Could Open Base Station SoCs Unleash A New Era In Mobile Infrastructure?

This article was originally published in Packet Pushers Ignition on March 23, 2021. Just as nature abhors a vacuum and seeks to fill it with any available matter, business abhors a single-source solution to wide scale problems. Competitors rush to fill the vacuum of choice with alternative, interchangeable products. The IT market typically fosters competition […]

The post Could Open Base Station SoCs Unleash A New Era In Mobile Infrastructure? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Arm CPUs To Take A Bite Out Of The HPC Market

Arm-based servers have had a somewhat checkered history that has seen many abortive attempts to challenge the X86 processor hegemony, but the firm appears bullish about its chances in the high performance computing (HPC) sector, where it believes its licensing model and the energy efficiency of its architecture give it an edge. …

Arm CPUs To Take A Bite Out Of The HPC Market was written by Daniel Robinson at The Next Platform.

Backing Up the Dump Truck

Hello Ellen,

 

I have received a number of these spam messages over the past few weeks and I had hoped they would eventually taper off. However, it doesn’t appear that is the case. So I’ll take the direct approach.

 

I’m a member of the CCIE Advisory Council. Which means I am obligated to report any and all attempts to infringe upon the integrity of the exam. As you have seen fit to continue to email me to link to your site to promote your test dumps I think you should be aware that I will be reporting you to the CCIE team.

 

Good luck in your future endeavors after they shut you down for violating their exam terms and conditions. And do not email me again.

That’s an actual email that I sent TODAY to someone (who probably isn’t really named Ellen) that has been spamming me to link to their CCIE dump site. The spam is all the same. They really enjoy reading a random page on my site, usually some index page picked up by a crawler. They want me to insure a link to their site which is a brain dump site for CCIE Continue reading

Missing Manuals – io_uring worker pool

Missing Manuals - io_uring worker pool

Chances are you might have heard of io_uring. It first appeared in Linux 5.1, back in 2019, and was advertised as the new API for asynchronous I/O. Its goal was to be an alternative to the deemed-to-be-broken-beyond-repair AIO, the “old” asynchronous I/O API.

Calling io_uring just an asynchronous I/O API doesn’t do it justice, though. Underneath the API calls, io_uring is a full-blown runtime for processing I/O requests. One that spawns threads, sets up work queues, and dispatches requests for processing. All this happens “in the background” so that the user space process doesn’t have to, but can, block while waiting for its I/O requests to complete.

A runtime that spawns threads and manages the worker pool for the developer makes life easier, but using it in a project begs the questions:

1. How many threads will be created for my workload by default?

2. How can I monitor and control the thread pool size?

I could not find the answers to these questions in either the Efficient I/O with io_uring article, or the Lord of the io_uring guide – two well-known pieces of available documentation.

And while a recent enough io_uring man page touches on the Continue reading

Lesson Learned: The Way Forward

I tried to wrap up my Lessons Learned presentation on a positive note: what are some of the things you can do to avoid all the traps and pitfalls I encountered in the almost four decades of working in networking industry:

  • Get invited to architecture and design meetings when a new application project starts.
  • Always try to figure out what the underlying actual business needs are.
  • Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
  • Keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
  • Work with your peers and explain how networking works and why you face certain limitations.
  • Humans are not perfect – automate as much as it makes sense, but no more.
Watch the video
You’ll need a Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

Lesson Learned: The Way Forward

I tried to wrap up my Lessons Learned presentation on a positive note: what are some of the things you can do to avoid all the traps and pitfalls I encountered in the almost four decades of working in networking industry:

  • Get invited to architecture and design meetings when a new application project is starting.
  • Always try to figure out what the underlying actual business needs are.
  • Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
  • Keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
  • Work with your peers, and explain how networking works and why you’re facing certain limitations.
  • Humans are not perfect – automate as much as it makes sense but no more.
Watch the video
You’ll need a Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

Using the seq command to generate numeric sequences

The seq command is handy for generating number sequences on Linux.It requires at least one number as an argument and, given that, it will provide all the numbers from 1 to whatever number you specify. However, that's just the command's simplest use. With additional arguments, seq can be surprisingly useful, especially when you use the generated numbers to drive a loop or do a calculation.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux The seq command below illustrates the most basic use of this command:To read this article in full, please click here

Using the seq command to generate numeric sequences

The seq command is handy for generating number sequences on Linux.It requires at least one number as an argument and, given that, it will provide all the numbers from 1 to whatever number you specify. However, that's just the command's simplest use. With additional arguments, seq can be surprisingly useful, especially when you use the generated numbers to drive a loop or do a calculation.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux The seq command below illustrates the most basic use of this command:To read this article in full, please click here

