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118 items tagged "networking"

Slashdot: IT

The Pirate Bay Returns, Anonymous Hater Takes Credit For DDoS

Posted: May 17th, 2012, 9:12pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "After being the victim of a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by an unknown party, The Pirate Bay has returned. An Anonymous traitor who goes by the name AnonNyre has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that kept the site offline for days."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
IEEE Approves Revision of Wireless LAN Standard

Posted: May 7th, 2012, 9:37pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE announced the publication of IEEE 802.11-2012, which defines the technology for the world's premier wireless LAN products. The new IEEE 802.11-2012 revision has been expanded significantly by supporting devices and networks that are faster and more secure, while offering improved Quality of Service and improved cellular network hand-off. The standard's relevance continues to expand with the emergence of new applications, such as the smart grid, which augments the facility for electricity generation, distribution, delivery and consumption with a two-way, end-to-end network for communications and control."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Linux 3.3: Making a Dent In Bufferbloat?

Posted: March 28th, 2012, 5:35pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: networking

mtaht writes "Has anyone, besides those that worked on byte queue limits, and sfqred, had a chance to benchmark networking using these tools on the Linux 3.3 kernel in the real world? A dent, at least theoretically, seems to be have made in bufferbloat, and now that the new kernel and new iproute2 are out, should be easy to apply in general (e.g. server/desktop) situations." Dear readers: Have any of you had problems with bufferbloat that were alleviated by the new kernel version?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Carrier Ethernet 2 Aims For Global Connectivity

Posted: February 23rd, 2012, 10:32pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

alphadogg provides this extract from Network World: "The Metro Ethernet Forum has updated its Carrier Ethernet specification, hoping to standardize the use of Ethernet for global multicarrier services. 'With Carrier Ethernet 2, we're expanding Quality-of-Service [QoS] well beyond best efforts, and will now allow carriers to interconnect to provide worldwide [Ethernet] service,' said Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, during a Metro Ethernet Forum Web conference held Thursday to announce the specification. The forum introduced Carrier Ethernet in 2005 as a set of extensions that describe how data communications carriers should use Ethernet in a consistent manner. The new specification, Carrier Ethernet 2, establishes an additional set of rules."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Internet Systems Consortium Seeks Wider Input For BIND 10

Posted: January 14th, 2012, 9:50am CET by timothy

Tags: networking

joabj writes "The ISC is seeking some open source magic for the next version of the widely used BIND. Although the BIND is already open source, most of the work thus far done on the DNS server software has come from contractors, the government and Unix vendors. 'The goal is to move away from having BIND a heavily sponsored corporate product,' said BIND 10 manager Shane Kerr. Kerr is hoping that more eyes will equal fewer bugs, and that more users will go ahead and implement the features they've been requesting themselves. BIND 10, due by the end of the year, features a new modular architecture, one designed to circumvent many of the security woes that have bedeviled BIND 9."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Comcast DNSSEC Goes Live

Posted: January 10th, 2012, 11:53pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post, Comcast's Jason Livingood has announced that Comcast has signed all of its (5000+) domains in addition to having all of its customers using DNSSEC-validating resolvers. He adds, 'Now that nearly 20 million households in the U.S. are able to use DNSSEC, we feel it is an important time to urge major domain owners, especially commerce and banking-related sites, to begin signing their domain names.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
No IPv6 Doomsday In 2012

Posted: December 29th, 2011, 7:02pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

itwbennett writes "Yes, IPv4 addresses are running out, but a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy won't be coming in 2012. Instead, businesses are likely to spend the coming year preparing to upgrade to IPv6, experts say. Of course there's a chance that panic will ensue when Europe's RIPE hands out its last IPv4 addresses this summer, but 'most [businesses] understand that they can live without having to make any major investments immediately,' said IDC analyst Nav Chander. Plus, it won't be until 2013 that North America will run out of IPv4 addresses and there's no sense getting worked up before then."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New WiFi Setup Flaw Allows Easy Router PIN Guessing

Posted: December 28th, 2011, 12:55am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Trailrunner7 writes "There is a newly discovered vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup standard that reduces the number of attempts it would take an attacker to brute-force the PIN for a wireless router's setup process. The flaw results in too much information about the PIN being returned to an attacker and makes the PIN quite weak, affecting the security of millions of WiFi routers and access points. Security researcher Stefan Viehbock discovered the vulnerability (PDF) and reported it to US-CERT. The problem affects a number of vendors' products, including D-Link, Netgear, Linksys and Buffalo. 'I noticed a few really bad design decisions which enable an efficient brute force attack, thus effectively breaking the security of pretty much all WPS-enabled Wi-Fi routers. As all of the of the more recent router models come with WPS enabled by default, this affects millions of devices worldwide,' Viehbock said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: Getting a Grip On an Inherited IT Mess?

Posted: December 6th, 2011, 5:42pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

First time accepted submitter bushx writes "A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company. All the documentation I have is of my own creation, as I've spent most of my time reverse-engineering the systems in place just so I can understand how everything works together. Since I've started, I've done everything from network and phone upgrades to database maintenance with Perl, and thus far it's been immensely rewarding. But as I dig deeper, I notice the alarming number of band-aids applied by my predecessor, and it seems like the entire company's infrastructure is just a few problems away from a total meltdown. The big question now is, how do I, as a single person, effectively audit the network, servers, databases, backups, and formulate a long-term plan that can be implemented by one person? Is it possible? Where do I begin?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Potential 0-Day Vulnerability For BIND 9

Posted: November 17th, 2011, 3:35pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Morty writes "BIND, the popular DNS server software, has been crashing all over the Internet. The root cause is believed to be a 0-day vulnerability in BIND's resolver. The ISC has issued an alert. Quoting: 'An as-yet unidentified network event caused BIND 9 resolvers to cache an invalid record, subsequent queries for which could crash the resolvers with an assertion failure. ISC is working on determining the ultimate cause by which a record with this particular inconsistency is cached. At this time we are making available a patch which makes named recover gracefully from the inconsistency, preventing the abnormal exit.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FBI Takes Out $14M DNS Malware Operation

Posted: November 9th, 2011, 11:38pm CET by samzenpus

Tags: networking

coondoggie writes "U.S. law enforcement today said it had smashed what it called a massive, sophisticated Internet fraud scheme that injected malware in more than four million computers in over 100 countries while generating $14 million in illegitimate income. Of the computers infected with malware, at least 500,000 were in the United States, including computers belonging to U.S. government agencies, such as NASA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FBI Takes Out $14M DNS Malware Operation

Posted: November 9th, 2011, 11:38pm CET by samzenpus

Tags: networking

coondoggie writes "U.S. law enforcement today said it had smashed what it called a massive, sophisticated Internet fraud scheme that injected malware in more than four million computers in over 100 countries while generating $14 million in illegitimate income. Of the computers infected with malware, at least 500,000 were in the United States, including computers belonging to U.S. government agencies, such as NASA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: DD-WRT Upgrade To 802.11n?

Posted: October 25th, 2011, 4:38pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

First time accepted submitter krinderlin writes "My home network consists of a Linksys WRT54GL for WAN access and a WRT54G version 8 for a wireless bridge for my Blu-Ray and old XBox 360*. Due to a recent move and coaxial jack placements, I can't run Ethernet to the office, so I'm now looking at about 8 wireless clients at any given time. I'd like to start piecing together a network upgrade to 802.11n, but want to keep the flexibility and power of DD-WRT. So what 802.11n routers do you have with DD-WRT? What would you recommend for PCIe x1 and USB adapters? *Because $100 for a 802.11g adapter is pure insanity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ask Slashdot: Best Use For a New Supercomputing Cluster?

