Case Study: IPng’s mail servers
Intro
I have seen companies achieve great successes in the space of consumer internet and entertainment industry. I’ve been feeling less enthusiastic about the stronghold that these corporations have over my digital presence. I am the first to admit that using “free” services is convenient, but these companies are sometimes taking away my autonomy and exerting control over society. To each their own of course, but for the last few years, I’ve been more and more inclined to take back a little bit of responsibility for my online social presence, away from centrally hosted services and to privately operated ones.
First off - I love Google’s Workspace products. I started using GMail just after it launched, back in 2004. Its user interface is sleek, performant, and very intuitive. Its filtering, granted, could be a bit less … robotic, but that’s made up by labels and an incredibly comprehensive search function. I would dare say that between GMail and Photos, those are my absolute favorite products on the internet.
That said, I have been running e-mail servers since well before Google existed as a company. I started off at M.C.G.V. Stack, the computer club of the University of Continue reading
Public Videos: Kubernetes Service Mesh
All the Kubernetes Service Mesh videos from the Kubernetes Networking Deep Dive webinar with Stuart Charlton are now public. Enjoy!
A Transport Protocol’s View of Starlink
Let's look at the Starlink at a protocol level, and how TCP, the workhorse transport protocol of the Internet, interacts with the somewhat unique characteristics of Starlink's service.IPB151: What Changed Alexandra Huides’ Mind about IPv6
Alexandra Huides didn’t like IPv6 on her first encounter with it. Today she is globally renowned for spreading the IPv6 gospel and helping AWS customers adopt it. Alexandra joins the show today to share what changed her mind about IPv6 and what she sees change the minds of network engineers every day: Greater client traffic... Read more »Amazon EKS networking options
When setting up a Kubernetes environment with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), it is crucial to understand your available networking options. EKS offers a range of networking choices that allow you to build a highly available and scalable cloud environment for your workloads.
In this blog post, we will explore the networking and policy enforcement options provided by AWS for Amazon EKS. By the end, you will have a clear understanding of the different networking options and network policy enforcement engines, and other features that can help you create a functional and secure platform for your Kubernetes workloads and services.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies routine operations, such as cluster deployment and maintenance, by automating tasks such as patching and updating operating systems and their underlying components. EKS enhances scalability through AWS Auto Scaling groups and other AWS service integrations and offers a highly available control plane to manage your cluster.
Amazon EKS in the cloud has two options:
- Managed
- Self-managed
Managed clusters rely on the AWS control plane node, which AWS hosts and controls separately from your cluster. This node operates in isolation and cannot be directly Continue reading
Cisco Starts To See Signs Of Datacenter Spending Recovery
If you look at the financial results for Cisco Systems over more than a decade, it is hard to tell one year from the other. …
Cisco Starts To See Signs Of Datacenter Spending Recovery was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Must Read: OSPF Protocol Analysis (RFC 1245)
Daniel Dib found the ancient OSPF Protocol Analysis (RFC 1245) that includes the Router CPU section. Please keep in mind the RFC was published in 1991 (35 years ago):
Steve Deering presented results for the Dijkstra calculation in the “MOSPF meeting report” in [3]. Steve’s calculation was done on a DEC 5000 (10 mips processor), using the Stanford internet as a model. His graphs are based on numbers of networks, not number of routers. However, if we extrapolate that the ratio of routers to networks remains the same, the time to run Dijkstra for 200 routers in Steve’s implementation was around 15 milliseconds.
Must Read: OSPF Protocol Analysis (RFC 1245)
Daniel Dib found the ancient OSPF Protocol Analysis (RFC 1245) that includes the Router CPU section. Please keep in mind the RFC was published in 1991 (35 years ago):
Steve Deering presented results for the Dijkstra calculation in the “MOSPF meeting report” in [3]. Steve’s calculation was done on a DEC 5000 (10 mips processor), using the Stanford internet as a model. His graphs are based on numbers of networks, not number of routers. However, if we extrapolate that the ratio of routers to networks remains the same, the time to run Dijkstra for 200 routers in Steve’s implementation was around 15 milliseconds.
Top500 Supers: Nvidia Utterly Dominates Those Shiny New Machines
If you stare at something for a little bit of time and let your mind wander, you can think of a new way to analyze something that you have looked at a bunch of times. …
Top500 Supers: Nvidia Utterly Dominates Those Shiny New Machines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Rule 11 Academy is (Somewhat) Live
The Academy does not replace this blog, the Hedge, etc. Instead, it’s a place for me to recreate all the training materials I’ve taught in the past, put them in one place, and adding new training material besides. It’s light right now, but I plan to post about once or twice a week.
Note this is a subscription site with paid content and two memberships–six months and yearly.
Get six months free using the coupon code BEAG2DRUP0TORNSKUT.
