Beware the Ides of March: Subsea Cable Cut Trend Continues

Earlier this month, the International Cable Protection Committee, a submarine cable advisory group, held their annual plenary in Dubai. One question that they could have considered is: Why do so many submarine cables get cut in the February/March timeframe? In this blog, we’ll look back at the last three years and the submarine cable industry’s own version of March Madness.

2012

Two years ago in February 2012, we saw a rash of closely-timed submarine cable cuts, causing Internet disruptions extending into March. In one incident, three cables were simultaneously severed in the Red Sea on February 17th, and then a fourth was damaged on the 25th off the coast of Kenya. The fourth cable was the TEAMS (The East African Marine System) cable systems, which runs from Mombasa to Fujairah, UAE.

We detailed the impact of the TEAMS cable break here, noting the resilience of many East African providers, who had purchased redundant capacity on the other two East African submarine cables: EASSy and SEACOM. The TEAMS cable would experience a second cut just weeks after it was repaired, which led TEAMS to threaten a lawsuit against the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) over the repeated damage caused by Continue reading

Encrypting sensitive data is a must; new key management tools make it easy

Encryption is one of the best ways to prevent the type of terrible headaches that many high-profile companies have experienced with stolen data. Even if experienced hackers are able to penetrate a system, having the data encrypted can mean that nothing useful is taken.But encryption can place a high burden on a network and its users. It's not too difficult to encrypt data, but providing access to protected files for authorized users while keeping everyone else away is extremely complicated. Small organizations may be able to manage encryption schemes manually, but for anything beyond a few dozen users, the task of doing that without help becomes monumentally difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Show 185 – Vendor Product Management

How do vendors decide to make network products ? What is the process and thinking behind what happens inside the wall of the vendor ? Today, Greg is join by Omar Sultan from Cisco to talk broadly about how vendors make big decisions

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 Show 185 – Vendor Product Management appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Custom DHCP server configuration on Opengear

For the last few years I've run my home DHCP service on a virtual private server at AWS.

This was not a great idea. It's a pain to resolve issues with my Internet service when those issues cause my laptop to stop getting an IP address assigned because the path between my house and the DHCP server has been interrupted.

The service is at Amazon because I wanted to purge "server" like things from the house, but its clear that I needed to bring DHCPd back home. I started investigating moving the service to one of my Opengear ACM5000 units, which is always running anyway because it keeps tabs on my generator and home security system, sends me text messages about interesting events and whatnot.

The Opengear web UI doesn't offer too many DHCP service configuration options, but I didn't expect that to be a problem. One of the things I love about Opengear is that most anywhere you look, the baked-in scripts and configuration elements can be replaced with user-supplied versions of those things.

I'd expected to find something like include /etc/config/dhcpd-user.conf in the automagically-generated DHCPd configuration, but it wasn't there.

So, I strings-ed every file in Continue reading

Healthy Paranoia Show 23: Phone Phreaking, Hacking and Fraud, Oh My!

That’s right listeners, you’re not in Kansas anymore! It’s time to follow that Yellow Brick Road to another episode of Healthy Paranoia. Today, we’ll be discussing phone phreaking, hacking and fraud, oh my! So we’re off to see Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of VoIP security, Patrick McNeil. Joining me over the rainbow for this trip […]

Author information

Mrs. Y

Snarkitecht at Island of Misfit Toys

Mrs. Y is a recovering Unix engineer working in network security. Also the host of Healthy Paranoia and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences and spending time in the Bat Cave. Sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.
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The post Healthy Paranoia Show 23: Phone Phreaking, Hacking and Fraud, Oh My! appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Turkish Internet Censorship Takes a New Turn

Internet censorship in Turkey took a new and ominous turn yesterday. In order to better seal off access to social media sites like YouTube and Twitter, the incumbent TurkTelecom began hijacking the IP address space of public DNS resolvers like those of Google. This allows TurkTelecom servers to masquerade as Google DNS servers, returning whatever answers they want. Under normal circumstances, such queries would have been destined for servers outside the country, which is how Turkish users were circumventing the ban on YouTube imposed earlier this week. However, now local users of these global DNS services are surreptitiously redirected to alternate providers within TurkTelekom. You can see this route redirection for yourself, here and here.

Recap

Turkey’s 25th and current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has publicly and repeatedly expressed his dislike of social media, instructing various sites to be blocked. The current attempt to curtail this important medium began on March 21st via DNS poisoning of Twitter by Turkish ISPs, probably trying to implement the government-mandated ban in a minimally invasive way.