Posted: September 13th, 2011, 11:32pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: networking

Supp0rtLinux writes "In about 2 weeks time I will be receiving everything necessary to build the largest x86_64-based supercomputer on the east coast of the U.S. (at least until someone takes the title away from us). It's spec'ed to start with 1200 dual-socket six-core servers. We primarily do life-science/health/biology related tasks on our existing (fairly small) HPC. We intend to continue this usage, but to also open it up for new uses (energy comes to mind). Additionally, we'd like to lease access to recoup some of our costs. So, what's the best Linux distro for something of this size and scale? Any that include a chargeback option/module? Additionally, due to cost contracts, we have to choose either InfiniBand or 10Gb Ethernet for the backend: which would Slashdot readers go with if they had to choose? Either way, all nodes will have four 1Gbps Ethernet ports. Finally, all nodes include only a basic onboard GPU. We intend to put powerful GPUs into the PCI-e slot and open up the new HPC for GPU related crunching. Any suggestions on the most powerful Linux friendly PCI-e GPU available?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

$300M To Save 6 Milliseconds

Posted: September 13th, 2011, 11:11am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

whoever57 writes "A new transatlantic cable (the first in 10 years) is going to be laid at the cost of $300M. The reason? To shave 6ms off the time to transmit packets from London to New York. The Hibernian Express will reduce the current transmission time — roughly 65 milliseconds — by less than ten percent. However, investors believe the financial community will be lining up to pay premium rates to use the new cable. The article suggests that a one-millisecond advantage could be worth $100M per year to a large hedge fund."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: Best Wi-Fi Solution For a Hotel?

Posted: August 20th, 2011, 6:29pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

dynamo52 writes "I have been tasked with replacing a managed Wi-Fi system for a mid-sized hotel. They have already selected Comcast to provide a 100mbps connection, which unfortunately must come in at one corner of the ~5-acre property. The hotel plans to provide this service for free, so there is no need for any type of billing management system, though it should be secured enough that the parking lot does not become a free Wi-Fi hotspot. Additionally, there is no ethernet infrastructure in place. The existing APs (hidden away in proprietary encasements) seem to be connected via telephone lines and the owners have strongly indicated they would prefer that no new wiring be installed. Have any Slashdotters implemented similar systems? Specifically, what hardware did you use and what special considerations should I take in designing this system?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: Best Wi-Fi Solution For a Hotel?

Posted: August 20th, 2011, 6:29pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

dynamo52 writes "I have been tasked with replacing a managed Wi-Fi system for a mid-sized hotel. They have already selected Comcast to provide a 100mbps connection, which unfortunately must come in at one corner of the ~5-acre property. The hotel plans to provide this service for free, so there is no need for any type of billing management system, though it should be secured enough that the parking lot does not become a free Wi-Fi hotspot. Additionally, there is no ethernet infrastructure in place. The existing APs (hidden away in proprietary encasements) seem to be connected via telephone lines and the owners have strongly indicated they would prefer that no new wiring be installed. Have any Slashdotters implemented similar systems? Specifically, what hardware did you use and what special considerations should I take in designing this system?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: Does SSL Validation Matter?

Posted: August 6th, 2011, 8:41pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "Right now, in an email list excluded from the public eye, some bright people are discussing the future of SSL. Under debate is (a) do they allow DV (domain only validation) certificates to continue to exist (exist for e-commerce use? only encryption use?) or do they require a higher degree of certificate validation? (b) Do they allow certificates to be issued with non-unique common names (certificates used on internal networks, think your exchange server) or do they ban the practice? If this were 'hypothetically' a heated debate going on right now and you could chime in, what would you say?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
IETF Mulls Working Group For IPv6 Home Networking

Posted: July 7th, 2011, 8:25pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

alphadogg writes "The Internet Engineering Task Force is considering establishing a working group to smooth some of the impending issues around setting up and maintaining IPv6-based Internet connections in homes. 'A collection of protocols needs to be agreed upon, so vendors of equipment used in home networks will have an interoperable suite of protocols available,' said Ralph Droms, a distinguished engineer for Cisco and among those who want to form the IETF working group. Home networking is a fairly new area for the IETF. Many of its standards were designed for large-scale organizational networks, rather than home use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PlanetLab Creates a More Advanced Sudo

Posted: June 21st, 2011, 5:56am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

angry tapir writes "Researchers at the PlanetLab global research network have developed a potential replacement for the widely used Unix sudo tool, called Vsys, that will offer administrators far greater control over what end users can and can't access. Vsys is similar to sudo, except it offers finer-grained access to system resources. PlanetLab created Vsys as a way to allow its researchers to access low-level network functionality so they could develop new network technologies — overlay networks, user-level file systems, virtual switches — while their experimental work remained safely isolated from other users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: Becoming a Network Administrator?

Posted: May 5th, 2011, 9:37pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

J. L. Tympanum writes "After many years as a star programmer, I have taken a position which involves maintaining and rebuilding the in-house network of a small company. There are maybe 100 machines, a mix of blade servers running Linux and desktop PCs running Windows of all flavors. Basically, I have to learn networking from scratch. I have been given an 'unlimited' budget to buy routers, switches, etc., to set up my own little test network as part of the learning process. So the question is: what's the right strategy here? What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire? What books should I read? Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ARIN Implements DNSSEC

Posted: April 29th, 2011, 11:24pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

wmbetts writes with this quote from an announcement by the American Registry for Internet Numbers: "On 27 April, ARIN placed Delegation Signer (DS) records into in-addr.arpa and ip6.arpa. Now DNSSEC validation will occur from the root down if you properly set up your DNSSEC-aware recursive resolver. For most DNSSEC-aware recursive resolver operators, nothing needs to be done for this change to be in effect as long as you have configured your DNSSEC-aware server to use ICANN's trust anchor for the root zone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sony Sued For PlayStation Network Data Breach

Posted: April 28th, 2011, 1:36am CEST by samzenpus

Tags: networking

suraj.sun writes "Like clockwork, the first lawsuit resulting from the security breach of the personal data of more than 75 million Sony PlayStation Network customers has been filed. The suit was filed today on behalf of Kristopher Johns, 36, of Birmingham, Ala., in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Johns accuses Sony of not taking 'reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users.' He also believes Sony took too long to notify him and other customers that their personal information had been exposed. Because of that, the complaint alleges, Sony did not allow its customers 'to make an informed decision as to whether to change credit card numbers, close the exposed accounts, check their credit reports, or take other mitigating actions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Doesn't Every Website Use HTTPS?

Posted: March 21st, 2011, 2:58pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

suraj.sun writes "HTTPS is more secure, so why isn't the Web using it? You wouldn't write your username and passwords on a postcard and mail it for the world to see, so why are you doing it online? Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing. There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP — HTTPS. But if HTTPS is more secure, why doesn't the entire Web use it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Got (Buffer) Bloat?

Posted: February 26th, 2011, 11:18am CET by Roblimo

Tags: networking

mtaht writes, "After a very intense month of development, the Bufferbloat project has announced the debloat-testing git kernel tree, featuring (via suggestion of Van Jacobson) a wireless network latency smashing algorithm, (called eBDP), the SFB and CHOKe packet schedulers, and a slew of driver level fixes that reduce network latency across the Linux kernel by over 2 orders of magnitude. Got Bloat?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

If You Think You Can Ignore IPv6, Think Again

Posted: February 4th, 2011, 10:49pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

wiredmikey writes "Now that the last IPv4 address blocks have been allocated, it's expected to take several months for regional registries to consume all of their remaining regional IPv4 address pool. The IPv6 Forum, a group with the mission to educate and promote the new protocol, says that enabling IPv6 in all ICT environments is not the endgame, but is now a critical requirement for continuity in all Internet business and services. Experts believe that the move to IPv6 should be a board-level risk management concern, equivalent to the Y2K problem or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. During the late 1990s, technology companies worldwide scoured their source code for places where critical algorithms assumed a two-digit date. This seemingly trivial software development issue was of global concern, so many companies made Y2K compliance a strategic initiative. The transition to IPv6 is of similar importance. If you think you can ignore IPv6, think again."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech

Posted: February 3rd, 2011, 1:03am CET by samzenpus

Tags: networking

jfruhlinger writes "You might be a hardcore sports fan or might think of jocks with disdain, but if you're a geek you'll probably be intrigued by the tech behind the brand-new stadium where this weekend's Superbowl will be played. 84 Cisco access points, 70 wiring closets, 40,000 wired ports, 8 million feet of Ethernet cabling, 260 miles of fiber, 100 TB of storage — all on a single network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme

Posted: January 26th, 2011, 12:51pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

dkd903 writes "Fedora developer Matt Domsch has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming. The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, the actual problem starts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Is Retaliation the Answer To Cyber Attacks?

