Getting your second (and 3rd) host online

Quick note: For the sake of things formatting correctly on the blog I’m using a lot of screenshots of config files rather than the actual text.  All of the text for the cloud-configs can be found on my github account here – https://github.com/jonlangemak/coreos/

Now that we have our first CoreOS host online we can start the cool stuff.  We’re going to pick up where we left off in my last post with our first installed CoreOS host which we called ‘coreOS1’.  Recall we had started with a very basic cloud-config that looked something like this…

image

All this really did was get us up and running with a DHCP address and the base system services running.  Since we’re looking to do a bit more in this post, we need to add some sections to the cloud-config.  Namely, I’m going to configure a static IP address for the host, configure and start etcd, and configure and start fleet.  So here’s what my new cloud config for coreOS1 will look like…

image

So there’s a lot more in this cloud-config.  This config certainly deserves some explaining.  However, in this post, I want to just get Continue reading

3 Ways To Get Started With VMware NSX

Over the past 12 months, VMware NSX momentum has continued to grow, as we’ve added VMware NSXnew platform capabilities, expanded our partner ecosystem, and of course, had more than 250+ customers purchase NSX for deployment. And as interest in VMware NSX has grown with both customers and IT professionals looking to evolve their careers by adding certification in network virtualization, one of the most common questions that we get is “How can I get started with NSX?.”

We understand that there is a strong demand for individuals and organizations to get their hands on the NSX technology. Many of you are working towards your initial VCP-NV certification. Others of you are exploring NSX as a way to improve your organization’s agility and security while reducing overall costs.

Here are three ways individuals and companies can get started with NSX.

Complete NSX: Install, Configure, Manage Training – for individuals on the NSX career path, we offer “NSX: Install, Configure, Manage” training.  We are offering ICM training as part of our On-Demand Curriculum, or you can take a 5-day instructor led course. Here is the detailed course description and class schedule. ICM training is a pre-requisite for VMware NSX certification. Once Continue reading

2014 in review

Looking back at 2014, it feels like a lot of progress was achieved in the past year in both the cloud infrastructure and NFV infrastructure markets. Some of that progress is technical, some is in terms of increased understanding of the key business and technical aspects. This post is my attempt to capture some changes I’ve observed from my particular vantage point.

This December marks the second anniversary of the acquisition of Contrail Systems by Juniper Networks. In the last year the Contrail team managed to deploy the Contrail network virtualization solution in several marquee customers; to solidify the image of the OpenContrail project as a production-ready implementation of the AWS VPC functionality; but, probably, more importantly to help transform attitudes at Juniper (and in the industry) regarding NFV.

In the late 90s and early naughts, the carrier wireline business went through a significant change with the deployment of provider managed virtual networks (using BGP L3VPN). From a business perspective, this was essentially outsourcing the network connectivity for distributed enterprises. Instead of a mesh of frame relay circuits managed by the enterprise; carriers provide a managed service that includes the circuit but also the IP connectivity. This is a service Continue reading

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