But Continue reading

Turkey Hijacking IP addresses for popular Global DNS providers

At BGPmon we see numerous BGP hijacks every single day, some are interesting because of the size and scale of the hijack or as we’ve seen today because of the targeted hijacked prefixes. 
It all started last weekend when the Turkish president ordered the censorship of twitter.com. This started with a block of twitter by returning false twitter IP addresses by Turk Telekom DNS servers.  Soon users in Turkey discovered that changing DNS providers to Google DNS or OpenDNS was a good method of bypassing the censorship.
But as of around 9am UTC today (Saturday March 29) this changed when Turk Telekom started to hijack the IP address for popular free and open DNS providers such as Google’s 8.8.8.8, OpenDNS’ 208.67.222.222 and Level3’s 4.2.2.2.

BGP hijack
Using the Turk Telekom looking glass we can see that AS9121 (Turk Telekom) has specific /32 routes for these IP addresses. Since this is the most specific route possible for an IPv4 address, this route will always be selected and the result is that traffic for this IP address is sent to this new bogus route.

Turk Telekom route server displaying the hijacked route

Turk Telekom route server displaying the Continue reading

Network Test Automation with Ansible

In the last post, I talked about how Ansible could be used for various forms of network automation.  In the comments, Michael asked if Ansible could also be used for network test automation and verification.  Since I’m just starting to explore Ansible, I figured why not try it out.  The short answer is, it’s possible.  Let’s take a look at an example proving this out.
I just built a playbook that verifies a router, or group of routers, has reachability to a defined list of destinations.  Maybe you are deploying a new site? Maybe a new host?  Is the route being sent correctly to all sites?  Now, a playbook like this can be used to ensure every site (from the router) has reachability to the new site, subnet, or host.  You define the destination.  Cool, right?

Update: Before reading anymore, it's recommended to read the first post on Ansible for Networking.

Let’s do a quick walk through.

Here is the playbook.
As you can see, there is not a lot to it.  This playbook that we are looking at, called ‘pinger’, is using a module called ‘auto_pinger’.  Continue reading

Over Layer Versus Under Layer

Do you feel like you are in data center acronym soup these days?   I sure feel it, and I think sometimes tech-speak can help mask the real driver for change. In the data center, we are striving for a new model.  The idea of real time resource allocation and reallocation, the ideal organism that responds perfectly to every request and oh, did I mention resiliency in the whole stack for instant recovery from any fault. Wow, that would be great!  I think we have a ways to go. For now, the latest craze is to add the word virtualization to each topic.

Why is that?  I think it is because virtualization has helped us learn that you can decouple the hardware and software and create layers of abstraction that lead to better systems.  And here “better” could be lower power / cooling and space utilization, or it could the idea that a virtual machine (VM) can be your 18 wheeler, or container ship, and move the application or data anywhere you want, to help in that resource allocation / re allocation or resiliency story I mentioned above.

Now if we look on the network side, Continue reading

When Good NICs Do Bad Things: A Blast of IPv6 Multicast Listener Discovery Queries

This is the write-up of a recent event we experienced on our network.  This will be combination of a  journal of symptoms, troubleshooting steps taken, and a brief overview of the environment and platforms involved. This isn’t a forensic analysis of the cause or of different behaviors in various environments.  Rather, it’s meant to be […]

Author information

Andrew Gallo

Senior Information Systems Engineer

Andrew Gallo is a Washington, DC based Senior Information Systems Engineer
and Network Architect, responsible for design and implementation of the
enterprise network for a large university.

Areas of specialization include the University's wide area connections,
including a 150 kilometer DWDM ring, designing a multicampus routing
policy, and business continuity planning for two online datacenters.

Andrew started during the internet upswing of the mid to late 90s
installing and terminating fiber. As his career progressed, he has had
experience with technologies from FDDI to ATM, and all speeds of Ethernet,
including a recent deployment of several metro area 100Gbps circuits.

Focusing not only on data networks, Andrew has experience in traditional
TDM voice, VoIP, and real-time, unified collaboration technologies.

Areas of interest include optical transport, network virtualization and
software defined networking, and network science and graph Continue reading

Internets of Interest for 28th March 2014

  Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 28th March 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Brocade – Brocade Extends Ethernet Fabric Leadership – Brocade hasn’t given up on the Campus. This announcement from February talks about their switch platform, most interesting is that […]

The post Internets of Interest for 28th March 2014 appeared first on EtherealMind.

Cisco Internal VLAN Usage

About a month ago I worked on an old CatOS switch. Working on this switch reminded me about some of the differences between CatOS and IOS. One of the big differences is how a Layer 3 routed interface is configured between the two OS versions. On a Catalyst running IOS, it is almost identical as […]

Author information

Charles Galler

Charles Galler

Charles is a network and UC engineer for a mainly Cisco reseller. He has worked in the networking industry for about 13 years. He started as a network administrator for a small CLEC (carrier) where he did it all in IT and worked on the carrier network. After the CLEC, Charles went to work for a large healthcare organization in the Houston area and stayed with them for about three and a half years. Now he works for a reseller in the professional services part of the organization. He is currently studying for his CCIE in Routing and Switching and plans on passing it before the end of 2014. You can find him on the Twitter @twidfeki.
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The post Cisco Internal VLAN Usage appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Does Network Lifecycle Management Make Sense?