Posted: January 22nd, 2011, 11:36pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

coondoggie writes "Should revenge assaults be just another security tool large IT shops use to counter cyber attacks? It's a controversial idea, and the law generally frowns on cyber attacks in general, but at the Black Hat DC conference last week, some speakers took up the issue of whether and how organizations should counterattack against adversaries clearly using attack tools to break into and subvert corporate data security."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Patent Hints at Net-Booting Cloud Strategy

Posted: January 5th, 2011, 2:20am CET by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has received a patent that hints at the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a 'net-booted environment.' It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Carrier Trick To Save IPv4 Could Help Spammers

Posted: December 18th, 2010, 12:28am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Julie188 writes "As public IPv4 addresses dwindle and carriers roll out IPv6, a new problem has surfaced. We have to move through a gray phase where the only new globally routable addresses we can get are IPv6, but most public content we want to reach is still IPv4. Multiple-layers of NAT will be required to sustain the Internet for that time, perhaps for years. But use of Large Scale NAT (LSN) systems by service providers will cause problems for many applications and one of them is reputation filtering. Many security filtering systems use lists of public IPv4 addresses to identify 'undesirable' hosts on the Internet. As more ISPs deploy LSN systems, the effectiveness of these IPv4 filtering systems will be hurt."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com

Posted: December 14th, 2010, 8:40pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DNSSEC Comes To .Net Zone Today

Posted: December 10th, 2010, 3:37pm CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

wiredmikey sends news that as of today VeriSign has enabled DNSSEC on the .net zone. This is one milestone in a years-long process of securing the DNS against cache poisoning and other attacks. Next step will be for VeriSign to sign the .com root early next year."Having DNSSEC enabled for .net domains... [is] important as it represents one of the most critical implementations of DNSSEC technology, since .net serves as the underpinning for many critical Internet functions. The largest zone to be DNSSEC enabled to date, .net currently has more than 13 million... domain name registrations worldwide."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Claims About China's April Internet Hijack Are Overblown

Posted: November 19th, 2010, 4:55pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

sturgeon writes "Yesterday, we discussed what most of the world's major media outlets were reporting on China's April 2010 hijack of '15% of Internet traffic,' including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report (see page 244) on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday. Unfortunately, few bothered with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from). In a review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second, or a 'statistically insignificant' percentage of Internet traffic)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Testing High-Speed Fiber Network At Stanford Res Halls

Posted: October 21st, 2010, 11:18pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

GovTechGuy writes with this news from "Google has reached an agreement to build its first ultra-high speed broadband network near Stanford University, the search giant announced on Thursday. The agreement with Stanford means the university's residential subdivision will be the first place to test Internet speeds up to one gigabit per second, more than 100 times faster than the typical broadband connection in the US. The plan is to break ground early next year." That might just be worth $50,576 per year to have.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Comcast Migrating Customers To DNSSEC Resolvers

Posted: October 18th, 2010, 11:28pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ctg1701 passes along this quote from a Comcast announcement: "Starting today we will begin migrating customers who have opted out of our Domain Helper service over to our production DNSSEC-validating servers. This will happen first in a selected part of our Virginia network, and will later expand to all markets in the following sixty days, at which point all of our customers who have opted out of Domain Helper will be migrated. After this has been completed, we will migrate the rest of our customers, which we anticipate will stretch into the early part of 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Squeezing More Bandwidth Out of Fiber

Posted: October 10th, 2010, 7:53pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

EigenHombre writes "The New York Times reports on efforts underway to squeeze more bandwidth out of the fiber optic connections which form the backbone of the Internet. With traffic doubling every two years, the limits of current networks are getting close to saturating. The new technology from Lucent-Alcatel uses the polarization and phase of light (in addition to intensity) to double or quadruple current speeds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 5:22pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Misconfigured Networks Main Cause of Breaches

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 11:54pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "Responses to a survey from attendees of the DEFCON 18 conference revealed that 73% came across a misconfigured network more than three quarters of the time – which, according to 76% of the sample, was the easiest IT resource to exploit. Results revealed that 18% of professionals believe misconfigured networks are the result of insufficient time or money for audits. 14% felt that compliance audits that don't always capture security best practices are a factor and 11% felt that threat vectors that change faster than they can be addressed play a key role."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stupid Data Center Tricks

Posted: August 15th, 2010, 3:31pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

jcatcw writes "A university network is brought down when two network cables are plugged into the wrong hub. An employee is injured after an ill-timed entry into a data center. Overheated systems are shut down by a thermostat setting changed from Fahrenheit to Celsius. And, of course, Big Red Buttons. These are just a few of the data center disasters caused by human folly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Verizon Changing Users Router Passwords

Posted: August 1st, 2010, 9:32pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Kohenkatz writes "I have Verizon FIOS at home and my Verizon-supplied Actiontec router had the password 'password1' that the tech assigned to it when he set it up three years ago. I received an email from Verizon that said 'we have identified that your router still had a password of either password1 or admin1 and we have changed it to your serial number.' I checked and it actually had been changed. I believe this to be in response to the Black Hat presentation about the hackability of home routers. I am upset about this because Verizon should not have any way to get into my router and change the settings, especially because I own the router, not them! I looked in the router's settings and I see port 4567 goes to the router and is labeled 'Verizon FIOS Service.' Is this port for anything useful other than Verizon changing settings on my router? What security measures does Verizon have to protect that port from unauthorized access?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day

Posted: July 30th, 2010, 5:50pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

ArbiterOne writes "The 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is today. Celebrated worldwide on the last Friday of July, this day honors those who fight in the digital trenches to keep the Net alive. OpenDNS offers a way to remind your boss about the holiday, while another blogger shares war stories. The startup Ksplice has created an homage to these heroes in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure." Reader Netbuzz submits a sobering look at the profession from Network World, which notes, "In the past year, [sysadmins'] pay has dropped, and more of their positions are being farmed out to temporary workers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Millions of Home Routers Are Hackable

Posted: July 16th, 2010, 2:48pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

Julie188 writes "Craig Heffner, a researcher with Maryland-based security consultancy Seismic, plans to release a software tool at the Black Hat conference later this month that he says could be used on about half the existing models of home routers, including most Linksys, Dell, and Verizon FiOS or DSL versions. The tool apparently exploits the routers through DNS rebinding. While this technique has been discussed for 15 years or more, Heffner says, 'It just hasn't been put together like this before.'" Notebooks.com has a list of routers tested and some advice on securing vulnerable routers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New US Broadband Projects Get $795 Million In Funding

Posted: July 2nd, 2010, 10:07pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

snydeq writes "The Obama administration has announced nearly $795 million in grants and loans to 66 new broadband projects across the nation. The subsidies — to be doled out by the US NTIA and the US Rural Utilities Service — will bring broadband service to 685,000 businesses, 900 health-care facilities, and 2,400 schools, according to officials. The NTIA will award $404 million to 29 projects, and the grants will finance 6,000 miles of new fiber-optic lines. Most of the money will finance middle-mile broadband network projects. The RUS will award $390.9 million, with $163 million in loans and the rest in grants. Most of the RUS money is focused on last-mile broadband projects."

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IEEE Releases 802.3ba Standard

Posted: June 23rd, 2010, 10:35pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "EEE announced the ratification of IEEE 802.3ba, a new standard governing 40Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet operations. An amendment to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard, IEEE 802.3ba, the first standard ever to simultaneously specify two new Ethernet speeds, paves the way for the next generation of high-rate server connectivity and core switching. The new standard will act as the catalyst needed for unlocking innovation across the greater Ethernet ecosystem. IEEE 802.3ba is expected to trigger further expansion of the 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet family of technologies by driving new development efforts, as well as providing new aggregation speeds that will enable 10Gbps Ethernet network deployments."

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VPN Flaw Shows Users' IP Addresses

Posted: June 21st, 2010, 7:22pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

AHuxley writes "A VPN flaw announced at the Telecomix Cyphernetics Assembly in Sweden allows individual users to be identified. 'The flaw is caused by a combination of IPv6, which is a new Internet protocol due to replace the current IPv4, and PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol)-based VPN services, which are the most widely used. ... The flaw means that the IP address of a user hiding behind a VPN can still be found, thanks to the connection broadcasting information that can be used to identify it. It's also relatively easy to find a MAC address (which identifies a particular device) and a computer's name on the network that it's on.' The Swedish anti-piracy bureau could already be gathering data using the exploit."

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10 Tips For Boosting Network Performance

Posted: June 1st, 2010, 11:12pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia and Matt Prigge provide hands-on insights for increasing the efficiency of your organization's network. From losing the leased lines, to building a monster IT test lab on the cheap, to knowing how best to accelerate backups, each tip targets a typical, often overlooked IT bottleneck."

