Tools 8. Monitoring Network Performance with Dockerised Prometheus, Iperf3 and Speedtest

Hello my friend,

in the time when the business is conducted online, it is vital to have a clear visibility into the health of your services and their performance, especially if they rely on the media or other components outside of your immediate control. Earlier in our blogpost we have covered how and why to use iperf3 for measurements of a performance between your hosts and speediest to measure a performance of an Internet connectivity. Today we’ll show how to automate this process with the help of Prometheus.



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How Can We Automate Monitoring?

Automation is not only about Ansible and Python. Knowing how you can properly use various applications, especially those great open source tools available on the market is a key to your success. At the same time, Ansible plays a key role in rolling out application these days, as it helps to ensure that deployment is done in a consistent way. Ansible is like Continue reading

Welcome to Security Week 2022!

Welcome to Security Week 2022!
Welcome to Security Week 2022!

Recent events are bringing cybersecurity to the forefront of many conversations.

Governments around the world are encouraging businesses to go “shields up” following Ukraine’s invasion. The current threat is significantly higher than before and any organization with Internet-facing infrastructure should put security as a top priority for the year.

To help keep services online, Cloudflare is also participating in the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project ensuring teams can get the best help to secure networks and applications more vulnerable to cyber threats, such as those in the medical, water and energy sectors.

As another example, not too long ago, Log4J, a high-severity vulnerability affecting many Java-based applications, also highlighted how important good security is on the Internet as attackers immediately started scanning for vulnerable applications within hours of the attack vector becoming public.

Unfortunately, these events are almost certainly not going to be our last reminders.

Over the next six days, we intend to tackle the broad topic of cyber security with a simple goal: ensure security is no longer an afterthought.

Security, however, is also hard, and you never know when “you’ve done enough”. The importance of good security practices should never be underestimated. Reliable and secure Continue reading

Maximum Flow Problems

Introduction

In optimization theory, Maximum Flow problems involve finding the maximum flow (or traffic) that can be sent from one place to another, subject to certain constraints. In this post, we will look at Maximum Flow algorithms applied to Networking and the questions they can help answer.

The main focus here will be the applied part, and we will only cover the surface of most algorithms as many of them requires Linear Programming and Optimization theory background.

Problem Setup

Assume that we have a small network connecting a few locations in the US using RSVP-TE for traffic management.
RSVP-TE allows us to find paths if there is not enough room on the shortest path, which removes the restriction that the flows need to travel only on the shortest path.

In the below picture, we can see the Capacity and IGP cost of the links. From a graph representation perspective, we will use MultiDigraph. Multi to represent multiple links, like between lax<-->iad, and Digraph for capturing the unidirectional behavior of RSVP LSPs.

Backbone Network

We will also assume that we already have some traffic routed between a few locations. The below table shows the existing traffic traveling between locations. For example, we Continue reading

Trust Will Do You In

loc

If you’re a fan of the Gestalt IT Rundown that I do every week on the Gestalt IT YouTube channel, you have probably heard about the recent hacks of NVIDIA and Samsung. The original investigation into those hacks talked about using MDM platforms and other vectors to gain access to the information that was obtained by the hacking groups. An interesting tweet popped up on my feed yesterday that helped me reframe the attacks:

It would appear that the group behind these attacks are going after their targets the old fashioned way. With people. For illustration, see XKCD from 2009:

The Weakest Links

People are always the weakest link in any security situation. They choose to make something insecure through bad policy or by trying to evade the policy. Perhaps they are trying to do harm to the organization or even try to shine a light on Continue reading

How China Made An Exascale Supercomputer Out Of Old 14 Nanometer Tech

If you need any proof that it doesn’t take the most advanced chip manufacturing processes to create an exascale-class supercomputer, you need look no further than the Sunway “OceanLight” system housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. …

How China Made An Exascale Supercomputer Out Of Old 14 Nanometer Tech was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Dell 2161DS-2 serial port pinout

I picked up a Dell (Avocent) 2161DS-2 (same as 4161DS?) KVM recently, and needed to use the serial port to upgrade the software.

Naturally, the serial port pinout is non-standard and requires a proprietary cable which comes with the KVM. Dell part numbers 80DH7 and 3JY78 might be involved. I don't have, and have never seen these cables.

I was able to to find the RX, TX and Ground pins and interact with the system using 9600, 8, N, 1.

Pinout in red text

Is the color coding inside these adaptors standardized? If so this may help.

The system prints some unsolicited messages ("welcome" or somesuch) a little while after power-up.

