Tech Bytes: NetBeez Enables Active Monitoring For The Distributed WAN (Sponsored)
NetBeez provides network monitoring for the WAN, Wi-Fi, remote workers, and the cloud. On today's sponsored Tech Bytes, we discuss how NetBeez customer AmWINS Group uses NetBeez sensors in conjunction with a Cisco IWAN deployment to better understand the end user experience. Our guests are NetBeez cofounder Panos Vouzis; and Brad Addington, Network Engineer at AmWINS Group.
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God Objects Considered Harmful
Every software developer has run into “god objects”—some data structure or database that every process must access no matter what it is doing. Creating god objects in software is considered an anti-pattern—something you should not do. Perhaps the most apt description of the god object I’ve seen recently is you ask for a banana, and you get the gorilla as well.
We seem to have a deep desire to solve all the complexity of modern networks through god objects. There was ATM, which was going to solve all our networking problems by allowing the edge device (or a centralized controller) to control the path its traffic takes through the network. There is LISP, which is going to solve every mapping and tunneling/transport problem in the entire networking world (including mobility and security). There is SDN, which is going to solve everything by pushing it all into a controller.
And now there is BGP, which can be a link state protocol (LSVR), the ideal DC fabric control plane, the ideal interdomain protocol, the ideal IGP … a sort-of distributed god object that solves everything, everywhere, all the time (life in the fast lane…).
The problem is, a bunch of people Continue reading
Understanding the Network Impact of SASE
While SASE seemingly negates the importance of on-premises security tools, it’s likely that most enterprise organizations will still require them as part of a hybrid cloud security architecture.The Week in Internet News: Backlash after WhatsApp Plan to Share Data
Don’t share me: After WhatsApp announced plans to share user data with owner Facebook, many users have started to move on to other secure messaging apps, the Independent reports. Rival Telegram reported a 500 percent increase in new users after the change was announced. Meanwhile, WhatsApp and Facebook are launching advertising in an effort to keep users, with the companies taking out full-page advertisements in 10 Indian newspapers, Reuters says. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with 400 million users.
Defending the ban hammer: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has defended the company’s decision to permanently ban outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump, after Trump supports attacked the U.S. Capitol, the BBC says. The decision was difficult, however, Dorsey said. “I do not celebrate or feel pride,” he tweeted. “After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter.”
Parler goes to court: In related news, Amazon Web Services ended its web hosting arrangement with right-wing Twitter competitor Parler after the Capitol riots, effectively shutting the microblogging site down. AWS pointed to a series of posts on Parler threatening violence, including Continue reading
Scaling Beyond the CDN – Jake Holland, Principal Architect @ Akamai
How to scale beyond the CDN with 8k video, millions of simultaneous download and streams, local caches and multicast. This episode is the last in the series of 3 in which we discuss scaling the internet.
The main links discussed in this episode are:
https://github.com/GrumpyOldTroll/multicast-ingest-platform
https://github.com/GrumpyOldTroll/wicg-multicast-receiver-api/blob/master/explainer.md
Other main things we referenced:
https://blog.apnic.net/2020/07/28/why-inter-domain-multicast-now-makes-sense/
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6726 (FLUTE)
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8777 (DRIAD)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mboned-dorms/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mboned-cbacc/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mboned-ambi/
https://github.com/GrumpyOldTroll/chromium/tree/multicast_new
Build Virtual Lab Topology: Dual Stack Addressing, ArcOS and Junos Support
In mid-December I announced a set of tools that will help you build Vagrant-based remote labs much faster than writing Vagrantfiles and Ansible inventories by hand.
In early January I received a nice surprise: Dave Thelen not only decided to use the tool, he submitted a pull request with full-blown (and correctly implemented) ArcOS support. A few days later I managed to figure out what needs to be configured on vSRX to make it work, added Junos support, and thus increased the number of supported platforms to six (spanning five different operating systems).
Build Virtual Lab Topology: Dual Stack Addressing, ArcOS and Junos Support
In mid-December I announced a set of tools that will help you build Vagrant-based remote labs much faster than writing Vagrantfiles and Ansible inventories by hand.
In early January I received a nice surprise: Dave Thelen not only decided to use the tool, he submitted a pull request with full-blown (and correctly implemented) ArcOS support. A few days later I managed to figure out what needs to be configured on vSRX to make it work, added Junos support, and thus increased the number of supported platforms to six (spanning five different operating systems).
