The Week in Internet News: Siberian Student Climbs Tree to Get Internet Access

Great heights: As his classes move online, Russian student Alexei Dudoladov has to climb a birch tree to get Internet access, Reuters reports. The student at the Omsk Institute of Water Transport, which is nearly 1,400 miles east of Moscow, says his home Internet service is not strong enough to connect to online classes. “I need to go into the forest 300 meters from the village and climb a birch tree that is eight-meters high … and I get on Zoom to speak to professors and prove that I am not skipping class for no reason.”

Even greater heights: Meanwhile, the Ector County Independent School District in Odessa, Texas, is hoping that the new SpaceX satellite Internet service will help give students and teachers better Internet access, Education Dive says. The district is the first in the U.S. to work with SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service. A pilot project in early 2021 will include 45 families with students or teachers in the district.

Cybersecurity boss fired: U.S. President Donald Trump, who continues to insist he was the victim of massive nationwide voting fraud in his recent election loss to Joe Biden, has fired Christopher Krebs, who led the federal Continue reading

How to Overcome the Impostor Syndrome as Network Engineer

imposter-syndrome

Many network engineers, myself included, sometimes feel like they don’t belong and don’t deserve to be here. Here are a few tips to combat the impostor syndrome. Sometimes, do you feel like an impostor? This is quite common in IT: you feel like an impostor. Even when you’ve got THE dream job, or when you’ve earned this recognition, or when you’ve passed that famous certification… You can’t get rid of the feeling that it’s just smoke, that you must have fooled everyone and that at any moment you will be…

The post How to Overcome the Impostor Syndrome as Network Engineer appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

Ansible – ‘until’ loop

Contents

Introduction

In this short post I'll introduce you to lesser known type of Ansible loop: "until" loop. This loop is used for retrying task until certain condition is met.

To use this loop in task you essentially need to add 3 arguments to your task arguments:

until - condition that must be met for loop to stop. That is Ansible will continue executing the task until expression used here evaluates to true.
retry - specifies how many times we want to run the task before Ansible gives up.
delay - delay, in seconds, between retries.

As an example, below task will keep sending GET request to specified URL until the "status" key in response is equal to "READY". We ask Ansible to make 10 attempts in total with delay of 1 second between each attempt. If after final attempt condition in until is still not met task is marked as failed.

  - name: Wait until web  Continue reading

Why Is Public Cloud Networking So Different?

A while ago (eons before AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancer) I discussed the intricacies of AWS and Azure networking with a very smart engineer working for a security appliance vendor, and he said something along the lines of “it shows these things were designed by software developers – they have no idea how networks should work.

In reality, at least some aspects of public cloud networking come closer to the original ideas of how IP and data-link layers should fit together than today’s flat earth theories, so he probably wanted to say “they make it so hard for me to insert my virtual appliance into their network.

Why Is Public Cloud Networking So Different?

A while ago (eons before AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancer) I discussed the intricacies of AWS and Azure networking with a very smart engineer working for a security appliance vendor, and he said something along the lines of “it shows these things were designed by software developers – they have no idea how networks should work.

In reality, at least some aspects of public cloud networking come closer to the original ideas of how IP and data-link layers should fit together than today’s flat earth theories, so he probably wanted to say “they make it so hard for me to insert my virtual appliance into their network.

Elle: inferring isolation anomalies from experimental observations

Elle: inferring isolation anomalies from experimental observations, Kingsbury & Alvaro, VLDB’20

Is there anything more terrifying, and at the same time more useful, to a database vendor than Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen? As the abstract to today’s paper choice wryly puts it, “experience shows that many databases do not provide the isolation guarantees they claim.” Jepsen captures execution histories, and then examines them for evidence of isolation anomalies. General linearizability and serializability checking are NP-complete problems due to extreme state-space explosion with increasing concurrency, and Jepsen’s main checker, Knossos, taps out on the order of hundreds of transactions.

Databases are in for an ‘Ell(e) of a hard time with the new checker in the Jepsen family though, Elle. From the README:

Like a clever lawyer, Elle looks for a sequence of events in a story which couldn’t possibly have happened in that order, and uses that inference to prove the story can’t be consistent.

