Using sFlow to monitor dropped packets

Visibility into dropped packets describes instrumentation, recently added to the Linux kernel, that provides visibility into packets dropped by the kernel data path on a host, or dropped by a switch ASIC when packets are forwarded in hardware. This article describes integration of drop monitoring in the open source Host sFlow agent and inclusion of drop reporting as part of industry standard sFlow telemetry.

Extending sFlow to provide visibility into dropped packets offers significant benefits for network troubleshooting, providing real-time network-wide visibility into the specific packets that were dropped as well the reason the packet was dropped. This visibility instantly reveals the root cause of drops and the impacted connections.

Packet discard monitoring complements sFlow's existing counter polling and packet sampling mechanisms and shares a common data model so that all three sources of data can be correlated.  For example, if packets are being discarded because of buffer exhaustion, the discard records don't necessarily tell the whole story. The discarded packets may represent mice flows that are victims of an elephant flow. Packet samples will reveal the traffic that isn't being dropped and provide a more complete picture. Counter data adds additional information such as CPU load, interface speed, Continue reading

Fast Friday – Mobility Field Day 5 Edition

I’ve been in the middle of Mobility Field Day 5 this week with a great group of friends and presenters. There’s a lot to unpack. I wanted to share some quick thoughts around wireless technologies and where we’re headed with it.

  • Wireless isn’t magic. We know that because it’s damned hard to build a deployment plan and figure out where to put APs. We’ve built tools that help us immensely. We’ve worked on a variety of great things that enable us to make it happen easier than it’s been before. But remember that the work still has to happen and we still have to understand it. As soon as someone says, “You don’t need to do the work, our tool just makes it happen” my defenses go up. How does the tool understand nuance? Who is double-checking it? What happens when you can’t feed it all the info it needs? Don’t assume that taking a human out of the loop is always good thing. Accrued knowledge is more important than you realize.
  • Analytics give you a good picture of what you want, but they don’t turn wrenches. All the data in the world won’t replace a keyboard. You need to Continue reading

Network Complexity Series

A while back Nick Russo developed a video series on network complexity for the Network Collective membership community. Today we’re releasing this content free for all to consume. This is fantastic content that helps quantify how complexity impacts network performance and network design. Thanks to Nick Russo for continually providing such fantastic content to the networking community.

You can find the documents referenced in the case study videos at the publications page on Nick Russo’s website.

Nick Russo
Contributor

The post Network Complexity Series appeared first on Network Collective.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 31st, 2020

Hey, it's HighScalability time!


 

Serverless is really complex. Or is it? @paulbiggar sparked a thoughtful Twitter thread.

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Without your support on Patreon this kind of Stuff won't happen. 

Usually I pitch my book Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 here, but if you're an author with books on Amazon I'd like to ask you to give Best Sellers Rank a try. I started it to send data to me about my own books, but in the best bootstrapping tradition I extended it to work for the entire planet.

Number Stuff:

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

The HashiCorp Consul Service Comes to Microsoft Azure

The release of HashiCorp’s push to widen the scope of its managed services offerings on the cloud. The GA release of HCS on Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, said the Azure HCS release is part of HashiCorp’s shift to a more managed-services business model. “We are transitioning from being a desktop software vendor to becoming more of a cloud software vendor,” said Dadgar. Dadgar said HashiCorp opted for Azure since there is a lot of overlap between the kinds of customer organizations HashiCorp and Microsoft tend to focus on. The launch Continue reading

Automating Security with CyberArk and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Proper privilege management is crucial with automation. Automation has the power to perform multiple functions across many different systems. When automation is deployed enterprise-wide, across sometimes siloed teams and functions, enterprise credential management can simplify adoption of automation — even complex authentication processes can be integrated into the setup seamlessly, while adding additional security in managing and handling those credentials.

Depending on how users have defined them, users can craft Ansible Playbooks that require access to credentials and secrets that have wide access to organizational systems. These are necessary to systems and IT resources to accomplish their automation tasks, but they’re also a very attractive target for bad actors. In particular, they are tempting targets for advanced persistent threat (APT) intruders. Gaining access to these credentials could give the attacker the keys to the entire organization.

Most breaches involve stolen credentials, and APT intruders prefer to leverage privileged accounts like administrators, service accounts with domain privileges, and even local admin or privileged user accounts.

You’re probably familiar with the traditional attack flow: compromise an environment, escalate privilege, move laterally, continue to escalate, then own and exfiltrate. It works, but it also requires a lot of work and a lot of Continue reading

Weekend Reads 073120

More than 4.7 million sources in five countries — the US, China, South Korea, Russia, and India — were used to level distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against victims in the second quarter of 2020, with the portmap protocol most frequently used as an amplification vector to create massive data floods, security and services firm A10 Networks says in its threat report for the second quarter.

Thousands of people graduate from colleges and universities each year with cybersecurity or computer science degrees only to find employers are less than thrilled about their hands-on, foundational skills. Here’s a look at a recent survey that identified some of the bigger skills gaps, and some thoughts about how those seeking a career in these fields can better stand out from the crowd.

Three standards for email security that are supposed to verify the source of a message have critical implementation differences that could allow attackers to send emails from one domain and have them verified as sent from a different — more legitimate-seeming — domain, says a research team who will present their findings at the virtual Black Hat conference next month.