 

SDN Lifecycle Management

Recently, we met with a friend who has done an amazing job of understanding the lifecycle management of virtual machines (VMs). As the CTO of a very large cloud provider, he explained in deep detail how he took advantage of Moore’s Law and doubled the amount of VMs in each rack each year, while maintaining or shrinking the cost per rack. As a result, he has doubled the amount of earning potential in each data center while driving cost down, even as his staff is ripping out servers long before their traditional three- to four-year lifecycle and purchasing new ones. He is buying servers at a 3-to-1 ratio over a three-year period when compared with a typical server lifecycle, yet his cost to operate the data center is going down and his productivity is going up by 2x every year.  Amazing!

While we enjoyed learning of his success, when we hear these stories, we think “Could this have the same type of impact somewhere in the network?” It got us to ask why customers traditionally hang on to their top-of-rack switches for four or five years and sometimes longer.

What is different about the network versus servers?

Obviously, Continue reading

SAN Automation with Python and Jinja

One of my least favorite things to do in my day job is create or maintain a zoning configuration on a fibre channel switch, such as a Cisco Nexus or MDS. It’s tedious, very error prone, and annoying when changes need to be made. I wrote earlier in the week on the value of using a templating language like Jinja to define the structure of a switch configuration, but dynamic enough to accept all kinds of input from some higher-level intelligence elsewhere.

SAN Automation with Python and Jinja

One of my least favorite things to do in my day job is create or maintain a zoning configuration on a fibre channel switch, such as a Cisco Nexus or MDS. It’s tedious, very error prone, and annoying when changes need to be made. I wrote earlier in the week on the value of using a templating language like Jinja to define the structure of a switch configuration, but dynamic enough to accept all kinds of input from some higher-level intelligence elsewhere.

How to become a network engineer

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
If you have arrived on this page then I would assume  you know what a network engineer is and would like to find out how to become a network engineer? If you are not sure what a network engineer is or does then the picture below explains it very well Picture courtesy of http://perceptionvsfact.com/ A […]

Other pages of interest:

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post How to become a network engineer

Troubleshooting with Wireshark [Riverbed lab kit]

A while ago I attended a Wireshark webinar from Riverbed in which they presented the tool, some beginner and intermediate users troubleshooting scenarios and some lab kit. Now I got an e-mail that they made it available for download at http://www.riverbed.com/wireshark-virtual-tour Part of this Lab Kit were available in the Virtual World Tour 2014 webinar […]

Three reasons why Networking is a pain in the IaaS, and how to fix it

In this post I share the slides, audio recording, and short outline of a presentation I gave at the Melbourne VMUG conference (Feb 2014) called “Three reasons why Networking is a pain in the IaaS, and how to fix it”.

As network technologists we know that when the compute architecture changes, the network architecture changes with it. Consider the precedent. The transition from mainframe to rack servers brought about Ethernet and top-of-rack switches. Blade servers introduced the blade switch and a cable-less network. And of course the virtual server necessitating the software virtual switch and a hardware-less network. At each iteration, we observe the architecture change occurring at the edge, directly adjacent to compute.

We can look at this superficially and say, “yes, the network architecture changed”. However if you think about it, the catalyzing change in each shift was the operational model, with intent to increase agility and reduce costs. The architecture change was consequential. Without compute, there is no reason for a network. Networking, both as a profession and technology, exists as a necessary service layer for computing. Without a network, computing is practically useless. As such, the capabilities of the network will either enable or impede Continue reading

Three reasons why Networking is a pain in the IaaS, and how to fix it

In this post I share the slides, audio recording, and short outline of a presentation I gave at the Melbourne VMUG conference (Feb 2014) called “Three reasons why Networking is a pain in the IaaS, and how to fix it”.

As network technologists we know that when the compute architecture changes, the network architecture changes with it. Consider the precedent. The transition from mainframe to rack servers brought about Ethernet and top-of-rack switches. Blade servers introduced the blade switch and a cable-less network. And of course the virtual server necessitating the software virtual switch and a hardware-less network. At each iteration, we observe the architecture change occurring at the edge, directly adjacent to compute.

We can look at this superficially and say, “yes, the network architecture changed”. However if you think about it, the catalyzing change in each shift was the operational model, with intent to increase agility and reduce costs. The architecture change was consequential. Without compute, there is no reason for a network. Networking, both as a profession and technology, exists as a necessary service layer for computing. Without a network, computing is practically useless. As such, the capabilities of the network will either enable or impede Continue reading

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