New Year, New Us?

It’s been a while, hope all are well. This is a behind the scenes update to share with you what has been going on with us at NC and where we are headed. Short story, we’ve taken a break but are getting back to it with new content, new ideas, and quite a few changes. If you want a heads up on what is coming, give this episode a listen. If you like surprises, well just ride it out and you’ll see soon enough. It’s good to be back.

The post New Year, New Us? appeared first on Network Collective.

BGP in 2021 – The BGP Table

At the start of each year, I have been reporting on the behaviour of the inter-domain routing system over the past 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.

When quantum computers forget: Overcoming decoherence

There’s no point in having a quantum computer if it’s not smokin’ fast; otherwise it’s way too much trouble, what with all the subzero temperatures and instability and such. So it’s always newsworthy when somebody sets a new standard for quantum computing processing speeds, even if quantum computers are far from common commercial use.In this case that somebody is IBM, which recently announced its newly developed quantum computing processor, called Eagle, has broken the 100-qubit barrier. IBM[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Fusion boldly (if clumsily) says it views Eagle “as a step in a technological revolution in the history of computation.” (It sounds like an algorithm wrote that sentence! Is this where you’re leading us, Big Blue? A quantum future of incoherent techspeak?)To read this article in full, please click here

When quantum computers forget: Overcoming decoherence

There’s no point in having a quantum computer if it’s not smokin’ fast; otherwise it’s way too much trouble, what with all the subzero temperatures and instability and such. So it’s always newsworthy when somebody sets a new standard for quantum computing processing speeds, even if quantum computers are far from common commercial use.In this case that somebody is IBM, which recently announced its newly developed quantum computing processor, called Eagle, has broken the 100-qubit barrier. IBM[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Fusion boldly (if clumsily) says it views Eagle “as a step in a technological revolution in the history of computation.” (It sounds like an algorithm wrote that sentence! Is this where you’re leading us, Big Blue? A quantum future of incoherent techspeak?)To read this article in full, please click here

Splitting files on Linux by context

The csplit command is unusual in that allows you to split text files into pieces based on their content. The command allows you to specify a contextual string and use it as a delimiter for identifying the chunks to be saved as separate files.As an example, if you wanted to separate diary entries into a series of files each with a single entry, you might do something like this.$ csplit -z diary '/^Dear/' '{*}' 153 123 136 In this example, "diary" is the name of the file to be split. The command is looking for lines that begin with the word "Dear" as in "Dear Diary" to determine where each chunk begins. The -z option tells csplit to not bother saving files that would be empty.To read this article in full, please click here

Splitting files on Linux by context

The csplit command is unusual in that allows you to split text files into pieces based on their content. The command allows you to specify a contextual string and use it as a delimiter for identifying the chunks to be saved as separate files.As an example, if you wanted to separate diary entries into a series of files each with a single entry, you might do something like this.$ csplit -z diary '/^Dear/' '{*}' 153 123 136 In this example, "diary" is the name of the file to be split. The command is looking for lines that begin with the word "Dear" as in "Dear Diary" to determine where each chunk begins. The -z option tells csplit to not bother saving files that would be empty.To read this article in full, please click here

Tello Drone — Initial Review and Python Programming

What is this about ?

A small starter programmable drone that is meant for mostly indoor and has 80 grams of weight with a flight time of 13 minutes.

Some Highlights

https://www.ryzerobotics.com/tello

– Small Drone with under 100 grams weight
– Suitable for kids and anyone who is starting out to get into drones and programmable ones
– Two sites (Tello and tello.edu) offers various addons to support learning and make it more customised for learning
– 13 minutes of Flight time
– 100m Flight distance
– 720p HD Transmission
– 2 Antennas
– you can also have VR headset compatibility
– In collab with DJI and Intel
– Operation via various Apps (Paid and Free ones), Programming Languages ( we are interested in this)

Fancy Features

– Throw and Go — you can just toss Tello into the air
– 8d Flips (needs battery more than 50%)
– Bounce mode (flies up and down from your hand)

Things that I didn’t like :

-First and foremost, there is no way this connects to your home Wifi, Drone goes into an AP Broadcast mode (meaning this starts broadcasting its own AP and we have to connect to it)

This Continue reading

Quality is (too often) the missing ingredient

Software Eats the World?

I’m told software is going to eat the world very soon now. Everything already is, or will be, software based. To some folks, this sounds completely wonderful, but—leaving aside the privacy issues—I still see an elephant in the room with this vision of the future.

Quality.

Let me give you some recent examples.

First, ceiling fans. Modern ceiling fans, in case you didn’t know, don’t rely on the wall switch and pull chains. Instead, they rely on remote controls. This is brilliant—you can dim the light, change the speed of the fan, etc., from a remote control. No unsightly chains hanging from the ceiling.

Well, it’s brilliant so long as it works. I’ve replaced three of the four ceiling fans in my house. Two of the remote controls have somehow attached themselves to two of the three fans. It’s impossible to control one of the fans without also controlling the other. They sometimes get into this entertaining mode where turning one fan off turns the other one on.

