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Network Operating Systems: Questions and Answers

James Miles got tons of really interesting questions while watching the Network Operating System Models webinar by Dinesh Dutt, and the only reasonable thing to do when he sent them over was to schedule a Q&A session with Dinesh to discuss them.

We got together last week and planned to spend an hour or two discussing the questions, but (not exactly unexpectedly) we got only halfway through the list in the time we had, so we’re continuing next week.

This is how far we’ve got:

Toward an API for the real numbers

Towards an API for the real numbers, Boehm, PLDI’20

Last time out we saw that even in scientific computing applications built by experts, problems with floating point numbers are commonplace. The idiosyncrasies of floating point representations also show up in more everyday applications such as calculators and spreadsheets. Here the user-base is less inclined to be sympathetic:

If arithmetic computations and results are directly exposed to human users who are not floating point experts, floating point approximations tend to be viewed as bugs.

Hans-J. Boehm, author of today’s paper, should know, because he’s been involved in the development of the Android calculator app. That app is subject to “voluminous (public) user feedback”, and in the 2014 floating-point based calculator, bug reports relating to inaccurate results, unnecessary zeroes, and the like.

It’s a classic software development moment. The bug / feature request that looks just like any other ordinary issue on the outside, but takes you from straightforward implementation to research-level problem on the inside! In this case, the realisation that you can’t just use standard IEEE floating point operations anymore.

For calculators, spreadsheets, and many other applications we don’t need the raw performance of hardware floating point operations. But Continue reading

Integrating 5G Edge Services into Enterprise Networks

The biggest factor in choosing a 5G edge computing provider will likely be based on which 5G services are available where your business requires them.

The Docker Dashboard Welcomes Hub and Local Images

Last year we released the Docker Dashboard as part of Docker Desktop, today we are excited to announce we are releasing the next piece of the dashboard to our community customers with a new Images UI. We have expanded the existing UI for your local machine with the ability to interact with your Docker images on Docker Hub and locally. This allows you to: display your local images, manage them (run, inspect, delete) through an intuitive UI without using the CLI. And for you images in Hub you can now view you repos or your teams repos and pull images directly from the UI.

To get started, Download the latest Docker Desktop release and load up the dashboard (we are also excited that we have given the dashboard an icon)

You will be able to see that we have also added a new sidebar to navigate between the two areas and we are planning to add new sections in here soon. To find out more about what’s coming or to give feedback on what you would like to see check out our public roadmap.

Let’s jump in and have a look at what we can do…

From Continue reading

VMware highlights security in COVID-era networking

As enterprise workloads continue to move off-premises and employees continue to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, securing that environment remains a critical challenge for IT.At its virtual VWworld 2020 gathering, VMware detailed products and plans to help customers deal with the challenges of securing distributed enterprise resources.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • What SD-Branch is and why you'll need it • What are the options for securing SD-WAN? "Amid global disruption, the key to survival for many companies has meant an accelerated shift to the cloud and, ultimately, bolting on security products in their data centers," said Sanjay Poonen, VMware's Chief Operating Officer, Customer Operations. "But legacy security systems are no longer sufficient for organizations that are using the cloud as part of their computing infrastructure. It's time to rethink security for the cloud. Organizations need protection at the workload level, not just at the endpoint."To read this article in full, please click here

VMware highlights security in COVID-era networking

Launching the First-Ever Virtual Indigenous Connectivity Summit

COVID-19 has moved many of our lives online, and our conversations around how to further broadband access are no exception. This year, the Indigenous Connectivity Summit is happening virtually for the first time.

After meeting in Santa Fe, Inuvik, and Waimanalo and Hilo, this year we had planned to meet in Winnipeg – the city with the highest Indigenous population in Canada. We will sorely miss seeing our ICS community in person, but we are excited to meet online and demonstrate how important it is for Indigenous communities to connect to the Internet.

An important aspect of the ICS is the space created for community members to engage in conversations sharing similar challenges, connecting with one another, and innovating solutions to the lack of broadband access in their communities. We are excited to continue having these impactful conversations virtually and to recreate a more discussion-based environment than in a typical webinar format. We are also looking forward to having new faces join us this year. Without the barrier of travel, we can now engage with more participants from different communities.

