Learning to Trust
The state of automation among enterprise operators has been a matter of some interest this year, with several firms undertaking studies of the space. Juniper, for instance, recently released the first yearly edition of the SONAR report, which surveyed many network operators to set a baseline for a better future understanding of how automation is being used. Another recent report in this area is Enterprise Network Automation for 2020 and Beyond, conducted by Enterprise Management Associates.
While these reports are, themselves, interesting for understanding the state of automation in the networking world, one correlation noted on page 13 of the EMA report caught my attention: “Individuals who primarily engage with automation as users are less likely to fully trust automation.” This observation is set in parallel with two others on that same page: “Enterprises that consider network automation a high priority initiative trust automation more,” and “Individuals who fully trust automation report significant improvement in change management capacity.” It seems somewhat obvious these three are related in some way, but how? The answer to this, I think, lies in the relationship between the person and the tool.
The Hedge 14: Ron Bonica and SRM6
SRv6 uses IPv6 header fields to perform many of the same traffic engineering, fast reroute, and other functions available through MPLS. The size of the header with a large label stack, however, can be problematic from a performance perspective. Further, adding the concept of actions to SRv6 would bring a lot of new functionality into view. On this episode of the Hedge podcast, Ron Bonica joins Russ White to talk about SRm6, or Segment Routing Mapped to the v6 address space, which compacts the label stack and actions into a smaller space, resulting in an easier to deploy version of SRv6.
Lessons in Location and Identity through Remote Peering
We normally encounter four different kinds of addresses in an IP network. We tend to assign specific purposes to each one. There are other address-like things, of course, such as the protocol number, a router ID, an MPLS label, etc. But let’s stick to these four for the moment. Looking through this list, the first thing you should notice is we often use the IP address as if it identified a host—which is generally not a good thing. There have been some efforts in the past to split the locator from the identifier, but the IP protocol suite was designed with a separate locator and identifier already: the IP address is the location and the DNS name is the identifier.
Research: Securing Linux with a Faster and Scalable IPtables
If you haven’t found the trade-offs, you haven’t looked hard enough.
A perfect illustration is the research paper under review, Securing Linux with a Faster and Scalable Iptables. Before diving into the paper, however, some background might be good. Consider the situation where you want to filter traffic being transmitted to and by a virtual workload of some kind, as shown below.
To move a packet from the user space into the kernel, the packet itself must be copied into some form of memory that processes on “both sides of the divide” can read, then the entire state of the process (memory, stack, program execution point, etc.) must be pushed into a local memory space (stack), and control transferred to the kernel. This all takes time and power, of course.
The Hedge 13: Ivan Pepelnjak
In this episode of the Hedge, Tom Ammon and Russ White are joined by Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net to talk about being old, knowing about how things are going to break before they do, and being negative. Along the way, we discuss the IETF, open source, and many other aspects of the world of network engineering.
IPv6 and Leaky Addresses
One of the recurring myths of IPv6 is its very large address space somehow confers a higher degree of security. The theory goes something like this: there is so much more of the IPv6 address space to test in order to find out what is connected to the network, it would take too long to scan the entire space looking for devices. The first problem with this myth is it simply is not true—it is quite possible to scan the entire IPv6 address space rather quickly, probing enough addresses to perform a tree-based search to find attached devices. The second problem is this assumes the only modes of attack available in IPv4 will directly carry across to IPv6. But every protocol has its own set of tradeoffs, and therefore its own set of attack surfaces.
The Hedge 12: Cyberinsecurity with Andrew Odlyzko
There is a rising tide of security breaches. There is an even faster rising tide of hysteria over the ostensible reason for these breaches, namely the deficient state of our information infrastructure. Yet the world is doing remarkably well overall, and has not suffered any of the oft-threatened giant digital catastrophes. Andrew Odlyzko joins Tom Ammon and I to talk about cyber insecurity.
Simpler is Better… Right?
A few weeks ago, I was in the midst of a conversation about EVPNs, how they work, and the use cases for deploying them, when one of the participants exclaimed: “This is so complicated… why don’t we stick with the older way of doing things with multi-chassis link aggregation and virtual chassis device?” Sometimes it does seem like we create complex solutions when a simpler solution is already available. Since simpler is always better, why not just use them? After all, simpler solutions are easier to understand, which means they are easier to deploy and troubleshoot.
The problem is we too often forget the other side of the simplicity equation—complexity is required to solve hard problems and adapt to demanding environments. While complex systems can be fragile (primarily through ossification), simple solutions can flat out fail just because they can’t cope with changes in their environment.
The Hedge 11: Roland Dobbins on Working Remotely
Network engineering and operations are both “mental work” that can largely be done remotely—but working remote is not only great in many ways, it is also often fraught with problems. In this episode of the Hedge, Roland Dobbins joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of working remote, including some strategies we have found effective at removing many of the negative aspects.
Data Gravity and the Network
One “sideways” place to look for value in the network is in a place that initially seems far away from infrastructure, data gravity. Data gravity is not something you might often think about directly when building or operating a network, but it is something you think about indirectly. For instance, speeds and feeds, quality of service, and convergence time are all three side effects, in one way or another, of data gravity.
As with all things in technology (and life), data gravity is not one thing, but two, one good and one bad—and there are tradeoffs. Because if you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough. All of this is, in turn, related to the CAP Theorem.
Data gravity is, first, a relationship between applications and data location.