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Black Market May Develop For IPv4 Addresses

Posted: May 4th, 2010, 5:37am CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

GMGruman writes "Everyone knows that we're running out of traditional IPv4 Internet addresses and that switching to IPv6 is the answer — yet foot-dragging by IT departments and vendors means the problem is still on the back burner. IPv4/IPv6 coexistence is now expected to last for 5 years. In this article, Mel Beckman explains how this is all leading to a black market in traditional IPv4 addresses that will catch many people off-guard, and boost Internet access prices sky-high."

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Athena's Free Firewall Browser

Posted: March 20th, 2010, 1:30am CET by timothy

Tags: networking

athenasec writes "Firewall Browser is a free configuration analyzer (download here), released by Athena Security, which works on Cisco, Check Point, and Netscreen firewalls for searching rulebases based on address or service ranges — the way change requests are actually made. The tool is available as a free download with no limitations, user license restrictions, or registration hurdles. Users can slice and dice any firewall-related question about the network, service objects, and security rules for a multi-vendor environment from a single flexible interface. There is also this how-to guide for applying the tool to day-to-day operational tasks."

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Throttle Shared Users With OS X — Is It Possible?

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 10:11pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

whisper_jeff writes "I work in a design studio where the production director is also the owner's son (translation = he can do no wrong). He is fond of accessing a designer's computer via filesharing and working directly on files off of the designer's computers rather than transferring the files to his computer to work on them there. In so doing, he causes the designer's computer to grind to a near-halt as the harddrive is now tasked with his open/save requests along with whatever the designer is doing. Given that there is no way he's going to change his ways (since he doesn't see anything wrong with it...), I was wondering if there was a way to throttle a user's shared access to a computer (Mac OSX 10.5.8) so that his remote working would have minimal impact on our work. Google searches have revealed nothing helpful (maybe I should Bing it... :) so I was hoping someone with more technical expertise on Slashdot could offer a suggestion."

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Half of All Data Centers Understaffed

Posted: January 11th, 2010, 2:53pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

alphadogg writes "Fifty percent of IT executives say their data centers are understaffed, and companies are still looking for more ways to cut costs, according to Symantec's latest 'State of the Data Center' report. Sixteen percent of survey respondents said their data centers are extremely understaffed, and another 34% called their data centers somewhat understaffed. At the same time, data centers are becoming more complex and harder to manage, with more applications, data and increasingly demanding service-level agreements. 'Data center complexity has led to a lot of staffing challenges,' says Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability at Symantec."
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NetBIOS Design Allows Traffic Redirection

Posted: December 26th, 2009, 11:14am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

iago-vL writes "Security researchers at SkullSecurity have demonstrated how the NetBIOS protocol allows trivial hijacking due to its design, through the use of a tool called 'nbpoison' (in the package 'nbtool'). If a DNS lookup fails on Windows, the operating system will broadcast a NetBIOS lookup request that anybody can respond to. One vector of attack is against business workstations on an untrusted network, like a hotel; all DNS requests for internal resources can be redirected (Exchange, proxy, WPAD, etc). Other attack vectors are discussed in a related blog post. Although similar attacks exist against DHCP, ARP and many other LAN-based protocols, we all know that untrusted systems on a LAN means game over. NetBIOS poisoning is much quieter and less likely to break other things."
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Holiday E-Commerce DDoS Attack Hits EC2 Cloud

Posted: December 26th, 2009, 2:12am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ARos writes "A holiday DDoS attack targeted a west-coast DNS provider, which is known for serving large-scale E-Commerce sites (including amazon.com and walmart.com). 'Neustar, which provides DNS services to high profile website addresses under the UltraDNS brand, said the flood of malicious traffic, just two days before Christmas, was directed at the company's facilities in San Jose and Palo Alto, and that the effects were mostly limited to California users.' CNet adds: 'In addition to the high-profile sites, dozens of smaller sites that rely upon Amazon for Web-hosting services were also taken down by the attack. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were affected by the problems, according to Jeff Barr, Amazon's lead Web Evangelist, who retweeted a report to that effect without clarification and confirmed it in later tweets.'"
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Windows 7 May Finally Get IPv6 Deployed

Posted: December 22nd, 2009, 9:49pm CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

Esther Schindler writes "According to this article at IT Expert Voice, Windows 7 and IPv6: Useful at Last?, we've had so many predictions that this will be 'the year of IPv6' that most of us have stopped listening. But the network protocol may have new life breathed into it because IPv6 is a requirement for DirectAccess. DirectAccess, a feature in Windows 7, makes remote access a lot easier — and it doesn't require a VPN. (Lisa Vaas interviews security experts and network admins to find out what they think of that idea.) The two articles examine the advantages and disadvantages of DirectAccess, with particular attention to the possibility that Microsoft's sponsorship may give IPv6 the deployment push it has lacked."
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Best Practices For Infrastructure Upgrade?

Posted: November 21st, 2009, 11:50pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "I was put in charge of an aging IT infrastructure that needs a serious overhaul. Current services include the usual suspects, i.e. www, ftp, email, dns, firewall, DHCP — and some more. In most cases, each service runs on its own hardware, some of them for the last seven years straight. The machines still can (mostly) handle the load that ~150 people in multiple offices put on them, but there's hardly any fallback if any of the services die or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same). Services running on virtualized servers hosted by a single reasonably-sized machine per office (plus one for testing and a spare) seem to recommend themselves. What's you experience with virtualization of services and implementing fallback/load-balancing schemes? What's Best Practice for an update like this? I'm interested in your success stories and anecdotes, but also pointers and (book) references. Thanks!"
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Cisco Security System Shuts Out Third-Party Tools

Posted: November 7th, 2009, 4:19pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

alphadogg writes "Cisco has finally publicly acknowledged it won't add support for new third-party devices to its security information and event monitoring appliance, ending months of speculation about the future of its Monitoring, Analysis and Response System. Some claim it's the beginning of the end for MARS as a multi-vendor SIEM device. 'MARS customers can expect non-Cisco network device data and signature updates to continue for currently supported third-party systems, but no new third-party devices will be added,' Cisco declared in a statement, noting that 'Cisco MARS continues to focus on supporting Cisco devices for threat identification and mitigation.' Cisco's SIEM competitors this week have eagerly grabbed at the topic of Cisco MARS freezing third-party support because of a Gartner research memo published Oct. 29 in which analyst Mark Nicolett stated, 'Cisco has quietly begun informing its customers of a decision to freeze support for most non-Cisco event sources with its [MARS].'"
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Affordably Aggregating ISP Connections?

Posted: October 16th, 2009, 1:01am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "Has anyone setup a system to aggregate multiple ISP connections to form a high bandwidth site-to-site link? Load Sharing SCTP looked interesting, but it doesn't look like it has been widely adopted. Multi-Link PPP appears to be more widely supported for clients, but I can't find any good guides for setting up both sides of the connection for a site-to-site link. The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business. Does anyone have experience using hardware solutions from Mushroom Networks (Virtual Leased Line, p2 of this document), Ecessa (site-to-Site Channel Bonding), or others?"
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Windows Server Trusts Samba4 Active Directory

Posted: October 10th, 2009, 8:42pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Darren Ginter writes "A group of Samba v4 developers recently spent a week in Redmond to work with Microsoft on Active Directory interoperability(?!). The result? Windows Server will now join, trust and replicate a Samba-based Active Directory using Microsoft-native protocols. Although Samba v4 is still in the alpha stages, this is a huge step for open source. Or it could be a trap."
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Large-Scale Mac Deployment?