One Cerebras Wafer Beats An Exascale Super At Molecular Dynamics
We think that waferscale computing is an interesting and even an inevitable concept for certain kinds of compute and memory. …
One Cerebras Wafer Beats An Exascale Super At Molecular Dynamics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
NAN063: The Team Behind Nautobot (Part 2) – The Benefits of Technical Writing
Curious about what it takes to write a technical book as a network engineer? You’re in luck. The team behind Nautobot is also the team behind the book “Network Automation with Nautobot: Adopt a network source of truth and a data-driven approach to networking.” Jason, Ken, and John tell us about their writing process, timeline,... Read more »New Consent and Bot Management features for Cloudflare Zaraz
Managing consent online can be challenging. After you’ve figured out the necessary regulations, you usually need to configure some Consent Management Platform (CMP) to load all third-party tools and scripts on your website in a way that respects these demands. Cloudflare Zaraz manages the loading of all of these third-party tools, so it was only natural that in April 2023 we announced the Cloudflare Zaraz CMP: the simplest way to manage consent in a way that seamlessly integrates with your third-party tools manager.
As more and more third-party tool vendors are required to handle consent properly, our CMP has evolved to integrate with these new technologies and standardization efforts. Today, we’re happy to announce that the Cloudflare Zaraz CMP is now compatible with the Interactive Advertising Bureau Transparency and Consent Framework (IAB TCF) requirements, and fully supports Google’s Consent Mode v2 signals. Separately, we’ve taken efforts to improve the way Cloudflare Zaraz handles traffic coming from online bots.
IAB TCF Compatibility
Earlier this year, Google announced that websites that would like to use AdSense and other advertising solutions in the European Economic Area (EEA), the UK, and Switzerland, will be required to use a CMP that is approved by Continue reading
MLAG Deep Dive: LAG Member Failures in VXLAN Fabrics
In the Dealing with LAG Member Failures blog post, we figured out how easy it is to deal with a LAG member failure in a traditional MLAG cluster. The failover could happen in hardware, and even if it’s software-driven, it does not depend on the control plane.
Let’s add a bit of complexity and replace a traditional layer-2 fabric with a VXLAN fabric. The MLAG cluster members still use an MLAG peer link and an anycast VTEP IP address (more details).
MLAG Deep Dive: LAG Member Failures in VXLAN Fabrics
In the Dealing with LAG Member Failures blog post, we figured out how easy it is to deal with a LAG member failure in a traditional MLAG cluster. The failover could happen in hardware, and even if it’s software-driven, it does not depend on the control plane.
Let’s add a bit of complexity and replace a traditional layer-2 fabric with a VXLAN fabric. The MLAG cluster members still use an MLAG peer link and an anycast VTEP IP address (more details).
Cisco vPC in VXLAN/EVPN Network – Part 4 – Fabric Peering
Like I mentioned in a previous post, normally leafs don’t connect to leafs, but for vPC this is required. What if we don’t want to use physical interfaces for this interconnection? This is where fabric peering comes into play. Now, unfortunately my lab, which is virtual, does not support fabric peering so I will just introduce you to the concept. Let’s compare the traditional vPC to fabric peering, starting with traditional vPC:
The traditional vPC has the following pros and cons:
- Pros:
- No dependency on other devices for peer link and peer keepalive link.
- No contention for bandwidth on interfaces as they are dedicated.
- This also means no QoS configuration is required.
- Intent of configuration is clear with dedicated interfaces.
- Cons:
- Requires dedicated interfaces that could be used for something else.
- Interfaces have a cost, both from perspective of buying the switch, but also SFPs.
Now let’s compare that to fabric peering:
Fabric peering has the following pros and cons:
- Pros:
- No dedicated interfaces required.
- Thus reducing cost.
- Resiliency as there are multiple paths between the two switches.
- Cons:
- Dependency to other devices.
- Dependency to underlay.
- Contention for bandwidth with other traffic.
- May require QoS.
- May be more difficult to Continue reading
PP014: Good Threat Hunting
Have you ever noticed “threat hunting” in vendor products and wondered exactly what it means? James Williams is here to explain: Threat hunting is the R&D of detection engineering. A threat hunter imagines what an attacker might try and, critically, how that behavior would show up in the logs of a particular environment. Then the... Read more »To Exascale And (Maybe) Beyond!
The difference between “high performance computing” in the general way that many thousands of organizations run traditional simulation and modeling applications and the kind of exascale computing that is only now becoming a little more commonplace is like the difference between a single, two door coupe that goes 65 miles per hour (most of the time) and a fleet of bullet trains that can each hold over 1,300 people and move at more than 300 miles per hour, connecting a country or a continent. …
To Exascale And (Maybe) Beyond! was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.