Eighty for Africa: Kenya and Nigeria’s IXP Success

Ten years ago the peering community came up with a vision: We wanted 80 percent of Internet traffic to be localized by 2020. I must admit, over the last decade there were times I wondered if it was possible.

But Kenya and Nigeria have just proven that it is – all thanks to the help of Internet exchange points (IXPs). A new report, Anchoring the African Internet Ecosystem: Lessons from Kenya and Nigeria’s Internet Exchange Points Growth is a case study on how they did it.

What Changed in Kenya and Nigeria

In just eight years a dedicated community helped Kenya and Nigeria to boost the levels of Internet traffic that is locally exchanged from 30% to 70%.

That happened because of a vibrant community of people united around a common cause: bringing faster, cheaper, and better Internet to their neighbours. They did this by focusing on their local Internet ecosystem that is dependent on the IXP.

Building an IXP takes humans and tech. We often say it takes 80% human engineering and 20% network engineering. It certainly is no easy task. Building a strong local Internet community facilitates this collaboration and results in neutral, even, and good local governance Continue reading

Adapting Network Design to Support Automation

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Adam left a thoughtful comment addressing numerous interesting aspects of network design in the era of booming automation hype on my How Should Network Architects Deal with Network Automation blog post. He started with:

A question I keep tasking myself with addressing but never finding the best answer, is how appropriate is it to reform a network environment into a flattened design such as spine-and-leaf, if that reform is with the sole intent and purpose to enable automation?

A few basic facts first:

Read more …

HPE Builds Out GreenLake Utility, Creates Ezmeral Software

Hewlett Packard Enterprise in January created its Transformation Office with an eye toward accelerating its move to become a platform provider – complete with hardware, software, services and other components – with a reach from the datacenter out through the cloud and to the fast-growing edge computing environment. …

HPE Builds Out GreenLake Utility, Creates Ezmeral Software was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Open Call To The Next Generation of Internet Leaders – Apply for the IGF Youth Ambassadors Program

Photo of IGF Youth Ambassadors

We are living in unprecedented times. COVID-19 has disrupted our world and it’s a crucial time for the Internet. We are facing issues related to misinformation, online education and connectivity. Challenges have been posed to encryption. Debates around the trade-off between privacy and contact tracing apps take place around the globe.

The acceleration of digital transformation worldwide has created immense opportunities and at the same time, uncertainty and challenges. Under these circumstances, youth must be represented in these discussions.

Young people know the benefits of connection, sharing and openness. Young engineers and programmers create new tools for the Internet every day, and many proposals about governance of new technologies come from interested people below the age of 30.

We grew up in cyberspace, and it has become an intrinsic part of many of our lives. We care for it, we value its principles, invariants and characteristics. Most of all, we understand how important the Internet is and how much of a force for good (or for evil) it can be.

The voice of youth matters and the Internet Society plays a significant role to empower the next generation of Internet leaders and to provide them with the freedom to voice Continue reading

The History of LINUX and SUSE with Dirk Hohndel

Started as a consulting company, SUSE was one of the first organizations to begin working in the development and commercialization of LINUX. Through the years, LINUX has become the base for much of the IT world, including many of the open source network operating systems. Dirk Hohndel joins the History of Networking to discuss the origins of SUSE LINUX.

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Containerize Your Go Developer Environment – Part 3

In this series of blog posts, we show how to put in place an optimized containerized Go development environment. In part 1, we explained how to start a containerized development environment for local Go development, building an example CLI tool for different platforms. Part 2 covered how to add Go dependencies, caching for faster builds and unit tests. This third and final part is going to show you how to add a code linter, a GitHub Action CI, and some extra build optimizations.

Adding a linter

We’d like to automate checking for good programming practices as much as possible so let’s add a linter to our setup. First step is to modify the Dockerfile:

# syntax = docker/dockerfile:1-experimental

FROM --platform=${BUILDPLATFORM} golang:1.14.3-alpine AS base
WORKDIR /src
ENV CGO_ENABLED=0
COPY go.* .
RUN go mod download
COPY . .