Posted: September 22nd, 2009, 1:43am CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

UncleRage writes "I've been asked to research and ultimately recommend a deployment procedure for Macs across a rather large network. I'm not a stranger to OS X; however, the last time I worked on deployment NetRestore was still king of the mountain. Considering the current options, what methodologies do admins adhere to? Given the current selection of tools available, what would you recommend when planning, prototyping, and rolling out a robust, modular deployment scenario? For the record, I'm not asking for a spoon-fed solution; I'm more interested in a discussion concerning the current tools and what may (or may not) have worked for you. There are a lot of options available for modular system deployment... what are your opinions?"
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Legitimate ISP a Cover-up For a Cybercrime Network

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 7:01pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ezabi writes "TrendWatch, the malware research arm of TrendMicro, has posted a white paper titled 'A Cybercrime Hub' (PDF, summary here) describing the activities of an Estonian ISP acting as a cover-up for a large cybercrime network. It's involved with malware distribution and DNS hijacking, which leads to credit card fraud. The story's interesting, and a typical internet user would be exposed in such a situation. What security measures should be taken to prevent normal users from falling victim to such malicious bodies? Note that they are represented legitimately and are offering real services like any other internet company."
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Network Adapter Keeps Talking While a PC Is Asleep

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Al writes "Researchers at Microsoft and the University of California, San Diego have developed a network adapter that lets a computer enter sleep mode without disrupting the network connection. The adapter, dubbed Somniloquy (meaning to talk in one's sleep), consists of a gumstix running embedded Linux, 64MB of RAM and a 2G SD memory card, connected via USB. The adapter keeps the network connection going and the researchers have also developed a simplified IM client and bittorrent client that carry out more complicated tasks autonomously, only waking the computer if, for example, an actualy IM is received or a download is completed."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How To Build a 100,000-Port Ethernet Switch

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 8:34am CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

BobB-nw writes "University of California at San Diego researchers Tuesday are presenting a paper (PDF) describing software that they say could make data center networks massively scalable. The researchers say their PortLand software will enable Layer 2 data center network fabrics scalable to 100,000 ports and beyond; they have a prototype running at the school's Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Jacobs School of Engineering. 'With PortLand, we came up with a set of algorithms and protocols that combine the best of layer 2 and layer 3 network fabrics,' said Amin Vahdat, a computer science professor at UC San Diego. 'Today, the largest data centers contain over 100,000 servers. Ideally, we would like to have the flexibility to run any application on any server while minimizing the amount of required network configuration and state... We are working toward a network that administrators can think of as one massive 100,000-port switch seamlessly serving over one million virtual endpoints.'"
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UK Lifeguards Dig Their Own 100Mbps Fiber-Optic Link

Posted: August 16th, 2009, 11:13am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

MJackson writes "The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in Humber, a large tidal estuary situated on the east coast of Northern England, has just become one of the UK's most remote-rural locations to have a next generation 100Mbps Fibre Optic FTTH broadband link installed. The deployment is being sponsored by FibreStream and amazingly the groundworks were completed by the lifeboat crew literally digging their own fibre. We'd do the same on our road, but the government would probably object."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Do You Create Config Files Automatically?

Posted: July 11th, 2009, 11:03pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "When deploying new server/servergroup/cluster to your IT infrastructure, deployment (simplified) consist of following steps: OS installation: to do it over network, boot server must be configured for this new server/servergroup/cluster; configuration/package management: configuration server has to be aware of the newcomer(s); monitoring and alerting: monitoring software must be reconfigured; and performance metrics: a tool for collecting data must be reconfigured. There are many excellent software solutions for those particular jobs, say configuration management (Puppet, Chef, cfengine, bcfg2), monitoring hosts and services (Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Zenoss, etc) and performance metrics (Ganglia, etc.). But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated. What tools do you use to achieve this? For example, when you have to deploy a new server, how do you create configs for, let's say, PXE boot server, Puppet, Nagios and Ganglia, at once?"
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US Seeks Volunteers To Review Broadband Grant Applications

Posted: July 9th, 2009, 10:07pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

BobB-nw writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, scheduled to distribute $4.7 billion in broadband deployment grants over the next 15 months, will count on volunteers to review grant applications. The NTIA, in a document released this week, asks for people to apply to become volunteer reviewers of the broadband grants. The NTIA's broadband grant program is part of $7.2 billion that the US Congress approved for broadband in a huge economic stimulus package approved earlier this year. ... It's 'a little scary' that volunteers will have the power to accept and reject broadband applications, said Craig Settles, an analyst and president of consulting firm Successful.com. Volunteers may have limited expertise, or they may have biases that aren't evident to the NTIA, he said."
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What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System?

Posted: July 8th, 2009, 11:30pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Krneki writes "I've been developing monitoring solutions for the last five years. I have used Cacti, Nagios, WhatsUP, PRTG, OpManager, MOM, Perl-scripts solutions, ... Today I have changed employer and I have been asked to develop a new monitoring solution from scratch (5,000 devices). My objective is to deliver a solution that will cover both the network devices, servers and applications. The final product must be very easy to understand as it will be used also by help support to diagnose problems during the night. I need a powerful tool that will cover all I need and yet deliver a nice 2D map of the company IT infrastructure. I like Cacti, but usually I use it only for performance monitoring, since pooling can't be set to 5 or 10 sec interval for huge networks. I'm thinking about Nagios (but the 2D map is hard to understand), or maybe OpManager. What monitoring solution do you use and why?"
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RC Submarine Lays Fiber Through Sewers In Italy

Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 10:57am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Directory Service Implementation From Scratch?

Posted: June 4th, 2009, 9:22pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "I work at a small but growing startup company. Currently, our directory and authentication information is scattered across many systems and wikis, and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. We are looking at centralizing this information in a directory service to minimize administrative overhead as we continue to grow. The service must support basic directory searches, as well as user authentication for Linux and Windows hosts. Although we are primarily a Linux shop, there are a handful of Windows systems that will be on a Windows Active Directory domain. Most directory servers seem to support integration with other directory servers, however it seems like it may be easiest to just use Active Directory for everything. Are there any pitfalls with this approach? If you had the chance to redesign your enterprise directory service without regard for legacy services, how would you do it?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Virgin Media UK Pilots 200Mbps Broadband Speeds

Posted: May 6th, 2009, 8:00pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

MJackson writes "UK cable operator Virgin Media has announced the first real-world customer pilots of up to 200Mbps broadband services using DOCSIS3 technology from Cisco, which could make it one of the fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world. Following successful lab trials, the 6 month long pilot started last week in Ashford, Kent (England), and will ultimately employ 100 customers in the testing process. The pilot will, among other things, test future online consumer applications, including High Definition Internet TV (HD IPTV) and the ability to deliver applications and support for home IT needs through its network. By comparison J:Com in Japan supplies broadband at up to 160Mbps and Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps. Like Virgin Media, both companies use DOCSIS3 technology for broadband over cable networks."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Time To Cut the Ethernet Cable?

Posted: May 1st, 2009, 4:44pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Should Network Cables Be Replaced?

Posted: April 21st, 2009, 10:33pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Jyms writes "As technology changes, so hubs routers and switches are upgraded, but does the cabling need replacing, and if so, how often? Coax gave way to CAT 5 and CAT 5e replaced that. If you are running a 100Mbit/s network on old CAT 5, can that affect performance? Do CAT 5(e) cables get old?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Is Connectivity So Cheap In Stockholm?

Posted: April 18th, 2009, 9:30pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

lpress writes "Symmetric, 100 Mbps service in Stockholm, costs $11/month. Conditions in every city are different, but part of the explanation for the low cost is that the city owns a municipal fiber network reaching every block. They lease network access to anyone who would like to offer service. The ISPs, including incumbent telephone and cable companies, compete on an equal footing."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Using Linux To Make a Slow, Awful WAN Connection

Posted: April 10th, 2009, 4:21am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Julie188 writes "This is a brilliant little Linux trick from Windows fanboy Tyson Kopczynski. He wanted to test a new Windows 7 feature called Branch Cache, which caches remote data on the local machine to reduce traffic on a stressed out WAN connection. But how to fake a crappy WAN? Linux. 'The command that I executed (tc) made use of Linux Traffic Control (a kernel thing) which allows me to easily interject 100ms latency on eth1. Boff, Bonk, Pow, Plop, Kapow, swa-a-p, whamm, zzzzzwap, bam ... instant WAN crappiness,' he writes."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Using Linux To Make a Slow, Awful WAN Connection

Posted: April 10th, 2009, 4:21am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Julie188 writes "This is a brilliant little Linux trick from Windows fanboy Tyson Kopczynski. He wanted to test a new Windows 7 feature called Branch Cache, which caches remote data on the local machine to reduce traffic on a stressed out WAN connection. But how to fake a crappy WAN? Linux. 'The command that I executed (tc) made use of Linux Traffic Control (a kernel thing) which allows me to easily interject 100ms latency on eth1. Boff, Bonk, Pow, Plop, Kapow, swa-a-p, whamm, zzzzzwap, bam ... instant WAN crappiness,' he writes."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Using Linux To Make a Slow, Awful WAN Connection

Posted: April 10th, 2009, 4:21am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Julie188 writes "This is a brilliant little Linux trick from Windows fanboy Tyson Kopczynski. He wanted to test a new Windows 7 feature called Branch Cache, which caches remote data on the local machine to reduce traffic on a stressed out WAN connection. But how to fake a crappy WAN? Linux. 'The command that I executed (tc) made use of Linux Traffic Control (a kernel thing) which allows me to easily interject 100ms latency on eth1. Boff, Bonk, Pow, Plop, Kapow, swa-a-p, whamm, zzzzzwap, bam ... instant WAN crappiness,' he writes."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Are Long URLs Wasting Bandwidth?

