IPv6 Buzz 102: The Problem With IPv4 Thinking
In this episode of IPv6 Buzz Ed, Scott, and Tom discuss "IPv4 thinking", what exactly it is, how it can be harmful to your IPv6 migration efforts, and—most importantly—how to avoid it.IPv6 Buzz 102: The Problem With IPv4 Thinking
In this episode of IPv6 Buzz Ed, Scott, and Tom discuss "IPv4 thinking", what exactly it is, how it can be harmful to your IPv6 migration efforts, and—most importantly—how to avoid it.
The post IPv6 Buzz 102: The Problem With IPv4 Thinking appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Using Ixia-c to test RTBH DDoS mitigation
Remote Triggered Black Hole Scenario describes how to use the Ixia-c traffic generator to simulate a DDoS flood attack. Ixia-c supports the Open Traffic Generator API that is used in the article to program two traffic flows: the first representing normal user traffic (shown in blue) and the second representing attack traffic (show in red).
The article goes on to demonstrate the use of remotely triggered black hole (RTBH) routing to automatically mitigate the simulated attack. The chart above shows traffic levels during two simulated attacks. The DDoS mitigation controller is disabled during the first attack. Enabling the controller for the second attack causes to attack traffic to be dropped the instant it crosses the threshold.
The diagram shows the Containerlab topology used in the Remote Triggered Black Hole Scenario lab (which can run on a laptop). The Ixia traffic generator's eth1 interface represents the Internet and its eth2 interface represents the Customer Network being attacked. Industry standard sFlow telemetry from the Customer router, ce-router, streams to the DDoS mitigation controller (running an instance of DDoS Protect). When the controller detects a denial of service attack it pushed a control via BGP to the ce-router, Continue reading
Neural Networks Are Only As Good As The Data They Are Fed
Like other kinds of computing, if you put garbage data into a machine learning training run and then pour new data through it, what comes out as the answer is puréed garbage. …
Neural Networks Are Only As Good As The Data They Are Fed was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Graphcore Thinks It Can Get An AI Piece Of The HPC Exascale Pie
For the last few years, Graphcore has primarily been focused on slinging its IPU chips for training and inference systems of varying sizes, but that is changing now as the six-year-old British chip designer is joining the conversation about the convergence of AI and high-performance computing. …
Graphcore Thinks It Can Get An AI Piece Of The HPC Exascale Pie was written by Dylan Martin at The Next Platform.
Data Center Switching ASICs Tradeoffs
A brief mention of Broadcom ASIC families in the Networking Hardware/Software Disaggregation in 2022 blog post triggered an interesting discussion of ASIC features and where one should use different ASIC families.
Like so many things in life, ASIC design is all about tradeoffs. Usually you’re faced with a decision to either implement X (whatever X happens to be), or have high-performance product, or have a reasonably-priced product. It’s very hard to get two out of three, and getting all three is beyond Mission Impossible.
Data Center Switching ASICs Tradeoffs
A brief mention of Broadcom ASIC families in the Networking Hardware/Software Disaggregation in 2022 blog post triggered an interesting discussion of ASIC features and where one should use different ASIC families.
Like so many things in life, ASIC design is all about tradeoffs. Usually you’re faced with a decision to either implement X (whatever X happens to be), or have high-performance product, or have a reasonably-priced product. It’s very hard to get two out of three, and getting all three is beyond Mission Impossible.
Making Flatpak Firefox use Private Browsing by Default
In April 2021 I wrote a post on making Firefox use Private Browsing by default, in which I showed how to modify the GNOME desktop file so that Firefox would open private windows by default without restricting access to normal browsing windows and functionality. I’ve used that technique on all my Fedora-based systems since that time, until just recently. What happened recently, you ask? I switched to the Flatpak version of Firefox. Fortunately, with some minor tweaks, this technique works with the Flatpak version of Firefox as well. In this post, I’ll share with you the changes needed to make the Flatpak version of Firefox also use private browsing by default.
