The Internet of Food

This abridged article by Francisca Hector was originally published in Tasty Bytes.

Arguably food is the most important item on the planet. The current food system; however, has many inefficiencies and food security continues to be a global challenge.

In addition to this, conscious consumption has reached new heights as consumers demand that their food is not only safe, nutritious, and affordable, but they also want to ensure that their food is ethically sourced and the harvesting and production processes reduce waste.

For many, there is the belief that the food system needs to be fundamentally disrupted. While there have been some attempts to use technology to make better decisions around food, these technologies are not widely available. Without widespread availability and adoption, the impact of any technology is hard to ascertain.

This and other concerns are what spurred the creation of The Internet Society Special Interest Group for the Internet of Food (SIG-IOF), which is a discussion room for next-gen Internet backbone standards for digital aspects of food. In short, that means that when food goes data, this group would like to facilitate the Internet standards for how that data is handled.

With 110 chapters located all over Continue reading

Juniper upgrades security software with threat intelligence, VPN package

Juniper Networks has added new components to its security portfolio to help customers get a better handle on potential threats as well as improve risk detection and response.The new products are aimed at figuring out who and what devices are on the network and then offering the security intelligence to help them address threats at every point on the network, said Samantha Madrid vice president of product management in the Security Business & Strategy business at Juniper Networks.Security is always a challenge but even more so now when customers have mass-scale remote workforces, Madrid said. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Madrid cited a recent Juniper-sponsored IT survey by Vanson Bourne that found 97% of respondents said their companies faced challenges securing their organizations’ network effectively.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper upgrades security software with threat intelligence, VPN package

Juniper Networks has added new components to its security portfolio to help customers get a better handle on potential threats as well as improve risk detection and response.The new products are aimed at figuring out who and what devices are on the network and then offering the security intelligence to help them address threats at every point on the network, said Samantha Madrid vice president of product management in the Security Business & Strategy business at Juniper Networks.Security is always a challenge but even more so now when customers have mass-scale remote workforces, Madrid said. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Madrid cited a recent Juniper-sponsored IT survey by Vanson Bourne that found 97% of respondents said their companies faced challenges securing their organizations’ network effectively.To read this article in full, please click here

Public/private key SSH access to Fortigate

To save having to enter usernames and passwords for your devices, it is a lot more convenient to use public/private key authentication. When SSHing to the device, you simply specify the username and authentication using the keys is automatic.

Windows users can use puttygen to make key pairs, and PuTTY as an SSH client to connect to devices. This process is quite well described here: https://www.ssh.com/ssh/putty/windows/puttygen

By default, keys (on a Linux or Macos host) are in your home directory, under the ~.ssh/ directory. A keypair is generated using ssh-keygen like so:

andrew@host % ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/andrew/.ssh/id_rsa): andrew_test
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in andrew_test.
Your public key has been saved in andrew_test.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:nx4REDACTEDGN69tY andrew@host
The key's randomart image is:
+---[RSA 3072]----+
| 1. o+|
| o o& o|
| * o..- =.|
| .. |
| S. =B xx . |
| .+. |
| . +.=. o. +E|
| o o+* .|
+----[SHA256]-----+
andrew@host %

In the example above, I created it as ‘andrew_test’ – this will Continue reading

Fixing Firewall Ruleset Problem For Good

Before we start: if you’re new to my blog (or stumbled upon this blog post by incident) you might want to read the Considerations for Host-Based Firewalls for a brief overview of the challenge, and my explanation why flow-tracking tools cannot be used to auto-generate firewall policies.

As expected, the “you cannot do it” post on LinkedIn generated numerous comments, ranging from good ideas to borderline ridiculous attempts to fix a problem that has been proven to be unfixable (see also: perpetual motion).

Read more …

Fixing Firewall Ruleset Problem For Good

Before we start: if you’re new to my blog (or stumbled upon this blog post by incident) you might want to read the Considerations for Host-Based Firewalls for a brief overview of the challenge, and my explanation why flow-tracking tools cannot be used to auto-generate firewall policies.

As expected, the “you cannot do it” post on LinkedIn generated numerous comments, ranging from good ideas to borderline ridiculous attempts to fix a problem that has been proven to be unfixable (see also: perpetual motion).

Read more …

What is a network switch, and how does it work?

Networks today are essential for supporting businesses, providing communication, delivering entertainment—the list goes on and on. A fundamental element networks have in common is the network switch, which helps connect devices for the purpose of sharing resources.What is a network switch? A network switch is a device that operates at the Data Link layer of the OSI model—Layer 2. It takes in packets being sent by devices that are connected to its physical ports and sends them out again, but only through the ports that lead to the devices the packets are intended to reach.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco slapped with $1.9 billion judgement in security patent lawsuit

Cisco this week lost a patent infringement case brought by security vendor Centripetal Networks and was hit with a $1.9 billion judgement.A non-jury judgement from U.S. District Judge Henry Morgan determined Cisco infringed on four security patents related to encrypted traffic and packet filtering technology belonging to plaintiff Centripetal Networks. The award directs $755.8 million in actual damages, multiplied by 2.5 to reflect "willful and egregious" conduct from Cisco, the judge found. The award also includes past damages and a running royalty of 10% on the apportioned sales of the patented products for a period of three years, followed by a second three-year term with a running royalty of 5% on such sales, which could take damages from the case north of $3 billion, according to a Centripetal statement about the case.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco slapped with $1.9 billion judgement in security patent lawsuit