Rails 6 Has and Belongs To Many Gotchas
Some gotchas when using a has_and_belongs_to_many relationship with rails 6.Five Number Summary for Network Topologies
Introduction
You may or may not have already heard about the Five Number summary for a dataset. It’s basically a set of descriptive statistics for a given dataset, which provides an idea about the dataset. Those are:
- Minimum
- First quartile
- Median
- Third quartile
- Maximum
Similarly, there are specific statistics about topology, which gives an idea about any network topology. The ones which I think the most essential are:
- Density and Sparsity
- Average Degree
- Assortativity
- Average Path Length
- Clustering Coefficient
Sample Topology
We will be using Cogent topology, which is publicly available here to follow along with our examples. The map represents the nodes in US + Mexico, and European countries.Each node color represents a specific country.
Graphml version
You may have already noticed that in the graph, each city is represented as a Node. In reality, any city will have many routers, which will make the topology a lot bigger and more attractive. For our purposes, the current topology abstraction provides the right balance where it’s not huge to overwhelm the reader but big enough to keep things interesting.
Five Number Summary
Density and Sparsity
A Graph consists of nodes and links connecting those nodes. An obvious thing to Continue reading
Rails 6 Has and Belongs To Many Gotchas
I recently came across a couple of caveates when working with has_and_belongs_to_many relationships with Rails. This post covers them and how to solve or work around them. Software Versions Rails - 6.0.3.4 Many to Many Relationship Type When creating a many to many relationship, you...Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: January 15 Edition
Intel announced the next generation of its Intel vPro platform, and multiple companies introduced solutions that aim to make the transition to cloud easier.AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices
I’ve been working on some AAA configuration lately and I went through some of my older templates and realized that I didn’t want to simply use them without verifying first if I still believed that this was the best way of configuring AAA. I started by reading some of the official docs but quickly realized they were a bit shallow and lacked any real detail of some different scenarios such as what happens when the AAA server is not available. I then realized that there also is a lack of blogs that dive into this into any detail. Being curious, I thought I would lab it out as I have recently built an ISE lab.
The goal of this post is to start with a very simple AAA configuration, expand on it, verify each step what happens when the AAA server is available and when it is not. I will give you relevant debug outputs as well as my thoughts on different parameters in the configuration. Buckle up! because this is going to be a super deep dive!
We start out by applying a simple AAA configuration, where I have specified my ISE server, which is at 192.168.128. Continue reading
Ben Pfaff | Creating Open vSwitch
Join co-hosts Derick and Brandon as they sit down with Ben Pfaff, one of the original and core contributors of Open vSwitch, the virtual network switch for Linux.
A Skeleton Key for AI Hardware Experimentation
For those are the intersection of AI hardware and software, the open source Apache TVM effort is already well known and used among a number of chipmakers as well as developers. …
A Skeleton Key for AI Hardware Experimentation was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Uganda’s January 13, 2021 Internet Shut Down
Two days ago, through its communications regulator, Uganda's government ordered the "Suspension Of The Operation Of Internet Gateways" the day before the country's general election. This action was confirmed by several users and journalists who got access to the letter sent to Internet providers. In other words, the government effectively cut off Internet access from the population to the rest of the world.
Ahead of tomorrow’s election the Internet has been shutdown in Uganda (confirmed by a few friends in Kampala).
— Samira Sawlani (@samirasawlani) January 13, 2021
Letter from communications commission below: pic.twitter.com/tRpTIXTPcW
On Cloudflare Radar, we want to help anyone understand what happens on the Internet. We are continually monitoring our network and exposing insights, threats, and trends based on the aggregated data that we see.
Uganda's unusual traffic patterns quickly popped up in our charts. Our 7-day change in Internet Traffic chart in Uganda shows a clear drop to near zero starting around 1900 local time, when the providers received the letter.
This is also obvious in the Application-level Attacks chart.
The traffic drop was also confirmed by the Uganda Internet eXchange point, a place where many providers exchange their data traffic, on their Continue reading
The Impending AMD Milan Versus Intel Ice Lake Server Showdown
What a strange server CPU world we live in. The dozen or so biggest customers in the world command something on the order of 45 percent of the server CPU shipments, but significantly lower share of the revenue because of the volume discounts they can command, and they not only shape the product rollouts, their opinions can kill off processor SKUs long before we even know about them on announcement day. …
The Impending AMD Milan Versus Intel Ice Lake Server Showdown was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.