5G auction: AT&T and Dish spend billions while Verizon sits out

The usual suspects—bar one—spent big on the latest FCC auction for 5G spectrum, with AT&T and Dish headlining the winning bidders.At the top of the list was AT&T, which spent over $9 billion to acquire 1,624 licenses in the 3.45-3.98GHz range, according to the FCC. Each license represents the right to use 10MHz of that spectrum in a given geographical subdivision of the country.What is 5G? Close behind AT&T at $7.3 billion was Dish, which acquired 1,232 individual licenses. T-Mobile spent almost $2.9 billion on 199 licenses, and U.S. Cellular spent nearly $580 million on 380 licenses to shore up its own 5G spectrum holdings.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco ups its game in top-shelf enterprise switching, Wi-Fi, 5G

Cisco has rolled out new wired and wireless gear aimed at amping up core campus wired and wireless networks to better support surging demand for remote connectivity.The company has added more powerful switches to the high end of its core enterprise Catalyst family—the biggest powered by Cisco’s high-performance Silicon One processors—as well as its Catalyst and Meraki wireless boxes to add Wi-Fi 6E support. It also announced private 5G as a service.To read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx Works From The Edge Towards Datacenters With Versal FPGA Hybrids

The “Everest” family of hybrid compute engines made by Xilinx, which have lots of programmable logic surrounded by hardened transistor blocks and which are sold under the Versal brand, have been known for so long that we sometimes forget – or can’t believe – that Versal chips are not yet available as standalone products in the datacenter or within the Alveo line of PCI-Express cards from the chip maker. …

Xilinx Works From The Edge Towards Datacenters With Versal FPGA Hybrids was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Providers and Privacy at NANOG 84

I’m speaking (in person) at NANOG84 on providers and privacy—

Privacy is a hot topic, but there’s little information for the networking professional in this area. This presentation will provide a quick overview and thoughts on the area of privacy aimed at transit provider operations personnel, including packet processing and logging. Note this presentation does not constitute legal advice, but rather just presents general concepts and thoughts from the perspective of a network engineer in an area of interest.

Need to Keep Analytics Data in the EU? Cloudflare Zaraz Can Offer a Solution

Need to Keep Analytics Data in the EU? Cloudflare Zaraz Can Offer a Solution
Need to Keep Analytics Data in the EU? Cloudflare Zaraz Can Offer a Solution

A recent decision from the Austrian Data Protection Authority (the Datenschutzbehörde) has network engineers scratching their heads and EU companies that use Google Analytics scrambling. The Datenschutzbehörde found that an Austrian website’s use of Google Analytics violates the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as interpreted by the “Schrems II” case because Google Analytics can involve sending full or truncated IP addresses to the United States.

While disabling such trackers might be one (extreme) solution, doing so would leave website operators blind to how users are engaging with their site. A better approach: find a way to use tools like Google Analytics, but do so with an approach that protects the privacy of personal information and keeps it in the EU, avoiding a data transfer altogether. Enter Cloudflare Zaraz.

But before we get into just how Cloudflare Zaraz can help, we need to explain a bit of the background for the Datenschutzbehörde’s ruling, and why it’s a big deal.

What are the privacy and data localization issues?

The GDPR is a comprehensive data privacy law that applies to EU residents’ personal data, regardless of where it is processed. The GDPR itself does not insist that personal data must Continue reading

Turn tabs into spaces on Linux and vice versa

The Linux expand and unexpand commands sound like they can make files larger and smaller, but what they actually do is turn tabs into spaces and spaces into tabs.In this post, we’ll use some simple text files to demonstrate what happens when you use expand and unexpand. We’ll also compare how these commands work with some likely more familiar commands—sed and awk—that can provide similar results and offer additional options.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] To begin, let’s take a look at this very simple text file:To read this article in full, please click here

Turn tabs into spaces on Linux and vice versa

The Linux expand and unexpand commands sound like they can make files larger and smaller, but what they actually do is turn tabs into spaces and spaces into tabs.In this post, we’ll use some simple text files to demonstrate what happens when you use expand and unexpand. We’ll also compare how these commands work with some likely more familiar commands—sed and awk—that can provide similar results and offer additional options.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] To begin, let’s take a look at this very simple text file:To read this article in full, please click here

Do a Cleanup Before Automating Your Network

Remington Loose sent me an interesting email describing his views on the right approach to network automation after reading my Network Reliability Engineering Should Be More than Software or Automation rant – he’s advocating standardizing network services and cleaning up your network before trying to deploy full-scale automation.

I think you are 100% right to start with a thorough cleanup before automation. Garbage in, garbage out. It is also the case that all that inconsistency and differentiation makes for complexity in automation (as well as general operations) that makes it harder to gain traction.

Read more …

Do a Cleanup Before Automating Your Network

Remington Loose sent me an interesting email describing his views on the right approach to network automation after reading my Network Reliability Engineering Should Be More than Software or Automation rant – he’s advocating standardizing network services and cleaning up your network before trying to deploy full-scale automation.

I think you are 100% right to start with a thorough cleanup before automation. Garbage in, garbage out. It is also the case that all that inconsistency and differentiation makes for complexity in automation (as well as general operations) that makes it harder to gain traction.

Read more …
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