The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Captive portals are widely used for accessing WiFi. The problem is that there is no specific method for activating these portals. With unencrypted HTTP it was a simple matter to redirect requests to a Web server and force a login (sometimes called a speed bump).

The rise of HTTPS using TLS encryption prevents interception and, to date, smartphone vendors have been implementing their own methods to detect and activate a captive portal.

This Community show discusses an IETF draft standard, CAPPORT Architecture, to produce a common method for detecting portals.

Our guest for today’s conversation is Dave Dolson from Sandvine. David is involved with the Captive Portals Working Group.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

Show Links:

CAPPORT Architecture – IETF

Capport WG Status Pages – IETF

Today in the Priority Queue channel we’re talking about an IETF project called Interface to Network Security Functions (i2nsf).

The goal of the project is to provide a standard set of software interfaces and data models for service providers that want to provide to customers a mix of security functions (for example, firewalling, malware scanning, etc.) from different vendors.

Greg Ferro talks with Linda Dunbar, a Working Group chair for i2nsf. They discuss the need for the project, outline its major goals, and review examples of how a common model to describe security actions and events across different vendor products would work.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

IoT is everywhere, from home automation to smart buildings to industrial controls. On this Datanaut’s episode Ethan Banks and Chris Wahl examine the major categories of IoT and where the technology sits on the spectrum between reality and hype.

They also dig into security issues with IoT, including easily exploitable software and the rise of IoT botnets, and suggest common-sense options for locking down IoT devices, including firewall and endpoint segmentation and isolation.

They also look at how IoT devices and sensors are networked, examine the radio and power issues, and outline general device classes. Last but not least, they look at the various mechanisms that have emerged to process, analyze, and store data collected by these devices.

The Datanauts are joined by Jennelle Crothers, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, to discuss infrastructure-as-a-service in the Microsoft public cloud, Azure.

In this episode we explore what Azure is, how it compares to other IaaS offerings, and when to use it vs. a SaaS offering like Office 365. We also get nerdy, talking about the orchestration and automation options in Azure. Our discussion concludes making sense of the different service options within Azure. For example, does it make sense to keep running our own domain controllers, or should we be using Azure’s Active Directory Domain Services instead?

Links

Microsoft Azure Resources

Azure Roadmap

Azure QuickStart Templates

Azure Products by Region

Azure Architecture Center

Follow Jennelle Crothers

* Jennelle’s blog

* Jennelle on Twitter @jkc137

The IETF is an influential standards body that makes significant contributions to networking and other IT disciplines. But it’s also a body in which you can participate.

Greg Ferro attended the IETF 99 meeting in Prauge in July 2017. In this Priority Queue show, he sits down with Kathleen Moriarty, an IETF Security Area Director; Alia Atlas, a Routing Area Director; and Russ White, a co-chair of a variety of working groups and all-around community leader; to discuss opportunities for IT professionals to get directly involved with the IETF in networking, security, and other areas.

Options include new IETF local communities, reviewing drafts, participating in mailing lists, and more.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about what the IETF is up to.

Show Links:

IETF Community Hubs Draft

IETF Hub Boston Discussion Archive

You’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to building out a new pod in the data center. Of course you have the tried-and-true Lego assembly of compute, storage, and networking blocks.

But what about  options such as converged, hyperconverged, composable, and superhyper compose-verged? (OK, not the last one, but you get the idea.)

Today on the Datanauts we’ll talk about the pros and cons of these alternative infrastructure options and why you might want to consider them for your next data center project.

Our guest is Fred Chagnon, an industry analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. He’s been researching converged, hyperconverged, and composable infrastructure approaches. He’ll share what he’s learned and explore benefits and limitations.

And as Fred notes in the show, you need to ask what your infrastructure platform needs to do not just today, but tomorrow.

Sponsor: Future:net

VMware’s Future:net is a networking-focused, invitation-only event being held during VMworld this August. You’ll hear from industry leaders and expert practitioners about new and emerging technologies that will transform the network. Request your invitation at vmware.com/futurenet.

Chris Wahl relates his ongoing Full Stack Journey, including stops along the way for PowerShell and Git, as well as the newest directions where his technology compass leads him.

Today on Datanauts, we look under the hood of distributed storage systems to explore erasure coding. Is erasure coding just a fancy name for RAID? What happens if we lose a storage node and have to recreate the missing pieces? Holy east-west traffic, Batman! It’s erasure coding today on the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is J Metz, Research & Development Engineer for Advanced Storage at Cisco Systems. You can follow J on Twitter and read his blog, which includes technical content, political musings, and lots of pictures of Jeeps, at jmetz.com.

The Datanauts and Dr. J discuss the general concept of distributed storage, offer common examples, and explain the similarities and differences between distributed storage and RAID.

They drill into how erasure coding works and then explore issues around bottlenecks, performance, and repair.

Go full storage nerd with this show, and then check out the links with additional information. The links are posted just below our sponsor message.

Sponsor: FutureNet

VMware’s FutureNet is a networking-focused, invitation-only event being held during VMworld this August. You’ll hear from industry leaders and expert practitioners about new and emerging technologies that will transform the network. Request your invitation at vmware.com/futurenet.

Show Links:

Basics

Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Chartreuse – Webinar

Erasure Coding Wiki

Storage Performance Benchmarking: Introduction and Concepts – Webinar

Intermediate

Modern Erasure Codes for Distributed Storage Systems. Presentation at the 2016 Storage Developer Conference – PDF

Erasure Codes for Large-Scale Distributed Storage – YouTube (oldie but a goodie)

Advanced

Network Coding for Distributed Storage Systems – PDF

Today the Datanauts talk about how to automate an MCSA lab project using Chef. MCSA, or Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate, is a Microsoft certification program that offers credentials for a variety of Microsoft products and services, such as Windows Server, SQL, Azure, and so on.

Our guest is Brett Johnson, a senior consultant at VMware. We talk with Brett about the options for setting up labs, explore a few free options, and then drill into the ability to stand up a Windows domain in a cloud provider using Chef and Terraform.

This is a project Brett is working on. He started the project to save time standing up servers and make more efficient use of study time.

You can follow him on Twitter or read his writing on technical topics at Brett’s IT Blog.

Show Links:

Brett on GitHub

Brett’s Web site

Brett on Twitter

Datanauts 071: Everything As Code With Mitchell Hashimoto

Today on the Priority Queue, intent-based networking. What is it? What’s it good for? What’s the technical reality? Is it like, “Alexa, make me a network” and then a network magically appears? Sort of.

In actuality, there’s a lot more to intent-based networking. There are APIs and message busses and abstraction layers and event handling and state enforcement and compliance reporting and so on.

Put another way, intent-based networking is kind of hard, especially when you try to handle complex networks of size and multi-vendor environments.

To talk about intent-based networking today, we have a sponsored show with Apstra. Apstra has brought an intent-based networking product to market and is here to explain the concepts and technologies behind its approach.

Joining Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks are Sasha Ratkovic, Derick Winkworth, and Douglas Gourlay from Apstra.

We talk about why the industry cares about intent, how intent-based networking actually works, and what its impact might be on the careers of network engineers.

Links:

Blog: The Industry Embraces Intent-Based Networking (by Mansour Karam)

Blog: A New Era In Network Operations (by Derick Winkworth on packetpushers.com)

Blog: Intent-based Networking Systems (by Derick Winkworth)

Video: Time Travels with @CloudToad

Video: Networking Field Day 13 – Who We Are (with Derick Winkworth)