Worth Reading: Finding Bugs in C and C++ Compilers

Something to keep in mind before you start complaining about the crappy state of network operating systems: people are still finding hundreds of bugs in C and C++ compilers.

One might argue that compilers are even more mission-critical than network devices, they’ve been around for quite a while, and there might be more people using compilers than configuring network devices, so one would expect compilers to be relatively bug-free. Still, optimizing compilers became ridiculously complex in the past decades trying to squeeze the most out of the ever-more-complex CPU hardware, and we’re paying the price.

Keep that in mind the next time a vendor dances by with a glitzy slide deck promising software-defined nirvana.

Friction Finders

Do you have a door that sticks in your house? If it’s made out of wood the odds are good that you do. The kind that doesn’t shut properly or sticks out just a touch too far and doesn’t glide open like it used to. I’ve dealt with these kinds of things for years and Youtube is full of useful tricks to fix them. But all those videos start with the same tip: you have to find the place where the door is rubbing before you can fix it.

Enterprise IT is no different. We have to find the source of friction before we can hope to repair it. Whether it’s friction between people and hardware, users and software, or teams going at each other we have to know what’s causing the commotion before we can repair it. Just like with the sticking door, adding more force without understand the friction points isn’t a long-term solution.

Sticky Wickets

Friction comes from a variety of sources. People don’t understand how to use a device or a program. Perhaps it’s a struggle to understand who is supposed to be in charge of a change control or a provisioning process. It could even Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020521


Despite WHOIS’s relevance, however, the dawn of new data regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seemingly disconnected the ties that bind domains to their owners


Microsoft on Wednesday shared more specifics about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the attackers behind the SolarWinds hack to stay under the radar and avoid detection, as cybersecurity companies work towards getting a “clearer picture” of one of the most sophisticated attacks in recent history.


In this post, I’ll look at hash-based signatures, a family of post-quantum algorithms that could be a good match for DNSSEC from the perspective of infrastructure stability.


Although spoofing has been around for a long time, there has been no longitudinal study of how it is changing over time. Prior studies of DNS spoofing explored how it works, particularly the use of spoofing for censorship.


The number of data breaches declined by half last year — to less than 4,000 events — yet the number of leaked records more than doubled, as did the number of breaches that included a ransomware component, according to an annual analysis of breach events by Risk Based Security.


Starlink is satellite internet access from SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s Continue reading

Heavy Networking 560: Moving Big Data Sets From Far-Off Locations

Construction sites generate tons of data but often lack network connectivity. Today's Heavy Networking explores how one CTO has found ways to move huge data sets to HQ and the cloud using everything from Free Space Optics to LTE to consumer broadband. There are also stories about flying drones and robot dogs, and the operational impacts of SD-WAN. Our guest is Michael Shepherd, CTO of Rogers-O’Brien Construction.

Heavy Networking 560: Moving Big Data Sets From Far-Off Locations

Construction sites generate tons of data but often lack network connectivity. Today's Heavy Networking explores how one CTO has found ways to move huge data sets to HQ and the cloud using everything from Free Space Optics to LTE to consumer broadband. There are also stories about flying drones and robot dogs, and the operational impacts of SD-WAN. Our guest is Michael Shepherd, CTO of Rogers-O’Brien Construction.

The post Heavy Networking 560: Moving Big Data Sets From Far-Off Locations appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Notes on Pushing Ansible-generated FortiOS Configs

I’m working on a project to push out configuration files to Fortigates using the ‘configuration restore’ capability in FortiOS. The configs are generated using Jinja2 templates and then restored to the remote device via SCP. This post is to collect together a few of the pitfalls and things I learned in the process. Hopefully it will help someone else out of a hole.

Why use SCP in the first place?

I had every intention of using the FortiOS Ansible modules for this process, specifically fortinet.fortios.fortios_system_config_backup_restore. The issue with doing so is that it operates over the REST API. To use the API, you have to go on to the box and generate an API token. The issue here is that you only see the token in cleartext at the point of creation, after which it is stored cryptographically in the config. This means that on the script host you need to keep a vault with both versions – cleartext to push to the API, and cryptotext to insert into the config file you are pushing.

Instead, it is easier to enable SCP on the devices, put an admin PKI user’s public key in every config and restore over Continue reading

Video: Finding Paths Across the Network

Regardless of the technology used to get packets across the network, someone has to know how to get from sender to receiver(s), and as always, you have multiple options:

  • Almighty controller
  • On-demand dynamic path discovery (example: probing)
  • Participation in a routing protocol

For more details, watch Finding Paths Across the Network video.