Posted: March 27th, 2009, 11:02pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: networking

Ryan McAdams writes "Popular websites, such as Facebook, are wasting as much as 75MBit/sec of bandwidth due to excessively long URLs. According to a recent article over at O3 Magazine, they took a typical Facebook home page, looked at the traffic statistics from compete.com, and figured out the bandwidth savings if Facebook switched from using URL paths which, in some cases, run over 150 characters in length, to shorter ones. It looks at the impact on service providers, with the wasted bandwidth used by the subsequent GET requests for these excessively long URLs. Facebook is just one example; many other sites have similar problems, as well as CMS products such as Word Press. It's an interesting approach to web optimization for high traffic sites."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cisco Router Hack Inspires New Patching Religion

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 9:09pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

ancientribe writes "The dirty little secret about patching routers is that many enterprises don't bother — for fear of the fallout any changes to their Cisco router software could have on the rest of their infrastructure. But the recent discovery of a way to easily hack these devices has put pressure on organizations to change their ways and patch. This article in Dark Reading gives tips on how to patch without taking down the network, including input from Cisco's own director of IT on how Cisco itself handles router patching."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
World-First VDSL2 Demo Gets 500Mbps Data Transfers

Posted: March 17th, 2009, 3:22pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

pnorth writes "Ericsson has achieved data transfer rates of more than 500Mbps in what it said is the world's first live demonstration of a new VDSL2-based technology. The demonstration achieved data rates of more than 0.5 Gbps over twisted copper pairs using 'vectorized' VDSL2. Vectoring decouples the lines in a cable (from an interference point of view), substantially improving power management, and reduces noise originating from the other copper pairs in the same cable bundle."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cisco Barges Into the Server Market

Posted: March 17th, 2009, 12:45am CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

mikesd81 was one of several readers to write in about Cisco's announcement of what has been called Project California — a system comprising servers made from 64-bit Intel Nehalem EP Xeon processors, storage, and networking in a single rack, glued together with software from VMWare and BMC. Coverage of this announcement is everywhere. Business Week said: "The new device, dubbed Project California, takes servers into new territory by cramming computer power into the very box that contains storage capacity and the networking tools that are Cisco's specialty. Cisco's approach could help companies use fewer machines — saving money not only on hardware, but also on power and IT staffing — in building data centers. ... Cisco is well-girded to take this step. It has more than $30 billion in cash, more than any other tech company. The company is moving into no fewer than 28 different markets, including digital music in the home and public surveillance systems." The Register provides more analysis: "Microsoft is, of course, a partner on the California system, since you can't ignore Windows in the data center, and presumably, Hyper-V will be supported alongside ESX Server on the hypervisors. (No one at the Cisco launch answered that and many other questions seeking details). ... The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How a Router's Missed Range Check Nearly Crashed the Internet

Posted: February 22nd, 2009, 7:26am CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Barlaam writes "A bug by router vendor A (omitting a range check from a critical field in the configuration interface) tickled a bug from router vendor B (dropping BGP sessions when processing some ASPATH attributes with length very close to 256), causing a ripple effect that caused widespread global routing instability last week. The flaw lay dormant until one of vendor A's systems was deployed in an autonomous system whose ASN, modulo 256, was greater than 250. At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster. Other router vendors, who were not affected by the bug, happily propagated the trigger message to every vulnerable system on the planet in about 30 seconds. Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is — this is just the latest example." Vendor A, in this case, is a Latvian router vendor called MikroTik.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
5 Powerline Networking Devices Reviewed

Posted: February 18th, 2009, 11:33pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "Most people who can't or won't hardwire for broadband have an obvious alternative: Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, there can be architectural anomalies between floors or even between rooms that can interfere with Wi-Fi signals, resulting in spotty, or even dead, signals. So what do you do? Well, you can try using a powerline device. Computerworld reviewer Bill O'Brien tests powerline units from Belkin, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear and Zyxel, and compares their performance to that of his wired and wireless setups."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Accused Rogue Admin Terry Childs Makes His Case

Posted: February 18th, 2009, 3:39pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

angry tapir writes "He's been in jail for seven months now, but former San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs says he's going to keep fighting to prove he's innocent of computer crime charges. Childs was arrested on July 12, charged with disrupting the City of San Francisco's Wide Area Network during a tense standoff with management. Infoworld has also conducted an interview with Childs."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm

Posted: February 8th, 2009, 2:22pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Linker3000 writes "According to The Register, OpenDNS plans to introduce an new service that will prevent PCs infected with the Conficker (aka Downadup) malware from contacting its control servers, and will also make it easy for admins to know if even a single machine under their control has been infected by Conficker: 'Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.' With the amount of trouble this worm has caused, perhaps this is a good time to take a look at OpenDNS if you haven't done so already."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Active Directory Comes To Linux With Samba 4

Posted: January 19th, 2009, 7:45am CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

Da Massive writes in with another possible answer to a recent Ask Slashdot about FOSS replacements for Microsoft AD server. "Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Speaking at this year's linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft's custom protocols. Because AD is 'far more than LDAP and Kerberos,' Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft's customization of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Active Directory Comes To Linux With Samba 4

Posted: January 19th, 2009, 7:45am CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

Da Massive writes in with another possible answer to a recent Ask Slashdot about FOSS replacements for Microsoft AD server. "Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Speaking at this year's linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft's custom protocols. Because AD is 'far more than LDAP and Kerberos,' Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft's customization of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Best FOSS Active Directory Alternative?

Posted: January 18th, 2009, 3:39am CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

danboid writes "I'm an IT technician at a large school near Manchester, England. We currently have two separate networks (one for pupils, one for staff) each with its own Windows Server 2003 Active Directory box handling authentication and storing users' files. We're planning on restructuring the network soon and we'd like to be able to replace the two aging AD servers with a single, more powerful Linux server running an open source OpenLDAP implementation. The main contenders for this purpose seem to be Fedora Directory Server, OpenDS, and Apache Directory Server; but I've been unable to find meaningful comparisons among the three. I'd like to hear which solution Slashdot readers recommend. What is your experience with ease of implementation / maintenance? Any stories of similar (un)successful migrations? Any other tips for an organization wanting to drop AD for a FOSS equivalent?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's

Posted: January 15th, 2009, 10:52pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's

Posted: January 15th, 2009, 10:52pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's

Posted: January 15th, 2009, 10:52pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Cisco Mulls Adding Verbal Interview To CCIE Exams

Posted: January 11th, 2009, 6:15pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Julie188 writes "Here's a new idea to stop certification test-taking cheaters; Cisco is considering introducing a verbal interview portion to its CCIE lab exams across the world. Cisco confirmed that it is running a pilot in its exam lab in Beijing, China that involves candidates taking a 10-minute verbal interview as part of their lab exam. Cisco said that if the pilot is successful, the interview could be introduced as a requirement for CCIE Routing & Switching candidates worldwide. The company has been running the pilot since August."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
USB 3.0 Is Ten Times Faster; Get It In 2010

Posted: January 10th, 2009, 10:36pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

thefickler writes "Seagate and Symwave are jointly demonstrating the first consumer applications of USB 3.0 at CES, showing a Seagate FreeAgent drive running through a Symwave USB 3.0-compatible storage controller device. According to Symwave, this will result in 'speeds previously unattainable with legacy USB technology.' Which means, if you understand PR-write, it will be much faster."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Another DNS Flaw Found, Patched