We’ve tried to use GUI to simplify the YAML file. But Continue reading

Member News: Teaching Computer Science in Rural Nigeria

Computing for the people: The San Francisco Chapter has an article by a software developer using open source software and open standards hardware to teach computer science skills to students in rural Nigeria. Chioma Ezedi Chukwu, founder of the STEMTeers mentorship program, writes that open source is more than free tools, software, or hardware. “It was a great opportunity to learn, learn by building and create with innovation.”

Coding for kids: Meanwhile, the Pacific Islands Chapter highlights a hackathon for kids event at a childcare center in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The goal of the event, focused on design thinking, was to equip the students with lifelong skills in the digital age.

Supporting e-learning: In other education-related news, the Uganda Chapter is focused on helping teachers and students improve their digital skills as the country embraces e-learning following the COVID-19 pandemic. “Educators need to adjust their teaching methods to cope with the new changes,” an article says. “Educators should be able to cause change or affect the learner beyond the chalk and blackboard while learners need to be taken through an adaptability process as they transition to digital education.”

Tracking the virus: The Chapter in the Continue reading

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless
Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

This week we’ve talked about how Workers provides a step function improvement in the TTFB (time to first byte) of applications, by running lightweight isolates in over 200 cities around the world, free of cold starts. Today I’m going to talk about another metric, one that’s arguably even more important: TTFD, or time to first dopamine, and announce a huge improvement to the Workers development experience — wrangler dev, our edge-based development environment with all the perks of a local environment.

There’s nothing quite like the rush of getting your first few lines of code to work — no matter how many times you’ve done it before, there's something so magical about the computer understanding exactly what you wanted it to do and doing it!

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

This is the kind of magic I expected of “serverless”, and while it’s true that most serverless offerings today get you to that feeling faster than setting up a virtual server ever would, I still can’t help but be disappointed with how lackluster developing with most serverless platforms is today.

Some of my disappointment can be attributed to the leaky nature of the abstraction: the journey to getting you to the point of writing Continue reading

Cisco urges patching flaws in data-center, SD-WAN gear

Cisco has issued a number of critical security advisories for its data center manager and SD-WAN offering customers should deal with now.On the data center side, the most critical – with a threat score of 9.8 out of 10 – involves a vulnerability in the REST API of Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) could let an unauthenticated, remote attacker bypass authentication and execute arbitrary actions with administrative privileges on an affected device.Cisco DCNM lets customers see and control network connectivity  through a single web-based management console for the company’s Nexus, Multilayer Director Switch, and Unified Computing System products.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco urges patching flaws in data-center, SD-WAN gear

Cisco has issued a number of critical security advisories for its data center manager and SD-WAN offering customers should deal with now.On the data center side, the most critical – with a threat score of 9.8 out of 10 – involves a vulnerability in the REST API of Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) could let an unauthenticated, remote attacker bypass authentication and execute arbitrary actions with administrative privileges on an affected device.Cisco DCNM lets customers see and control network connectivity  through a single web-based management console for the company’s Nexus, Multilayer Director Switch, and Unified Computing System products.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker Index: Dramatic Growth in Docker Usage Affirms the Continued Rising Power of Developers

Developers have always been an integral part of business innovation and transformation. With the massive increase in Docker usage, we can see the continued rising importance of developers as they create the next generation of cloud native applications. 

You may recall in February we introduced the Docker Index, which gives a snapshot and analysis of developer and dev team preferences and trends based on anonymized data from 5 million Docker Hub users, 2 million Docker Desktop users and countless other developers engaging with content on Docker Hub.

According to a newly updated Docker Index, the eight months between November 2019 and July 2020 have seen a dramatic swell in consumption across the Docker community and ecosystem. How exactly is usage expanding? Let us count the ways.

Last November, there were 130 billion pulls on Docker Hub. That seemed worth talking about, so we shared this data in a blog in February. But since then consumption of the world’s most popular repository for application components (Docker Hub lest there be any doubt) has skyrocketed; in July, total pulls on Docker Hub reached 242 billion. That’s almost a doubling of pulls in a little over six months. (To be Continue reading

Bringing Your Own IPs to Cloudflare (BYOIP)

Bringing Your Own IPs to Cloudflare (BYOIP)

Today we’re thrilled to announce general availability of Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) across our Layer 7 products as well as Spectrum and Magic Transit services. When BYOIP is configured, the Cloudflare edge will announce a customer’s own IP prefixes and the prefixes can be used with our Layer 7 services, Spectrum, or Magic Transit. If you’re not familiar with the term, an IP prefix is a range of IP addresses. Routers create a table of reachable prefixes, known as a routing table, to ensure that packets are delivered correctly across the Internet.

As part of this announcement, we are listing BYOIP on the relevant product pages, developer documentation, and UI support for controlling your prefixes. Previous support was API only.

Customers choose BYOIP with Cloudflare for a number of reasons. It may be the case that your IP prefix is already allow-listed in many important places, and updating firewall rules to also allow Cloudflare address space may represent a large administrative hurdle. Additionally, you may have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of end users pointed directly to your IPs via DNS, and it would be hugely time consuming to get them all to update their records Continue reading

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