Heavy Networking 564: Seven Engineers At The Community Roundtable
Today's Heavy Networking episode is a grab bag of topics delivered in our community roundtable format. Five engineers join Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro to talk about subjects including IPv6, SmartNICs, firewall rule management, becoming a manager, and other topics.
The post Heavy Networking 564: Seven Engineers At The Community Roundtable appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Building Snowflakes On Purpose
We all know that building snowflake networks is bad, right? If it’s not a repeatable process it’s going to end up being a problem down the road. If we can’t refer back to documentation to shows why we did something we’re going to end up causing issues and reducing reliability. But what happens when a snowflake process is required to fix a bigger problem? It’s a fun story that highlights where process can break down sometimes.
Reloaded
I’ve mentioned before that I spent about six months doing telephone tech support for Gateway computers. This was back in 2003 so Windows XP was the hottest operating system out there. The nature of support means that you’re going to be spending more time working on older things. In my case this was Windows 95 and 98. Windows 98 was a pain but it was easy to work on.
One of the most common processes we had for Windows 98 was a system reload. It was the last line of defense to fix massive issues or remove viruses. It was something that was second nature to any of the technicians on the help desk:
- Boot from the Gateway tools CD and use GWSCAN Continue reading
Why Customers Always Escalate To Tech Support
Responding to Eyvonne's piece on escalation
Video: High-Level Technology Guidelines
I concluded the Focus on Business Challenges First presentation (part of Business Aspects of Networking Technologies webinar) with a few technology guidelines starting with:
- Be vendor-agnostic (always look around to see what others are doing);
- Try to understand how the technology you’re evaluating works (it will help you spot the potential problems before they crash your network);
- Always select what’s best for your business, not for the sales quota of your friendly $vendor account manager.
For more guidelines, watch the video.
Video: High-Level Technology Guidelines
I concluded the Focus on Business Challenges First presentation (part of Business Aspects of Networking Technologies webinar) with a few technology guidelines starting with:
- Be vendor-agnostic (always look around to see what others are doing);
- Try to understand how the technology you’re evaluating really works (it will help you spot the potential problems before they crash your network);
- Always select what’s best for your business, not for the sales quota of your friendly $vendor account manager.
For more guidelines, watch the video (available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription).
Looking at What’s Driving Edge Computing’s New Security Strategy
As edge computing grows, security teams must address the requirement for visibility and control across the LAN, WAN, and cloud edges.No, 1,000 engineers were not needed for SolarWinds
Microsoft estimates it would take 1,000 to carry out the famous SolarWinds hacker attacks. This means in reality that it was probably fewer than 100 skilled engineers. I base this claim on the following Tweet:
When asked why they think it was 1,000 devs, Brad Smith says they saw an elaborate and persistent set of work. Made an estimate of how much work went into each of these attacks, and asked their own engineers. 1,000 was their estimate.
— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) February 23, 2021
Yes, it would take Microsoft 1,000 engineers to replicate the attacks. But it takes a large company like Microsoft 10-times the effort to replicate anything. This is partly because Microsoft is a big, stodgy corporation. But this is mostly because this is a fundamental property of software engineering, where replicating something takes 10-times the effort of creating the original thing.
It's like painting. The effort to produce a work is often less than the effort to reproduce it. I can throw some random paint strokes on canvas with almost no effort. It would take you an immense amount of work to replicate those same strokes -- even to figure out the exact color of Continue reading
JNCIE-DC remote lab exam resources
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the exam centers of Juniper are at time of this writing closed for external visitors. Fortunately the Juniper Education team did a great job and made JNCIE lab exams available from your own home! Now this does impact how you make the test and also what resources you have available […]
The post JNCIE-DC remote lab exam resources first appeared on Rick Mur.The Datacenter Is Just A Big Game For Nvidia
We have a saying around here at The Next Platform, and it is this: Money is not the point of the game. …
The Datacenter Is Just A Big Game For Nvidia was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Creating serendipity with Python
We've been experimenting with breaking up employees into random groups (of size 4) and setting up video hangouts between them. We're doing this to replace the serendipitous meetings that sometimes occur around coffee machines, in lunch lines or while waiting for the printer. And also, we just want people to get to know each other.
Which lead to me writing some code. The core of which is divide n elements into groups of at least size g minimizing the size of each group. So, suppose an office has 15 employees in it then it would be divided into three groups of sizes 5, 5, 5; if an office had 16 employees it would be 4, 4, 4, 4; if it had 17 employees it would be 4, 4, 4, 5 and so on.
I initially wrote the following code (in Python):
groups = [g] * (n//g)
for e in range(0, n % g):
groups[e % len(groups)] += 1
The first line creates n//g (// is integer division) entries of size g (for example, if g == 4 and n == 17 then groups == [4, 4, 4, 4]). The for loop deals with the 'left over' parts that Continue reading
Changes Go Far Beyond Just AI, Machine Learning
SambaNova Systems is a technology startup founded in 2017 by a group of far-sighted engineers and data scientists who saw that the current approaches to AI and machine learning were beginning to run out of steam, and that an entire new architecture would be necessary in order to make AI accessible for everyone as well as deliver the scale, performance, accuracy and ease of use needed for future applications. …
Changes Go Far Beyond Just AI, Machine Learning was written by Daniel Robinson at The Next Platform.
The Role of Machine Learning and AIOps in Network Performance Management
Nascent AIOps holds the key to a more automated, streamlined, and optimized approach to IT management that can help quickly and effectively identify and resolve network issues.Response: Firefox 86 Introduces Total Cookie Protection – Mozilla Security Blog
Browsers keep users safe from excessive user tracking
Captains Take 5 – Nick Janetakis
Docker Captains are select members of the community that are both experts in their field and are passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others. “Docker Captains Take 5” is a regular blog series where we get a closer look at our Captains and ask them the same broad set of questions ranging from what their best Docker tip is to whether they prefer cats or dogs (personally, we like whales and turtles over here). Today, we’re interviewing Nick Janetakis who has been a Docker Captain since 2016. He is a freelance full stack developer / teacher and is based in New York, United States.
How/when did you first discover Docker?
I was doing freelance web development work and kept running into situations where it was painful to set up my development environment for web apps created with Ruby on Rails. Different apps had different Ruby version requirements as well as needing different PostgreSQL and Redis versions too.
I remember running a manually provisioned Linux VM on my Windows dev box and did most of my development there. I even started to use LXC directly within that Linux VM.
That wasn’t too bad after investing a lot of time to Continue reading
Does Unequal-Cost Multipathing Make Sense?
Every now and then I’m getting questions along the lines “why doesn’t X support unequal-cost multipathing (UCMP)?” for X in [ OSPF, BGP, IS-IS ].
To set the record straight: BGP does support some rudimentary form of unequal-cost multipathing with the DMZ Bandwidth community, but it only works across multiple egress points from a single autonomous system. Follow-up nerd knobs described how to use the same community over EBGP sessions; not sure whether anyone implemented that part (comments welcome).