FROM base AS build
ARG TARGETOS
ARG TARGETARCH
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/go-build \
  GOOS=${TARGETOS} GOARCH=${TARGETARCH} go build -o /out/example .

FROM base AS unit-test
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/go-build \
  go test -v .

FROM golangci/golangci-lint:v1.27-alpine AS lint-base

FROM base AS lint
COPY --from=lint-base /usr/bin/golangci-lint /usr/bin/golangci-lint
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/go-build \
  --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/golangci-lint \
  golangci-lint run --timeout 10m0s ./...

FROM scratch AS bin-unix
COPY Continue reading

Intel unveils third-generation Xeon Scalable processors

Intel formally unveiled the third generation of its Xeon Scalable processor family, developed under the codename "Cooper Lake." This generation is aimed at the high end of the performance line for functions such as high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).The Cooper Lake line is targeted at four- and eight-socket servers. Xeons based on the Ice Lake architecture are due later this year and will target one- and two-socket servers. The latest announcement includes 11 new SKUs with between 16 and 28 cores, running at up to 3.1 Ghz base clock (and up to 4.3 Ghz with Turbo Boost), plus support for up to six memory channels. READ MORE: Data center sales dip amid COVID-19 fallout, but public cloud growsTo read this article in full, please click here

Now Available: Red Hat-Maintained Content Collections on Automation Hub

Today marks an important milestone for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscribers: The initial release of Red Hat-maintained Ansible Content Collections have been published to Automation Hub for automating select platforms from Arista, AWS, Cisco, IBM, Juniper, Splunk and more. The addition of these 17 Red Hat-maintained Collections on Automation Hub brings the total number to 47 Collections certified and published since September 2019. Finally, we are thrilled to have Ansible Collections for automating Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite included as part of this release as well.

Why is this significant? First, it is important to understand that the Ansible project has recently completed an effort to decouple the Ansible executable from most of the content, and all migrated content now resides in new upstream repositories on GitHub. This change has had a ripple effect on backend development, testing, publishing, and maintenance on Ansible content. The good news is that now features of high quality, can be delivered more quickly, asynchronously from Ansible releases. 

Today’s announcement highlights the successful culmination of the following: 

  1. Migration of Ansible-maintained content from Ansible project to Collections. 
  2. Releasing new features and functionality since Ansible 2.9, without having to wait Continue reading

Lessons from a 2020 intern assignment

Lessons from a 2020 intern assignment

This summer, Cloudflare announced that we were doubling the size of our Summer 2020 intern class. Like everyone else at Cloudflare, our interns would be working remotely, and due to COVID-19, many companies had significantly reduced their intern class size, or outright cancelled their programs entirely.

With our announcement came a huge influx of  students interested in coming to Cloudflare. For applicants seeking engineering internships, we opted to create an exercise based on our serverless product Cloudflare Workers. I'm not a huge fan of timed coding exercises, which is a pretty traditional way that companies gauge candidate skill, so when I was asked to help contribute an example project that would be used instead, I was excited to jump on the project. In addition, it was a rare chance to have literally thousands of eager pairs of eyes on Workers, and on our documentation, a project that I've been working on daily since I started at Cloudflare over a year ago.

In this blog post, I will explain the details of the full-stack take home exercise that we sent out to our 2020 internship applicants. We asked participants to spend no more than an afternoon working on it, and Continue reading

Fixes for Some Vagrant Issues on Fedora

Yesterday I needed to perform some testing of an updated version of some software that I use. (I was conducting the testing because this upgrade contained some breaking changes, and needed to understand how to mitigate the breaking changes.) So, I broke out Vagrant (with the Libvirt provider) on my Fedora laptop—and promptly ran into a couple issues. Fortunately, these issues were relatively easy to work around, but since the workarounds were non-intuitive I wanted to share them here for the benefit of others.