Watch the video
The video is part of How Networks Really Work webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

Video: Finding Paths Across the Network

Regardless of the technology used to get packets across the network, someone has to know how to get from sender to receiver(s), and as always you have multiple options:

  • Almighty controller
  • On-demand dynamic path discovery (example: probing)
  • Participation in a routing protocol

For more details, watch Finding Paths Across the Network video.

Watch the video
The video is part of How Networks Really Work webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

US Air Force Spends $100 Million To Accelerate Data Warehouses

We talk about big money being spent on GPU-accelerated HPC and AI systems all the time here at The Next Platform, and we have been clear that we think another area where such acceleration will take off is with databases and related analytics, and particularly with data warehouses that have trillions of rows of data. …

US Air Force Spends $100 Million To Accelerate Data Warehouses was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Member News: Mali Chapter Works to Get Women Online

Lending a hand: The Mali Chapter of the Internet Society is focusing on helping women who aren’t digitally literate connect to the Internet. The chapter is providing training to help these women, including women with disabilities, earn income through online services like Facebook and WhatsApp. Participants have included small business operators, including caterers and hairdressers.

Antisocial networks: A recent survey by Internet Society chapter the Israeli Internet Association has found that about half of the people in the country refrain from responding on social networks for fear of encountering violent reactions. The survey also found that 86 percent of Israelis believe that discourse on social networks is violent, and 80 percent believe that public figures and politicians share violent discourse on social media.

Talking governance: Netherlands chapter board member Ruben Brave was recently invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the FreedomLab think tank to give a speech about Internet governance and respond to a recent position paper. He focused on recognizing human rights during debates about Internet governance. “Invest again in the explicit contribution of human rights in the re-design and management of Internet protocols by making people and resources available to knowledge institutions and invest in training for Continue reading

Cisco AppDynamics software melds security, application management

Cisco AppDynamics is making it easier for customers to integrate security features with application development to help customers detect threats, identify non-standard application behavior, and block attacks.The company is adding software, called Cisco Secure Application, to the AppDynamics platform to correlate security and application information by scanning code execution for known exploits. Vulnerability data is shared with application and security operations teams so that together they can prioritize, execute, and track remediation efforts. Read more: How AI can create self-driving data centersTo read this article in full, please click here

Cisco AppDynamics software melds security, application management

Cisco AppDynamics is making it easier for customers to integrate security features with application development to help customers detect threats, identify non-standard application behavior, and block attacks.The company is adding software, called Cisco Secure Application, to the AppDynamics platform to correlate security and application information by scanning code execution for known exploits. Vulnerability data is shared with application and security operations teams so that together they can prioritize, execute, and track remediation efforts. Read more: How AI can create self-driving data centersTo read this article in full, please click here

The Real Intent Behind Intent Based Networking

Networking is one of the industries where every time a good idea comes around it doesn’t take long for that idea to get coopted and turned into something to sell products, often drastically changing the intent of the original idea. Today we’re going to try to roll back the clock a bit and discuss the original idea around Intent Based Networking. What is it? What does it mean for you? And how do products fit into the original intent.

Show Notes

  • Compare/contrast the original intent of Intent Based Networking with what it has been marketed as
  • Trajectory towards Intent Based Networks
    • Traditional models
    • Automation added
    • Orchestration added
    • Intent added
  • Three pillars of Intent Based Networking
    • Defining Intent
    • Fulfilling Intent
    • Assuring Intent
  • Gaps between the vision and current reality
  • Approach vs. Product – what’s the right way to think about Intent Based Networking
Daren Fulwell
Guest
Tony Efantis
Host
Jordan Martin
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post The Real Intent Behind Intent Based Networking appeared first on Network Collective.

Donating Docker Distribution to the CNCF

We are happy to announce that Docker has contributed Docker Distribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Docker is committed to the Open Source community and open standards for many of our projects, and this move will ensure Docker Distribution has a broad group maintaining what is the foundation for many registries. 

What is Docker Distribution?

Distribution is the open source code that is the basis of the container registry that is part of Docker Hub, and also many other container registries. It is the reference implementation of a container registry and is extremely widely used, so it is a foundational part of the container ecosystem. This makes its new home in the CNCF highly appropriate.

Docker Distribution was a major rewrite of the original Registry code which was written in Python and was a much earlier design not using content addressed storage. This new version, written in Go, was designed to be an extensible library, so that different backends and subsystems could be designed. Docker formed the Open Container Initiative (OCI) in 2015, in the Linux Foundation, in order to standardise the specifications for the container ecosystem, including the registry and image formats.

Why are we donating Docker Continue reading

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