The conversations we hold at the ICS hold significant weight in the policy world. Take our conversations around the Tribal Continue reading

Docker Names Donnie Berkholz to Vice President of Products

To deepen Docker’s investment in products that make developers successful, we’re pleased to announce that Donnie Berkholz will join the Docker team as VP of Products. Donnie has an extensive background as a practitioner, leader, and advisor on developer platforms and communities. He spent more than a decade as an open-source developer and leader at Gentoo Linux, and he recently served as a product and technology VP at CWT overseeing areas including DevOps and developer services. Donnie’s also spent time at RedMonk, 451 Research, and Scale Venture Partners researching and advising on product and market strategy for DevOps and developer products.

To get to know Donnie, we asked him a few questions about his background and where he plans to focus in his new role:

What got you the most excited about joining Docker?

I’ve been a big fan of Docker’s technology since the day it was announced. At the time, I was an industry analyst with RedMonk, and I could instantly sense the incredible impact that it would have in transforming the modern developer experience. Recent years have borne that out with the astonishing growth in popularity of containers and cloud-native development. With Docker’s renewed focus on developers, Continue reading

NTS RFC Published: New Standard to Ensure Secure Time on the Internet

The Internet Society is pleased to see the publication of RFC 8915: Network Time Security for the Network Time Protocol by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This standard represents a new security mechanism for one of the oldest protocols on the Internet, the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Secure and Accurate Time

NTP enables the synchronization of time on computers connected by a network. Time is very important for many vital everyday functions, such as financial transactions and the correct operation of electrical power systems and transportation systems. Secure and accurate time is also crucial for many Internet security technologies including basic website security. As everything becomes more distributed and more online, synchronized time in computers becomes even more important. But despite all this, security for NTP has lagged behind in development and deployment. Network Time Security (NTS) was developed to fill this gap.

The publication of the NTS protocol on 1 October, 2020 represents the culmination of many years of work by the IETF NTP Working Group. NTS adds cryptographic security for the client-server mode of NTP. So, what does this mean? It means that NTP can now confirm the identity of the network clocks that are exchanging time Continue reading

NTS is now an RFC

Earlier today the document describing Network Time Security for NTP officially became RFC 8915. This means that Network Time Security (NTS) is officially part of the collection of protocols that makes the Internet work. We’ve changed our time service to use the officially assigned port of 4460 for NTS key exchange, so you can use our service with ease. This is big progress towards securing a ubiquitous Internet protocol.

Over the past months we’ve seen many users of our time service, but very few using Network Time Security. This leaves computers vulnerable to attacks that imitate the server they use to obtain NTP. Part of the problem was the lack of available NTP daemons that supported NTS. That problem is now solved: chrony and ntpsec both support NTS.

Time underlies the security of many of the protocols such as TLS that we rely on to secure our online lives. Without accurate time, there is no way to determine whether or not credentials have expired. The absence of an easily deployed secure time protocol has been a problem for Internet security.

Without NTS or symmetric key authentication there is no guarantee that your computer is actually talking NTP with the computer Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 061: Weird And Wacky IPv6 Addressing

In this week's IPv6 Buzz podcast, Ed, Scott, and Tom talk about some of the weird things they've seen folks do with IPv6 addresses. IPv6 is different than IPv4 in many ways but the endless supply of IPv6 addresses yields endlessly crazy ways to use them.

IPv6 Buzz 061: Weird And Wacky IPv6 Addressing

The post IPv6 Buzz 061: Weird And Wacky IPv6 Addressing appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How sensors, ambient intelligence could revolutionize healthcare

Networks of radio-connected, intelligent sensors will propel the healthcare industry forward as increasing numbers of patients need care, researchers say. Two academic institutions recently shared details about how IoT-based technology might help mitigate clinical errors and improve caregiving in hospitals – an environment that's under increased strain due to coronavirus cases – as well as at home.The School of Engineering at Stanford University is exploring how a combination of electronic sensors and artificial intelligence could be installed in hospital rooms and elder care homes to help medical professionals monitor and treat patients more effectively.To read this article in full, please click here

TCP Authentication Option – Greg Hankins (Nokia) and Ron Bonica (Juniper Networks)

In this episode we introduce the TCP Authentication Option, why do we need it, what problems does it solve, who implemented it and where can you learn more? Our guests are Greg Hankins from Nokia and Ron Bonica from Juniper Networks.