The paper describes how Elle works behind the scenes, and gives us a taste of Elle in action. Elle is able to check histories of hundreds of thousands of transactions in just tens of seconds. Which means whole new levels of stress for Continue reading

Worth Reading: Do Your Homework

Tom Hollingsworth wrote another must-read blog post in which he explained what one should do before asking for help:

If someone comes to me and says, “I tried this and it failed and I got this message. I looked it up and the response didn’t make sense. Can you tell me why that is?” I rejoice. That person has done the legwork and narrowed the question down to the key piece they need to know.

In other words (again his), do your homework first and then ask relevant questions.

Worth Reading: Do Your Homework

Tom Hollingsworth wrote another must-read blog post in which he explained what one should do before asking for help:

If someone comes to me and says, “I tried this and it failed and I got this message. I looked it up and the response didn’t make sense. Can you tell me why that is?” I rejoice. That person has done the legwork and narrowed the question down to the key piece they need to know.

In other words (again his), do your homework first and then ask relevant questions.

PostgreSQL install

Howdy Folks! This post covers the process of installing the PostgreSQL database on Linux and a few of the common details around configuration and operation. Software Versions Used in this Post PostgreSQL - 13.1 Ubuntu - 20.04 Centos - 8.2.2004 Installation Ubuntu This is almost a...continue reading

PostgreSQL install

Howdy Folks! This post covers the process of installing the PostgreSQL database on Linux and a few of the common details around configuration and operation. Software Versions Used in this Post PostgreSQL - 13.1 Ubuntu - 20.04 Centos - 8.2.2004 Installation Ubuntu This is almost a...

rbenv Install Ubuntu 2004

rbenv is a utility for installing multiple ruby versions on a host machine. Using rbenv allows you to install ruby in a path you have ownership over so you can install gems without having to have sudo or root privileges. rbenv also allows you to target the exact ruby version in development...

Heavy Networking 551: An Insider’s Guide To The SONiC Network OS

SONiC is a network OS that can run on a variety of whitebox switches. Originally developed by Microsoft, SONiC is now an open-source project with distributions that target hyperscale and enterprise environments. Today's Heavy Networking is a deep dive into SONiC with Dave Maltz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who has been closely involved with SONiC's development. While Microsoft is a SONiC backer, this is an unsponsored episode.

Heavy Networking 551: An Insider’s Guide To The SONiC Network OS

SONiC is a network OS that can run on a variety of whitebox switches. Originally developed by Microsoft, SONiC is now an open-source project with distributions that target hyperscale and enterprise environments. Today's Heavy Networking is a deep dive into SONiC with Dave Maltz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who has been closely involved with SONiC's development. While Microsoft is a SONiC backer, this is an unsponsored episode.

The post Heavy Networking 551: An Insider’s Guide To The SONiC Network OS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Calico Delivers “Wow Effect” with 6x Faster Encryption than Any Other Solution… Confirms Leadership in Latest Independent CNI Benchmark Tests

Benchmark tests measure a repeatable set of quantifiable results that serve as a point of reference against which products and services can be compared. Since 2018, Alexis Ducastel, a Kubernetes CKA/CKAD and the founder of InfraBuilder, has been running independent benchmark tests of Kubernetes network plugins (CNI) over a 10Gbit/s network.

The latest benchmark in this periodic series of tests was published in September, and was based on CNI versions that were up-to-date as of August 2020. Only CNIs that can be set up with a single yaml file were tested and compared, and included the following:

  • Antrea v.0.9.1
  • Calico v3.16
  • Canal v3.16 (Flannel network + Calico Network Policies)
  • Cilium 1.8.2
  • Flannel 0.12.0
  • Kube-router latest (2020–08–25)
  • WeaveNet 2.7.0

We are thrilled to report that among all of the CNI’s tested, Calico was the clear winner, excelling in nearly every category and delivering superlative results which are summarized in the chart below. In fact, Calico is the CNI of choice in the primary use cases presented by the author in the report’s summary.

The exceptional performance of Calico encryption was described as having the “real wow effect” among all of Continue reading