For the third one—the one hanging from a 13-foot ceiling—the remote control sometimes operates one of the other fans, and sometimes the fan its supposed to operate. Continue reading

Designing WhatsApp

 

This is a guest post by Ankit Sirmorya. Ankit is working as a Machine Learning Lead/Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon and has led several machine-learning initiatives across the Amazon ecosystem. Ankit has been working on applying machine learning to solve ambiguous business problems and improve customer experience. For instance, he created a platform for experimenting with different hypotheses on Amazon product pages using reinforcement learning techniques. Currently, he is in the Alexa Shopping organization where he is developing machine-learning-based solutions to send personalized reorder hints to customers for improving their experience.

Problem Statement

Design an instant messenger platform such as WhatsApp or Signal which users can utilize tosend messages to each other. An essential aspect of the application is that the chat messageswon’t be permanently stored in the application.

FUN FACT: Some of the chat messengers such as FB Messenger stores the chat messages unless the users explicitly delete it. However, instant messengers such as WhatsApp don’t save the messages permanently on their server.

Gathering Requirements

How to Achieve TAP-less Network Traffic Analysis

We’re all becoming extremely aware of the importance of east-west protection. Recent security breaches have highlighted the role of Zero Trust as an essential strategy to protect valuable information. As a result, organizations are explicitly considering the security of east-west traffic flows to prevent adversaries from gaining a foothold in the data center and moving laterally across the network to access high-value data.

The biggest problem with protecting against advanced threats is the need to inspect all network traffic to prevent unwanted access by hackers, malicious insiders, or users with compromised accounts.

The traditional approach involves setting up a series of network Test Access Points (TAPs) to see traffic going over the network. Tapped traffic is then sent to a centralized Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA) appliance for monitoring. All of this – designing the infrastructure, acquiring the devices and appliances, configuring, implementing, and managing them—can present serious issues.

Let’s look at the challenges of the traditional approach, and then show how a distributed implementation can not only respond to the challenges but also provide operational simplicity.

TAP Network Challenges

TAP Challenge 1: Where to put the TAPs

A network architect must determine which network assets are most critical, which locations Continue reading

New Year’s resolutions for Linux sysadmins in 2022

As the new year gets off to a start, it's always a good idea to commit to some changes that might improve your life or make your work more rewarding. So, here are some suggestions for Linux sysadmin resolutions for 2022.Learn some new commands Even after using Linux for more than 30 years, I often find myself discovering some command that I didn't know about or didn't realize how much I could do with it. 2021 was the first year that I used the cheat command or used the --help option for commands more often that I read their man pages. I also started using the bpytop command fairly often. And, whenever I ran across a command I wasn't previously familiar with, I took the time to look it up, install it (if needed) on one or more of my Linux systems and play with it. Considering that I'm seeing nearly 2,000 files just in /usr/bin on my Fedora system, I'm not surprised that, even after 30+ years, I'm not familiar with all of them.To read this article in full, please click here

New Year’s resolutions for Linux sysadmins in 2022

As the new year gets off to a start, it's always a good idea to commit to some changes that might improve your life or make your work more rewarding. So, here are some suggestions for Linux sysadmin resolutions for 2022.Learn some new commands Even after using Linux for more than 30 years, I often find myself discovering some command that I didn't know about or didn't realize how much I could do with it. 2021 was the first year that I used the cheat command or used the --help option for commands more often that I read their man pages. I also started using the bpytop command fairly often. And, whenever I ran across a command I wasn't previously familiar with, I took the time to look it up, install it (if needed) on one or more of my Linux systems and play with it. Considering that I'm seeing nearly 2,000 files just in /usr/bin on my Fedora system, I'm not surprised that, even after 30+ years, I'm not familiar with all of them.To read this article in full, please click here

Tailscale: A Virtual Private Network for Zero Trust Security

Well before launching their company, the founders of problems with VPN security had already emerged before the pandemic. Since then, the big jump in remote work sparked by lockdowns has only revealed just how vulnerable they can be. Even enterprise-grade VPNs are riddled with security problems. In fact, a Zscaler David Cranshaw and Chief Operating Officer Avery Pennarun wanted to give developers a secure, scalable alternative to traditional VPNs. “Our big vision is to help developers be reasonable about scale,” said Pennarun, a former Google engineer. Although Continue reading

netsim-tools: New in December 2021

Tons of new things were added to netsim-tools in December 2021:

  • Pete Crocker contributed support for Fortinet devices. You can configure IPv4, IPv6 and OSPF. More details…
  • Jeroen van Bemmel contributed support for Nokia SR Linux and SR OS (including initial device configuration, OSPF, ISIS, BGP, and SR-MPLS).
  • I added Vagrant box names for IOSv, CSR and vSRX on VirtualBox. You still have to build the boxes, but at least you won’t have to change the default settings.
Starting with release 1.3, we renamed netsim-tools to netlab.
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