Notes from upgrading the firmware from MacOS 12:


 # Grab the firmware  
 URL="https://dl.dell.com/RACK SOLUTIONS/DELL_MULTI-DEVICE_A04_R301142.exe"  
 wget -P /tmp "$URL"  
   
 # Start MacOS tftp service  
 sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist  
   
 # Extract the firmware (it's a self-extracting exe, but we can open it with unzip)  
 sudo unzip -d /private/tftpboot "/tmp/$(basename "$URL")" Omega_DELL_1.3.51.0.fl  
   
 # Now, using the menu on the KVM serial port, point it toward the MacOS TFTP service  
 # to retrieve the Omega_DELL_1.3.51.0.fl file

Weekend Reads 031122


The big ISPs all lobbied hard against the net neutrality rules, but the CEO of every big ISP was on the record at least once saying that the net neutrality rules were not a big deal and that they could live with net neutrality. So why did the big carriers lobby so hard about what the FCC was doing?


VESA, which makes the DisplayPort spec, today announced a certification program aimed at helping consumers understand if a DisplayPort 2.0 cable, monitor, or video source can support the max refresh rates and resolutions the spec claims.


Over the past week, the Akamai researchers said, they have detected multiple DDoSes that used middleboxes precisely the way the academic researchers predicted. The attacks peaked at 11Gbps and 1.5 million packets per second.


The metaverse, as Microsoft Corp. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. would have us call it, raises a remarkable prospect: For the first time, all of the technology giants are going to compete over the same turf.


A group of academics from the North Carolina State University and Dokuz Eylul University have demonstrated what they say is the “first side-channel attack” on homomorphic encryption that could be exploited to Continue reading

External Lab Access With Ngrok and Containerlab

Thank you all for checking out my inaugural post on the Packet Pushers platform. I’ve been a long time fan of the content here and its pretty exciting to be one of the contributors. Sif Baksh recently asked John Capobianco and myself a very interesting question. @John_Capobianco and @Julio_PDX do know of a service where […]

The post External Lab Access With Ngrok and Containerlab appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Video: Functions-as-a-Service Demo

Serverless computing (marketing term for code running on servers managed by other people) is one of the must-have terms if you’re playing a Buzzword Bingo, but what does it really mean and how does the whole thing work?

Matthias Luft and Florian Barth illustrated the concept during the Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar with a short demo in which they build a simple AWS Lambda function. For a more network-centric view, read the Can We Ping a Lambda Function blog post by Noel Boulene.

Watch the video
You need Free or Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

Video: Functions-as-a-Service Demo

Serverless computing (marketing term for code running on servers managed by other people) is one of the must-have terms if you’re playing a Buzzword Bingo, but what does it really mean and how does the whole thing work?

Matthias Luft and Florian Barth illustrated the concept during the Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar with a short demo in which they build a simple AWS Lambda function.

Watch the video
You need Free or Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

seccomp — Unsafe at any speed

I’ll just assert that there’s no way to use seccomp() correctly. Just like how there’s no way to use gets() correctly, causing it to eventually be removed from the C and C++ standards.

seccomp, briefly

seccomp allows you to filter syscalls with a ruleset.

The obvious thing is to filter anything your program isn’t supposed to be doing. If it doesn’t do file IO, don’t let it open files. If it’s not supposed to execute anything, don’t let it do that.

But whether you use a whitelist (e.g. only allow working with already open file descriptors), or a blacklist (e.g. don’t allow it to open these files), it’s fundamentally flawed.

1. Syscalls change. Sometimes without even recompiling

open() in your code actually becomes the openat syscall. Maybe. At least today. At least on my machine, today.

select() actually becomes pselect6. At least on Fridays.

If you upgrade libc or distribute a binary to other systems, this may start to fail.

2. Surprising syscalls

Calling printf() will call the syscall newfstatat, a syscall hard to even parse into words. But only the first time you call it! So after your first printf() you can block newfstatat.

Maybe Continue reading

Zero-trust for cloud-native workloads

There has been a huge uptick in microservices adoption in the data analytics domain, primarily aided by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Some of the reasons why containers are popular among ML developers is the ease of portability, scalability, and quick access to data using services—specifically network services. The rise of cloud-native applications, especially for big data in the analytics sector, makes these applications a prime target for cyber crime.

Preventing threat actors from breaching the network and accessing critical data or applications is a daunting task for one team or individual to take on alone. DevOps and security engineers, SREs, and platform architects all need to work together to facilitate the process. These teams are usually presented with two challenges:

  • Since the fundamental architecture model of microservices is distributed, it is imperative that east-west traffic is present. With most common deployments using a multi-cloud or hybrid model, there is no real network perimeter.
  • One or more microservices will access external services such as 3rd-party cloud services, APIs, and applications, resulting in multiple ingress/egress points for north-south traffic.

This article talks about what organizations need to know about zero trust for cloud-native workloads, and how zero trust Continue reading

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