Posted: January 10th, 2009, 1:11am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

darthcamaro writes "Remember the big DNS flaw that Dan Kaminsky 'discovered' last year? Well, it looks like another flaw in DNS has just been patched. This time it's an item that affects DNSSEC, which was supposed to be the savior for the Kaminsky flaw. The good news, though, is that this time, the issue is relatively minor and DNS has already been patched. 'The flaw is specific to certain usages of DNSSEC,' Joao Damas, senior programming manager of the ISC told InternetNews. 'It is strongly advised that all BIND DNSSEC deployments update in case they are using the particular pattern affected (DSA keys in some cases) and to prevent coming across the problem in the future unexpectedly.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cisco Launching Blade Servers in 2009

Posted: December 24th, 2008, 10:40pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

minutetraders writes "According to some sources, by next year Cisco Systems will be in the blade server business. ChannelWeb has a story, confirmed by several sources, that the San Jose, Calif.-based networking behemoth is readying blade servers, code-named California, for a release early next year. A blade server offering would put Cisco in direct competition with the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM, companies it partners with on their respective blade server offerings, for control of the enterprise data center."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
USPS Server Meltdown

Posted: December 9th, 2008, 9:23pm CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

m2pc writes "The US Postal Service is experiencing major server issues for its shipping API web services. After spending about an hour debugging my own eCommerce software for a client, I found the problem was with the USPS shipping servers being unavailable. Further research showed that message boards for OS Commerce and other e-Commerce packages are filling with posts from angry users who are experiencing crashing Web store applications and frustrated customers. Developers are scrambling to find interim solutions, from hard-coding fixed price shipping, to 'rolling their own' shipping calculation APIs based on the USPS Fixed Rate Zone Tables, to disabling the USPS option altogether. One user reported yesterday that a call to USPS yielded the response 'we expect it to be down all day.' As of 9:20 AM PST the service is still unavailable."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant

Posted: November 30th, 2008, 3:35pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ruphus13 points out news from the Linux Foundation, which announced that all major Linux distributions meet certification requirements for the US Department of Defense's IPv6 mandates. The announcement credits work done by the IPv6 Workgroup, whose members include IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat. Quoting: "Linux has had relatively robust IPv6 support since 2005, but further work was needed for the open source platform to achieve full compliance with DoD standards. The Linux Foundation's IPv6 workgroup analyzed the DoD certification requirements and identified key areas where Linux's IPv6 stack needed adjustments in order to guarantee compliance. They collaboratively filled in the gaps and have succeeded in bringing the shared technology into alignment with the DoD's standards."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant

Posted: November 30th, 2008, 3:35pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ruphus13 points out news from the Linux Foundation, which announced that all major Linux distributions meet certification requirements for the US Department of Defense's IPv6 mandates. The announcement credits work done by the IPv6 Workgroup, whose members include IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat. Quoting: "Linux has had relatively robust IPv6 support since 2005, but further work was needed for the open source platform to achieve full compliance with DoD standards. The Linux Foundation's IPv6 workgroup analyzed the DoD certification requirements and identified key areas where Linux's IPv6 stack needed adjustments in order to guarantee compliance. They collaboratively filled in the gaps and have succeeded in bringing the shared technology into alignment with the DoD's standards."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant

Posted: November 30th, 2008, 3:35pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ruphus13 points out news from the Linux Foundation, which announced that all major Linux distributions meet certification requirements for the US Department of Defense's IPv6 mandates. The announcement credits work done by the IPv6 Workgroup, whose members include IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat. Quoting: "Linux has had relatively robust IPv6 support since 2005, but further work was needed for the open source platform to achieve full compliance with DoD standards. The Linux Foundation's IPv6 workgroup analyzed the DoD certification requirements and identified key areas where Linux's IPv6 stack needed adjustments in order to guarantee compliance. They collaboratively filled in the gaps and have succeeded in bringing the shared technology into alignment with the DoD's standards."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant

Posted: November 30th, 2008, 3:35pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

ruphus13 points out news from the Linux Foundation, which announced that all major Linux distributions meet certification requirements for the US Department of Defense's IPv6 mandates. The announcement credits work done by the IPv6 Workgroup, whose members include IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat. Quoting: "Linux has had relatively robust IPv6 support since 2005, but further work was needed for the open source platform to achieve full compliance with DoD standards. The Linux Foundation's IPv6 workgroup analyzed the DoD certification requirements and identified key areas where Linux's IPv6 stack needed adjustments in order to guarantee compliance. They collaboratively filled in the gaps and have succeeded in bringing the shared technology into alignment with the DoD's standards."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Working For Samba Interoperability

Posted: October 23rd, 2008, 4:50pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

JP writes "Andrew Bartlett of Samba fame has written a document describing their recent collaboration with Microsoft's Active Directory team. In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft's engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way. However according to Andrew the Samba AD team is currently very short on manpower, so if you have network experience, now is the time to get coding."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Corporate Data Centers As Ethernet's Next Frontier

Posted: October 21st, 2008, 5:26pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

alphadogg writes with a story that's about the possibilities for the next generation(s) of Ethernet, stuff far beyond 10base-T: "Ethernet has conquered much of the network world and is now headed deep into the data center to handle everything from storage to LAN to high-performance computing applications. Cisco, IBM and other big names are behind standards efforts, and while there is some dispute over exactly what to call this technology, vendors seem to be moving ahead with it, and it's already showing up in pre-standard products. 'I don't see any show-stoppers here — it's just time,' says one network equipment-maker rep. 'This is just another evolutionary step. Ethernet worked great for mundane or typical applications — now we're getting to time-sensitive applications and we need to have a little bit more congestion control in there.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Server Optimization For Newbies?

Posted: September 13th, 2008, 10:19pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: networking

supaneko writes "I recently took a new job as a network and server administration for a small IT company. I am absolutely shocked at how much is taking place within this company that I have little to no experience with. To help bolster my experience, I purchased a used server to use for hands-on training and practice. My ultimate goal is to have a complete, secure LAMP server available to the public running CentOS. I have been browsing the Net for various guides and tips on setup, optimization, security, and maintenance, but nothing I've found really gives me a hands-on approach to the topics I want to learn about. When you all started out, what route did you take to pick up the server setup and maintenance skills you have now? Is there anything in particular that you would recommend to someone who has excellent skills with consumer PCs and servers but is a total newbie to corporate and enterprise networking and servers?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TCP/IP Meets Physical Reality

Posted: September 7th, 2008, 7:31am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "When Google is clouding the borderline between web and the desktop, a much, much smaller project is blurring the border between the Internet and the physical reality: the newly released Contiki operating system version 2.2.1. Contiki runs on networked wireless sensors that are used for anything from road tunnel monitoring for fire rescue operations to collecting vital statistics from ice hockey players. These sensors typically have as little as a few kilobytes of memory and a few milliwatts of power budget — a thousandth of the resources of a typical PC computer — yet Contiki provides them with full TCP/IP connectivity. Meanwhile, San Francisco is monitoring parking spaces with wireless technology."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hacker Conventions Ranked By Bandwidth-Per-Visitor

Posted: September 7th, 2008, 12:50am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An Anonymous Coward writes "Ever wondered how much bandwidth you will get at a hacker con? This web page tells you how much. It shows the total bandwidth and bandwidth for each visitor for all the recent hacker cons." It looks like Defcon attendees get the short end of the stick, while those at metarheinmain chaosdays are practically swimming in bandwidth. There are a lot of other cons (a few examples listed here) which I'd like to see added to this list.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Preparing Computer and Cellular Networks For a Hurricane

Posted: August 30th, 2008, 12:58am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

CWmike writes "As Hurricane Gustav approaches the US Gulf Coast, IT lessons learned from the devastating Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that smashed New Orleans and other areas in 2005 are on the minds of many worried IT managers. David Avgikos, president of Digimation Inc., a 3-D digital animation software company in St. Rose, Louisiana, said, 'We don't have to be told twice.' Meanwhile, the nation's major cellular network providers say that they too are prepared, having learned from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Still, they offer some helpful tips for dealing with what is expected to be a category-three hurricane when it hits: use text vs. calling on your cell phone, and if you use a cordless for your landline, ditch it for a corded model so that it will still work if there are power outages."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Defcon "Warballoon" Finds 1/3 of Wireless Networks Unsecured

Posted: August 10th, 2008, 7:35pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

avatar4d writes "Networkworld is reporting about a warballooning operation (similar to wardriving) that was disallowed by the management at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, but was covertly launched anyway. The team found approximately 370 networks, and about a third of those were unsecured. In addition to that, the project managed to show how trusting the local law enforcement agencies really were: 'Near the end of the operation, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police cruiser drove by the parking lot to see what was going on. Hill and his team waved. The police officers waved back and drove off.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
BIND Still Susceptible To DNS Cache Poisoning

Posted: August 9th, 2008, 3:05pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "John Markoff of the NYTimes writes about a Russian hacker, Evgeniy Polyakov, who has successfully poisoned the latest, patched BIND with randomized ports. Originally, the randomized ports were never supposed to completely solve the problem, but just make it harder to do. It was thought that with port randomization, it would take roughly a week to get a hit. Using his own exploit code, two desktop computers and a GigE link, Polyakov reduced the time to 10 hours."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SF Not an Exception In Giving IT Too Much Control

Posted: July 25th, 2008, 8:44pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

CWmike writes "The city of San Francisco's IT department is certainly not the exception when it comes to allowing just one person to have unfettered rights to make password and configuration changes to networks and enterprise systems. In fact, it's a situation fairly common in many organizations — especially small to medium-size ones, IT managers and others cautioned in the wake of the recent Terry Childs incident."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Best DNS Naming Scheme For Small/Medium Businesses?