When working with the non-Flatpak version of Firefox, the GNOME desktop file installed with the Firefox package is found at /usr/share/applications. In my earlier article, I suggested editing that file to add the --private-window parameter to the Exec line. Unfortunately, that change gets overwritten every time the Firefox package is updated. It’s better, actually, to use a locally customized desktop file placed in ~/.local/share/applications instead, which will take precedence over the shared desktop file.
With the Flatpak version of Firefox, there is still a shared Continue reading
‘Integration Tax’ Limits Network Automation
For every dollar spent on a new tech product, it costs several dollars to integrate that product. How can businesses overcome those costly obstacles that impede network engineering and ops teams' abilities to deploy new tech, like automation?Potential Routing and Management Limitations in Private 5G Deployments
Businesses are expecting private 5G networks to be as easy to install and manage as Wi-Fi. And with few exceptions, that’s not the case right now.To Cure Iron Anemia With SYCL, Intel Buys Codeplay
Intel doesn’t want to just create a rival to the CUDA programming model and library stack so it can better compete against Nvidia in the GPU compute market. …
To Cure Iron Anemia With SYCL, Intel Buys Codeplay was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Day Two Cloud 149: On-Prem Cloud Networking With Netris (Sponsored)
Today's Day Two Cloud sponsor Netris promises to deliver a cloud-like experience for running your physical network. Netris software lets you build a private cloud on premises, and integrates with Terraform and Kubernetes. Our guest is Alex Saroyan, Netris CEO and founder.Released: Automation content navigator 2.0
Automation content navigator releases with Ansible Automation Platform 2.2
What is it?
Automation content navigator was released alongside Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 and changed the way content creators build and test Ansible automation. Navigator 1.0 drew together multiple Ansible command line tools like ansible-playbook, ansible-doc, ansible-config, etc. and continues to accrue seriously useful new features to help deliver greater flexibility to automation creators.
Coinciding with the release of Ansible Automation Platform 2.2, navigator 2.0 introduces improvements to existing functionality alongside additional features to aid in the development of automation content.
Within navigator 2.0, you will find:
- Automation execution environment image build support
- Ability to interact in real-time with automation execution environments
- Settings subcommand to view active configuration of local environment
- Generate a sample configuration file that can be used for new projects
- Automatic mode selection (stdout vs. interactive)
- Technology preview lint support, UI improvements, Collections view support for Ansible built-ins, time zone support, color enhancements, and more!
Looking closer
Image builder support
Before the release of navigator 2.0, a separate command line application (ansible-builder) was needed to build execution environment images from human readable YAML files. With this release, ansible-navigator Continue reading
Thinking Outside the Box for Network Acceleration
There is a continued push to go even “faster.” Lowering port to port latency while maintaining features and increasing link speeds and system density is a significant technology challenge for designers and the laws of physics. Since the first release of Arista’s 7100 and 7150 switch families, the company has been a partner in building best-in-class low latency trading networks that are today deployed in global financial institutions and trading locations.
Cutting edge customers took the approach of disaggregating network functions into pools of functionality – extremely fast Layer 1 switching, operating as low as 5 ns and FPGA-driven trading pipelines running at under 40 ns with the Arista 7130 family. This approach allowed more sophisticated L2 / L3 networking functionality, such as the ability to tap any flow or enable routing protocols, to run on general-purpose systems, including the Arista 7050X, 7060X and 7170 full-featured platforms, using merchant silicon with billions of packets per second and low latency.
MLAG Deep Dive: System Overview
Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) – the ability to terminate a Port Channel/Link Aggregation Group on multiple switches – is one of the more convoluted1 bridging technologies2. After all, it’s not trivial to persuade two boxes to behave like one and handle the myriad corner cases correctly.
In this series of deep dive blog posts, we’ll explore the intricacies of MLAG, starting with the data plane considerations and the control plane requirements resulting from the data plane quirks. If you wonder why we need all that complexity, remember that Ethernet networks still try to emulate the ancient thick yellow cable that could lose some packets but could never reorder packets or deliver duplicate packets.