Cisco this week lost a patent infringement case brought by security vendor Centripetal Networks and was hit with a $1.9 billion judgement.A non-jury judgement from U.S. District Judge Henry Morgan determined Cisco infringed on four security patents related to encrypted traffic and packet filtering technology belonging to plaintiff Centripetal Networks. The award directs $755.8 million in actual damages, multiplied by 2.5 to reflect "willful and egregious" conduct from Cisco, the judge found. The award also includes past damages and a running royalty of 10% on the apportioned sales of the patented products for a period of three years, followed by a second three-year term with a running royalty of 5% on such sales, which could take damages from the case north of $3 billion, according to a Centripetal statement about the case.To read this article in full, please click here

AppIQ – Unprecedented visibility that Aviatrix CoPilot brings

Earlier in my career, I worked as a Network Engineer in the high-frequency trading industry at a capital market exchange. It was the time when electronic trading was gaining heavy momentum as open outcry was receding. This was thanks mainly in part to vendors such as Arista who leveraged merchant silicon from Broadcom to lead … Continue reading AppIQ – Unprecedented visibility that Aviatrix CoPilot brings →

RFC1925 Rule 2

According to RFC1925, the second fundamental truth of networking is: No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can’t increase the speed of light.

However early in the world of network engineering this problem was first observed (see, for instance, Tanenbaum’s “station wagon example” in Computer Networks), human impatience is forever trying to overcome the limitations of the physical world, and push more data down the pipe than mother nature intended (or Shannon’s theory allows).

One attempt at solving this problem is the description of an infinitely fat pipe (helpfully called an “infan(t)”) described in RFC5984. While packets would still need to be clocked onto such a network, incurring serialization delay, the ability to clock an infinite number of packets onto the network at the same moment in time would represent a massive gain in a network’s ability, potentially reaching speeds faster than the speed of light. The authors of RFC5984 describe several attempts to build such a network, including black fiber, on which the lack of light implies data transmission. This is problematic, however, because a lack of information can be interpreted differently depending on the context. A pregnant pause has far different meaning Continue reading

Getting Started With AWS Ansible Module Development and Community Contribution

We often hear from cloud admins and developers that they’re interested in giving back to Ansible and using their knowledge to benefit the community, but they don’t know how to get started.  Lots of folks may even already be carrying new Ansible modules or plugins in their local environments, and are looking to get them included upstream for more broad use.

Luckily, it doesn’t take much to get started as an Ansible contributor. If you’re already using the Ansible AWS modules, there are many ways to use your existing knowledge, skills and experience to contribute. If you need some ideas on where to contribute, take a look at the following:

  • Creating integration tests: Creating missing tests for modules is a great way to get started, and integration tests are just Ansible tasks!
  • Module porting: If you’re familiar with the boto3 Python library, there’s also a backlog of modules that need to be ported from boto2 to boto3.
  • Repository issue triage: And of course there’s always open Github issues and pull requests. Testing bugs or patches and providing feedback on your use cases and experiences is very valuable.

The AWS Ansible Content Collections

Starting with Ansible 2.10, the AWS Continue reading

Let’s build a Cloudflare Worker with WebAssembly and Haskell

Let's build a Cloudflare Worker with WebAssembly and Haskell

This is a guest post by Cristhian Motoche of Stack Builders.

At Stack Builders, we believe that Haskell’s system of expressive static types offers many benefits to the software industry and the world-wide community that depends on our services. In order to fully realize these benefits, it is necessary to have proper training and access to an ecosystem that allows for reliable deployment of services. In exploring the tools that help us run our systems based on Haskell, our developer Cristhian Motoche has created a tutorial that shows how to compile Haskell to WebAssembly using Asterius for deployment on Cloudflare.


What is a Cloudflare Worker?

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless platform that allows us to run our code on the edge of the Cloudflare infrastructure. It's built on Google V8, so it’s possible to write functionalities in JavaScript or any other language that targets WebAssembly.

WebAssembly is a portable binary instruction format that can be executed fast in a memory-safe sandboxed environment. For this reason, it’s especially useful for tasks that need to perform resource-demanding and self-contained operations.

Why use Haskell to target WebAssembly?

Haskell is a pure functional languages that can target WebAssembly. As such, It helps developers Continue reading

EVPN Control Plane in Infrastructure Cloud Networking

One of my readers sent me this question (probably after stumbling upon a remark I made in the AWS Networking webinar):

You had mentioned that AWS is probably not using EVPN for their overlay control-plane because it doesn’t work for their scale. Can you elaborate please? I’m going through an EVPN PoC and curious to learn more.

It’s safe to assume AWS uses some sort of overlay virtual networking (like every other sane large-scale cloud provider). We don’t know any details; AWS never felt the need to use conferences as recruitment drives, and what little they told us at re:Invent described the system mostly from the customer perspective.

Read more …

EVPN Control Plane in Infrastructure Cloud Networking

One of my readers sent me this question (probably after stumbling upon a remark I made in the AWS Networking webinar):

You had mentioned that AWS is probably not using EVPN for their overlay control-plane because it doesn’t work for their scale. Can you elaborate please? I’m going through an EVPN PoC and curious to learn more.

It’s safe to assume AWS uses some sort of overlay virtual networking (like every other sane large-scale cloud provider). We don’t know any details; AWS never felt the need to use conferences as recruitment drives, and what little they told us at re:Invent described the system mostly from the customer perspective.

Read more …

What is a service mesh what it means to data center networking

Microservices-style applications rely on fast, dependable network infrastructure in order to respond quickly and reliably, and the service mesh can be a powerful enabler.At the same time, service-mesh infrastructure can be difficult to deploy and manage at scale and may be too complex for smaller applications, so enterprises need to carefully consider its potential upsides and downsides in relation to their particular circumstances.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] What is a service mesh? A service mesh is infrastructure software that provides fast and reliable communications between the microservices that applications may need. Its networking features include application identification, load balancing, authentication, and encryption. To read this article in full, please click here

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