Posted: July 6th, 2008, 10:34pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Bandman writes "My business just purchased a couple dozen blades, and with our existing servers, this brings us to around 60 machines. We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters). We used to use theme-based naming schemes, but we've been migrating to a more utilitarian system. I think it's clearer and more concise, but I've had some feedback from users who didn't find it understandable. What do you use for your internal DNS schemes? How big is your network, and what do you recommend for future expansion? Does it matter to your users at all?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Encrypted Traffic No Longer Safe From Throttling

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 2:23pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

coderrr writes "New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself. Challenges remain for ISPs to implement this technology, but it's clear that encrypting your traffic inside an SSH session or VPN connection is not a solution to protect net neutrality."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Beating Comcast's Sandvine On Linux With Iptables

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:20am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

HiroDeckard writes "Multiple sites reported a while ago that Comcast was using Sandvine to do TCP packet resets to throttle BitTorrent connections of their users. This practice may be a thing of the past as it's been found a simple rule in the Linux firewall, iptables, can simply just block their reset packets, returning your BitTorrent back to normal speeds and allowing you to once again connect to all your seeds and peer. If blocking the TCP packet resets becomes a common practice, on and off of Linux, it'll be interesting to see the next move in the cat-and-mouse game between customers and service providers, and who controls that bandwidth."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Working With 2 ISPs For Home Networking?

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 8:34pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "This is, I think, a simple question — but one which I can't get the answer to. As a typical, but perhaps high-demand home user I would like to use 2 separate ISPs. ADSL is pretty cheap nowadays, and 2 x ADSL seems a better value than one fast one — especially in terms of reliability. If one breaks, at least the other will work. Using an old box as a router/firewall, how can I configure a system to use two completely separate ISPs in a sensible manner? Ideally, I'd like the load of my browsing to be balanced, but at the minimum, I'd want some kind of 'fail-over.' If I leave torrents running over night, I'd like the router to use whichever connection doesn't block the traffic — and preferably for it to reset the errant connection. Ideas?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Huge Traffic On Wikipedia's Non-Profit Budget

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 7:11pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

miller60 writes "'As a non-profit running one of the world's busiest web destinations, Wikipedia provides an unusual case study of a high-performance site. In an era when Google and Microsoft can spend $500 million on one of their global data center projects, Wikipedia's infrastructure runs on fewer than 300 servers housed in a single data center in Tampa, Fla.' Domas Mituzas of MySQL/Sun gave a presentation Monday at the Velocity conference that provided an inside look at the technology behind Wikipedia, which he calls an 'operations underdog.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Extracting Meaning From the Structure of Networks

Posted: May 3rd, 2008, 10:43pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Roland Piquepaille writes "Networks are used to represent the structure of complex systems, including the Internet or social networks, but often these descriptions are biased or incomplete. Now, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have shown that it's possible to extract automatically the hierarchical structure of networks. The researchers say their results 'suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.' They also think that their algorithms can be applied to almost every kind of networks, from biochemical networks (protein interaction networks, metabolic networks or genetic regulatory networks) to communities in social networks. But read more for additional references and some pictures about hierarchical networks and their applications."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
10Gb Ethernet Alliance is Formed

Posted: April 17th, 2008, 6:27pm CEST by Zonk

Tags: networking

Lucas123 writes "Nine storage and networking vendors have created a consortium to promote the use of 10GbE. The group views it as the future of a combined LAN/SAN infrastructure. They highlight the spec's ability to pool and virtualize server I/O, storage and network resources and to manage them together to reduce complexity. By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration. 'Compared to 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel, a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet-based storage infrastructure can cut storage network costs by 30% to 75% and increases bandwidth by 2.5 times.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Cisco Turns Routers Into Linux App Servers

Posted: April 13th, 2008, 7:15pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

symbolset writes "InternetNews is reporting that Cisco's new Application eXtension Platform turns several models of Cisco switches into Linux application servers. With certified libraries in C, Java and Perl, developers will be able to use a downloadable SDK to build their apps. The AXP server is just another module in a Cisco switch running Cisco's own derivation of a modern Linux distro (Kernel 2.6.x) specifically hardened to run on that particular hardware. Modules will include up to 1.4-GHz Intel Pentiums with 2 GB RAM and a 160 GB hard drive."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

BBC and ISPs Clash over iPlayer

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 7:11pm CEST by Zonk

Tags: networking

randomtimes writes "A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC. ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope. '"The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity," said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk. He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face. "They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing," he said. ISPs needed to stop using the term 'unlimited' to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Internet Black Holes

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 4:17pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Unique Broadband Over Powerline Project Planned For Mosques

Posted: April 6th, 2008, 12:19pm CEST by Zonk

Tags: networking

Lucas123 writes "Broadband over powerline (BPL) provider Velchip is heading up a project that will offer 60 million very unique network users an unlimited high speed Internet connection of 224Mbps at a cost of only around RM5 ($1.58) per user per month. That's the cheapest, fastest internet connection in the world. The network is slated for use in the $14 billion 'Smart Mosque' project, which will be rolled out over three years in Indonesia and will link together 400,000 mosques. To add some perspective, in the US Verizon FiOS currently offers up to 30 Mbps downloads and 5 Mbps uploads starting at $42.99 a month. BPL modems use existing electrical power lines to deliver high speed Internet access and data transmission."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Open Source News » Tags » networking

Feeds

118 items tagged "networking"

Posted: May 17th, 2012, 9:12pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: May 7th, 2012, 9:37pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: March 28th, 2012, 5:35pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: networking

Posted: February 23rd, 2012, 10:32pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: January 14th, 2012, 9:50am CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: January 10th, 2012, 11:53pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: December 29th, 2011, 7:02pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: December 28th, 2011, 12:55am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: December 6th, 2011, 5:42pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: November 17th, 2011, 3:35pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: November 9th, 2011, 11:38pm CET by samzenpus

Tags: networking

Posted: November 9th, 2011, 11:38pm CET by samzenpus

Tags: networking

Posted: October 25th, 2011, 4:38pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: September 13th, 2011, 11:32pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: networking

Posted: September 13th, 2011, 11:11am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: August 20th, 2011, 6:29pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: August 20th, 2011, 6:29pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: August 6th, 2011, 8:41pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: July 7th, 2011, 8:25pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: June 21st, 2011, 5:56am CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: May 5th, 2011, 9:37pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: April 29th, 2011, 11:24pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: April 28th, 2011, 1:36am CEST by samzenpus

Tags: networking

Posted: March 21st, 2011, 2:58pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

Posted: February 26th, 2011, 11:18am CET by Roblimo

Tags: networking

Posted: February 4th, 2011, 10:49pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: February 3rd, 2011, 1:03am CET by samzenpus

Tags: networking

Posted: January 26th, 2011, 12:51pm CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: January 22nd, 2011, 11:36pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: January 5th, 2011, 2:20am CET by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: December 18th, 2010, 12:28am CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: December 14th, 2010, 8:40pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: networking

Posted: December 10th, 2010, 3:37pm CET by kdawson

Tags: networking

Posted: November 19th, 2010, 4:55pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: October 21st, 2010, 11:18pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: October 18th, 2010, 11:28pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: October 10th, 2010, 7:53pm CEST by timothy

Tags: networking

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 5:22pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: networking

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 11:54pm CEST by CmdrTaco