Technology Short Take 132

Welcome to Technology Short Take #132! My list of links and articles from around the web seems to be a bit heavy on security-related topics this time. Still, there’s a decent collection of networking, cloud computing, and virtualization articles as well as a smattering of other topics for you to peruse. I hope you find something useful!

Networking

  • I think a fair number of folks may not be aware that the Nginx ingress controller for Kubernetes—both the community version and the Nginx-maintained open source version—do suffer from timeouts and errors resulting from changes in the back-end application’s list of endpoints (think pods being added or removed). This performance testing post lays out all the details. In particular, see the section titled “Timeout and Error Results for the Dynamic Deployment.”
  • Ivan Pepelnjak attempts to answer the question, “How much do I need to know about Linux networking?”
  • Speaking of Linux networking…Marek Majkowski of Cloudflare digs deep into conntrack, used for stateful firewalling functionality.

Servers/Hardware

  • Normally I talk about server hardware and such here, but with so much moving to public cloud providers, let’s expand that focus a little bit: in this post, Jeramiah Dooley provides his perspective Continue reading

Weekend Reads 102320

One of the most common ways such access is monetized these days is through ransomware, which holds a victim’s data and/or computers hostage unless and until an extortion payment is made. But in most cases, there is a yawning gap of days, weeks or months between the initial intrusion and the deployment of ransomware within a victim organization.

There is a lot of discussion about the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) Phase 2 report on evaluating a System for Standardized Access/Disclosure (SSAD) to non-public gTLD registration data after the decisions taken by the GNSO Council on September 24th.

Nvidia’s announcement a month ago of a plan to acquire Arm Holdings for $40 billion was followed last week by reports of another towering deal in semiconductors: Advanced Micro Device’s prospective purchase of Xilinx for about $30 billion.

For a long time, datacenter compute has been the very picture of stability – Intel-based servers running enterprise workloads in central facilities. The workloads are changing fast and the datacenter is dissolving, and this is all having a ripple effect throughout the infrastructure, from the servers and storage appliances down to the components, most notability the silicon that is powering the systems.

Booter services Continue reading

Best Networking ideas For Small Groups

Whether for small or large groups, networking is a challenging task. It takes a lot of effort to give the best impression of yourself while trying to socialize no matter what the purpose of socializing or networking is. This can become more challenging when you are living in a place where there are not many resources available for networking. Networking can be done for different purposes. So, if you are looking for networking ideas for small groups, you need to find out the purpose of networking for the group.

Check out a few networking ideas for small groups below.

A Mobile Event App

If you have an event coming up, you can create a mobile event app to organize your event and connect with the attendees of the event. This is a great way to stay in touch and coordinate with your small group of attendees who are going to look after various tasks of the event. These mobile apps are one of the easiest ways for staying in touch with the team. You even get the option to rate your favorite session and provide the admin with feedback once the event ends.

Thorough Social Media

If the purpose of Continue reading

Do You Do What You’ve Always Done?

When I was an intern at IBM twenty something years ago, my job was deploying new laptops to people. The job was easy enough. Transfer their few hundred megabytes of data to the new machine and ensure their email was all setup correctly. There was a checklist that needed to be followed in order to ensure that it was done correctly.

When I arrived for my internship, one of my friends was there finishing his. He was supposed to train me in how to do the job before he went back to school. He helped me through the first day of deploying laptops following the procedure. The next day he handed me a different sheet with some of the same information but in a different order. He said, “I realized we had too many reboots in the process and this way cuts about twenty minutes off the deployment time.” I’m all about saving time so I jumped at the chance.

Everything went smashingly for the next month or so. My friend was back at school and I used his modified procedure to be as productive as possible. One day, my mentor wanted to shadow my deployment day to see Continue reading

Heavy Networking 545: Achieving Automated Network State Validation

Automated state validation is our topic today on Heavy Networking. The hard part isn't configuring the network: it's ensuring the configuration has resulted in the desired state. Guest John Capobianco regards automated state validation is an advanced automation technique. We dive into details in this episode.

The post Heavy Networking 545: Achieving Automated Network State Validation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Going Postal

Over the past few months I've had the opportunity at various network operator meetings to talk about BGP routing security. As usual, these presentations include an opportunity for questions from the audience. Here are a small collection of such questions and my efforts at trying to provide an answer.

Machine learning in network management has promise, challenges

As part of the trend toward more automation and intelligence in enterprise networks, artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly in-demand because the ability to programmatically identify problems with the network and provide instant diagnosis of complex problems is a powerful one.Applying AI and ML to network management can enable the consolidation of input from multiple management platforms for central analysis. Rather than IT staff manually combing through reports from diverse devices and applications, machine learning can make quick, automated diagnoses of problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker Hub Image Retention Policy Delayed, Subscription Updates

Today we are announcing that we are pausing enforcement of the changes to image retention until mid 2021. Two months ago, we announced a change to Docker image retention policies to reduce overall resource consumption. As originally stated, this change, which was set to take effect on November 1, 2020, would result in the deletion of images for free Docker account users after six months of inactivity. After this announcement, we heard feedback from many members of the Docker community about challenges this posed, in terms of adjusting to the policy without visibility as well as tooling needed to manage an organization’s Docker Hub images. Today’s announcement means Docker will not enforce image expiration enforcement on November 1. Instead, Docker is focusing on consumption-based subscriptions that meet the needs of all of our customers. In this model, as the needs of a developer grow, they can upgrade to a subscription that meets their requirements without limits.

