The Hedge 32: Overcommunication
Michael Natkin, over at Glowforge, writes: “That’s a funny thing about our minds. In the absence of information, they fill in the gaps and make up all sorts of plausible things, without the owners of said minds even realizing it is happening.” The answer, he says, is to overcommunicate. Michael joins Eyvonne Sharpe, Tom Ammon, and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss what it means to overcommunicate.
Reflections on Intent
No, not that kind. 🙂
BGP security is a vexed topic—people have been working in this area for over twenty years with some effect, but we continuously find new problems to address. Today I am looking at a paper called BGP Communities: Can of Worms, which analyses some of the security problems caused by current BGP community usage in the ‘net. The point I want to think about here, though, is not the problem discussed in the paper, but rather some of the larger problems facing security in routing.
The Hedge 31: Network Operator Groups
Many engineers have heard about the wide variety of Network Operator Group (NOG) meetings, from smaller regional organizations through larger multinational ones. What is the value of attending a NOG? How can you convince your business leadership of this value? In this episode of the Hedge Vincent Celindro and Edward McNair join Russ White to consider these questions.
Learning from Failure at Scale
One of the difficulties for the average network operator trying to understand their failure rates and reasons is they just don’t have enough devices, or enough incidents, to make informed observations. If you have a couple of dozen switches, it is often hard to understand how often software defects take a device down versus human error (Mean Time Between Mistakes, or MTBM). As networks become larger, however, more information becomes available, and more interesting observations can be made. A recent paper written in conjunction with Facebook uses information from Facebook’s data center fabrics to make some observations about the rate and severity of different kinds of failures—needless to say, the results are fairly interesting.
The Hedge 30: Ethan Banks and Network Fundamentals
In this episode of the Hedge, Ethan Banks, Ethan’s old-timey routers, Tom Ammon, Tom’s printer, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White sit around the virtual hedge to talk about networking fundamentals. What are they, why are they important, how you learn them, and how to be intentional about your career.
Understanding Internet Peering
The world of provider interconnection is a little … “mysterious” … even to those who work at transit providers. The decision of who to peer with, whether such peering should be paid, settlement-free, open, and where to peer is often cordoned off into a separate team (or set of teams) that don’t seem to leak a lot of information. A recent paper on current interconnection practices published in ACM SIGCOMM sheds some useful light into this corner of the Internet, and hence is useful for those just trying to understand how the Internet really works.
The Hedge 29: Remote Work and Security
The massive numbers of people staying home to work because of the ongoing pandemic are placing a lot of strain on network infrastructure. One area many operators are not considering, however, is security—how does having a lot of remote workers impact DDoS? Is split tunneling really the right way to manage remote connectivity? Roland Dobbins joins Eyvonne Sharp and Russ White to discuss security in times of mass remote work on this episode of the Hedge.
Working from Home: Myth and Reality
The last few weeks have seen a massive shift towards working from home because of the various “stay at home” orders being put in place around the world—a trend I consider healthy in the larger scheme of things. Of course, there has also been an avalanche of “tips for working from home” articles. I figured I’d add my own to the pile.
The Hedge 28: Intent Based Networking in the IRTF
Intent based networking is on the upslope of the hype cycle right now. In this episode of the Hedge, Alex Clemm and Jeff Tantsura join Alvaro Retana and Russ White for a discussion of Intent-Based Networking – Concepts and Definitions, a draft working its way through the Internet Research Task Force.
An Interesting take on Mapping an Attack Surface
Security often lives in one of two states. It’s either something “I” take care of, because my organization is so small there isn’t anyone else taking care of it. Or it’s something those folks sitting over there in the corner take care of because the organization is, in fact, large enough to have a separate security team. In both cases, however, security is something that is done to networks, or something thought about kind-of off on its own in relation to networks.
I’ve been trying to think of ways to challenge this way of thinking for many years—a long time ago, in a universe far away, I created and gave a presentation on network security at Cisco Live (raise your hand if you’re old enough to have seen this presentation!).