Configuration examples, interoperability test results and more to be found on this GitHub page

BGP FlowSpec on Arista vEOS

BGP FlowSpec is an another Multiptocol-BGP extension with SAFI 133. Created for the purpose of DoS and DDoS attacks mitigation, it brings a new NLRI that collects 12 types of L3 and L4 information. These information creates a flow which defines criteria used for matching DDoS parameters. For instance, a flow can match victim's IP, […]
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Introducing API Shield

APIs are the lifeblood of modern Internet-connected applications. Every millisecond they carry requests from mobile applications—place this food delivery order, “like” this picture—and directions to IoT devices—unlock the car door, start the wash cycle, my human just finished a 5k run—among countless other calls.

They’re also the target of widespread attacks designed to perform unauthorized actions or exfiltrate data, as data from Gartner increasingly shows: “by 2021, 90% of web-enabled applications will have more surface area for attack in the form of exposed APIs rather than the UI, up from 40% in 2019, and “Gartner predicted that, by 2022, API abuses will move from an infrequent to the most-frequent attack vector, resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications”[1][2]. Of the 18 million requests per second that traverse Cloudflare’s network, 50% are directed towards APIs—with the majority of these requests blocked as malicious.

To combat these threats, Cloudflare is making it simple to secure APIs through the use of strong client certificate-based identity and strict schema-based validation. As of today, these capabilities are available free for all plans within our new “API Shield” offering. And as of today, the security benefits also extend to gRPC-based APIs, which use binary Continue reading

Announcing support for gRPC

Today we're excited to announce beta support for proxying gRPC, a next-generation protocol that allows you to build APIs at scale. With gRPC on Cloudflare, you get access to the security, reliability and performance features that you're used to having at your fingertips for traditional APIs. Sign up for the beta today in the Network tab of the Cloudflare dashboard.

gRPC has proven itself to be a popular new protocol for building APIs at scale: it’s more efficient and built to offer superior bi-directional streaming capabilities. However, because gRPC uses newer technology, like HTTP/2, under the covers, existing security and performance tools did not support gRPC traffic out of the box. This meant that customers adopting gRPC to power their APIs had to pick between modernity on one hand, and things like security, performance, and reliability on the other. Because supporting modern protocols and making sure people can operate them safely and performantly is in our DNA, we set out to fix this.

When you put your gRPC APIs on Cloudflare, you immediately gain all the benefits that come with Cloudflare. Apprehensive of exposing your APIs to bad actors? Add security features such as WAF and Bot Management. Need Continue reading

The Network CLI is Dead, Long Live XML! (just kidding, it’s an Ansible+NETCONF+YANG Deep Dive)

Now that I've startled you, no, the network CLI isn’t going away anytime soon, nor are people going to start manipulating XML directly for their network configuration data. What I do want to help you understand is how Ansible can now be used as an interface into automating the pushing and pulling of configuration data (via NETCONF) in a structured means (via YANG data models) without having to truly learn about either of these complex concepts. All you have to understand is how to use the Ansible Content Collection as shown below, obfuscating all technical implementation details that have burdened network operators and engineers for years.

Setting the stage

Before we even start talking about NETCONF and YANG, our overall goal is for the network to leverage configuration data in a structured manner. This makes network automation much more predictable and reliable when ensuring operation state. NETCONF and YANG are the low-level pieces of the puzzle, but we are making it easier to do via well known Ansible means and methodologies.

What we believe as Ansible developers is that NETCONF and YANG aren't (and shouldn't) be quintessential or ultimate goals for network automation engineers. You should not need to Continue reading

Network Automation Isn’t Easy

Contrary to what some evangelists would love you to believe, getting fluent in network automation is a bit harder than watching 3-minute videos and cobbling playbooks together with google-and-paste… but then nothing really worth doing is ever easy, or everyone else would be doing it already.

Here’s a typical comment from a Building Network Automation Solutions attendee:

I’m loving the class. I feel more confused than I ever have in my 23 year career… but I can already see the difference in my perspective shift in all aspects of my work.

Network Automation Isn’t Easy

Here’s a typical comment from a Building Network Automation Solutions attendee:

I’m loving the class. I feel more confused than I ever have in my 23 year career… but I can already see the difference in my perspective shift in all aspects of my work.