This change means that developers will get a base level of consumption to start, and can extend their subscriptions as their needs grow and evolve, only paying for what is actually needed. The community of 6.7 million registered Docker developers is incredibly diverse–the Continue reading

Kolkata IX: The Maiden Community Internet Exchange in India

In 2015, the Internet Society Kolkata Chapter decided to create an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). It had just completed the installation of L-Root Instance, a critical Internet infrastructure to improve security and resiliency of the Web.

It chose the IXP model specifically because it was working towards hosting an authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) root zone for a top-level domain (TLD), another essential infrastructure of the Internet. But they didn’t know where to begin.

So, the team evaluated cost models and the market and held an outreach event with the Internet Service Provider (ISP) community. The engagement raised interest, but no one joined the IXP. The expectation was that Content Distribution Networks (CDN) would kick off the IXP, before others could join. Tushar Kanti Bhakta, a senior member of the Chapter’s board, suggested community building could help.

With no equipment, no members and no CDN, the team started community building efforts. It held workshops where it invited potential members to discuss Domain Name System Security Extensions, DNS, and the Border Gateway Protocol, the routing protocol for the Internet. Each workshop gave the team the opportunity to pitch the idea of a community IXP in Kolkata.

After two years of engagement, Continue reading

A Last Call for QUIC, a giant leap for the Internet

A Last Call for QUIC, a giant leap for the Internet

QUIC is a new Internet transport protocol for secure, reliable and multiplexed communications. HTTP/3 builds on top of QUIC, leveraging the new features to fix performance problems such as Head-of-Line blocking. This enables web pages to load faster, especially over troublesome networks.

QUIC and HTTP/3 are open standards that have been under development in the IETF for almost exactly 4 years. On October 21, 2020, following two rounds of Working Group Last Call, draft 32 of the family of documents that describe QUIC and HTTP/3 were put into IETF Last Call. This is an important milestone for the group. We are now telling the entire IETF community that we think we're almost done and that we'd welcome their final review.

A Last Call for QUIC, a giant leap for the Internet

Speaking personally, I've been involved with QUIC in some shape or form for many years now. Earlier this year I was honoured to be asked to help co-chair the Working Group. I'm pleased to help shepherd the documents through this important phase, and grateful for the efforts of everyone involved in getting us there, especially the editors. I'm also excited about future opportunities to evolve on top of QUIC v1 to help build a better Internet.

There are two aspects Continue reading

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience
A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

In July 2020, I joined Cloudflare as a Product Management Intern on the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) team to enhance the benefits that Network Analytics brings to our customers. In the following, I am excited to share with you my experience with remote working as an intern, and how I acclimatized into Cloudflare. I also give details about what my work entailed and how we approached the process of Product Management.

Onboarding to Cloudflare during COVID19

As a long-time user of Cloudflare’s Free CDN plan myself, I was thrilled to join the company and learn what was happening behind the scenes while making its products. The entering internship class consisted of students and recent graduates from various backgrounds around the world - all with a mutual passion in helping build a better Internet.

The catch here was that 2020 would make the experience of being an intern very different. As it was the case with many other fellow interns, it was the first time I had taken up work remotely from scratch. The initial challenge was to integrate into the working environment without ever meeting colleagues in a physical office. Because everything took place online, it was much harder Continue reading

ACI Fabric Access Policies Part 2: Physical Domain

 Physical Domain

This section explains how to create a Physical Domain (Fabric Access Policy). It starts by mapping the REST call POST method and JSON Payload into Fabric Access Policy modeling. Then it explains how the same configurations can be done by using the APIC GUI. Phase 2 in Figure 1-15 illustrates the APIC Management Information Model (MIM) from the Physical Domain perspective. I have already added the object Phys-Standalone_ESXi_PHY into the figure. The format of the RN for this object is Prefix1-{name}, where the Prefix1 is “phys”. This gives us the RN “phys-Standalone_ESXi_PHY”.



Figure 1-15: Fabric Access Policy Modeling: Physical Domain (click image to enlarge).


Continue reading

Weird: Wrong Subnet Mask Causing Unicast Flooding

When I still cared about CCIE certification, I was always tripped up by the weird scenario with (A) mismatched ARP and MAC timeouts and (B) default gateway outside of the forwarding path. When done just right you could get persistent unicast flooding, and I’ve met someone who reported average unicast flooding reaching ~1 Gbps in his data center fabric.

One would hope that we wouldn’t experience similar problems in modern leaf-and-spine fabrics, but one of my readers managed to reproduce the problem within a single subnet in FabricPath with anycast gateway on spine switches when someone misconfigured a subnet mask in one of the servers.

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