If you’re unfamiliar with Vagrant, have a look at my quick introduction to Vagrant. The “TL;DR” is the Vagrant can offer users a consistent workflow to creating and destroying VMs across a fairly wide number of platforms, including both local providers (like VirtualBox or VMware Fusion/VMware Workstation) and cloud provider (such as AWS and Azure). I’ve written a fair amount on Vagrant, so feel free to browse all the “Vagrant”-tagged posts on the site for more information.

Likewise, if you’re unfamiliar with the Libvirt provider, check out this post from 2017 on using Vagrant with Libvirt on Fedora 27.

In my testing yesterday, I ran into two networking-related issues. The first of them was Continue reading

Security Aspects of Using Smart NICs

After I published the blog post describing how infrastructure cloud provides (example: AWS) might use smart Network Interface Cards (NICs) as the sweet spot to implement overlay virtual networking, my friend Christoph Jaggi sent me links to two interesting presentations:

Both presentations describe how you can take over a smart NIC with a properly crafted packet, and even bypass CPU on a firewall using smart NICs.

Read more …

Microsoft is buying CyberX to bolster its Azure IoT security

Microsoft has announced it will purchase the industrially focused network security vendor CyberX for an undisclosed sum in an effort to bolster the security capabilities of its Azure IoT platform.The acquisition strikes at the heart of two key IIoT security pain points. While it’s comparatively easy to build new IoT devices that have all the necessary features for seamless security management, older devices running a wildly diverse range of different protocols, which may lack important features like the ability to be patched remotely, are a bigger challenge.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 289: Cisco Live 2020, Palo’s ML, HPE Edge Telco and more

Cisco Live Virtual topics so SecureX, Webex Collaboration and the "Connected Experience" (even if we don't really know what that is). Palo Alto gets machine learning features into the latest PAN-OS release for malware scanning, automated rule creation and more. HPE get Edgey with Telco plus more on Zoom security tradeoffs. 

The post Network Break 289: Cisco Live 2020, Palo’s ML, HPE Edge Telco and more appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Research: Off-Path TCP Attacks

I’s fnny, bt yu cn prbbly rd ths evn thgh evry wrd s mssng t lst ne lttr. This is because every effective language—or rather every communication system—carried enough information to reconstruct the original meaning even when bits are dropped. Over-the-wire protocols, like TCP, are no different—the protocol must carry enough information about the conversation (flow data) and the data being carried (metadata) to understand when something is wrong and error out or ask for a retransmission. These things, however, are a form of data exhaust; much like you can infer the tone, direction, and sometimes even the content of conversation just by watching the expressions, actions, and occasional word spoken by one of the participants, you can sometimes infer a lot about a conversation between two applications by looking at the amount and timing of data crossing the wire.

The paper under review today, Off-Path TCP Exploit, uses cleverly designed streams of packets and observations about the timing of packets in a TCP stream to construct an off-path TCP injection attack on wireless networks. Understanding the attack requires understanding the interaction between the collision avoidance used in wireless systems and TCP’s reaction to packets with a sequence number outside Continue reading

DockerCon 2020: The Microsoft Sessions

This is the second post of our series of blog articles focusing on the key developer content that we are curating from DockerCon LIVE 2020. Increasingly, we are seeing more and more developers targeting Microsoft architectures and Azure for their containerized application deployments. Microsoft has always had a rich set of developer tools including VS Code and GitHub that work with Docker tools. 

One of the biggest developments for developers using Windows 10 is the release of WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Instead of using a translation layer to convert Linux kernel calls into Windows calls, WSL 2 now offers its own isolated Linux kernel running on a thin version of the Hyper-V hypervisor. Check out Simon Ferquel’s session on WSL 2 as well as Paul Yuknewicz’s session on apps running in Azure. Be sure to check out these valuable sessions on using Docker with Microsoft tools and technologies.

Docker Desktop + WSL 2 Integration Deep Dive

Simon Ferquel – Docker

Simon’s session provides a deep dive on how Docker Desktop on Windows works with WSL 2 to provide a better developer experience. This presentation will give you a better understanding of how Docker Desktop and WSL 2 Continue reading

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