The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category

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The IoT strikes back again: half a million IoT devices killed DYN DNS for hours, but fixing this will be hard

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/10/22

Less than a month after The IoT strikes back: 650 Gigabit/second and 1 Terabit/second attacks by IoT devices within a week the IoT struck back again: an estimated half a million IoT devices was used to perform multiple DDoS attacks against Dyn Managed DNS that took around 11 hours to resolve.

Google DNS appears to

Google DNS appears to “live” near me in Amsterdam

High availability usually involves a mix of DNS TTL and/or BGP routing. That’s typically how CDN providers like Cloudflare work (it’s one of the reasons that global DNS servers like Google’s 8.8.8.8 appear near to you and over time routes – some MPLS – to it change). Short DNS TTL can help CDN, requires a very stable DNS infrastructure and is similar to but different from a Fast Flux network.

Last months attacks were on a security researcher and a single ISP. The Dyn DNS attack affected even more internet services (not just sites like Twitter, WhatsApp, AirBnB and Github). So I’m with Bruce Schneier that Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet.

Handling these attacks is hard as the DDoS mitigation firms simply cannot handle the sudden increase of attack sizes yet. BCP38 should be part of mitigation, but the puzzle is big and fixing it won’t be easy though root-causes of bugs change as a lot of research is in progress.

I’m not alone in expecting it to get worse though before getting better.

On the client side, I learned that many users could cope by changing their DNS servers to either of these Public DNS Servers:

  • OpenDNS 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220, 208.67.222.220, 208.67.220.222
    • OpenDNS does a good job of handing “last known good” IPs when they can’t resolve.
  • Google Public DNS 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4
  • Level 3 DNS 4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4, 4.2.2.5, 4.2.2.6

Some more interesting tidbits on the progress and mitigation on this particular attack are the over time heat-maps of affected regions and BGP routing changes below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CDN (Content Delivery Network), Cloud, Cloudflare, DNS, Hardware, Infrastructure, Internet, IoT Internet of Things, Network-and-equipment, Opinions, Power User | Leave a Comment »

“We looked at the latency of Google Compute Engine in the US Central region.…

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/28

“We looked at the latency of Google Compute Engine in the US Central region. Google’s cloud has a latency performance characteristic that’s unique among… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

It describes why a stable latency helps Google and SysEleven to outperform other cloud providers.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Less than two decades of Google Data Centers – from corkboard x86 hardware via GPU to TPU – now they make their own chips too

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/05/20

First corkboard production server by Google in 1998

First corkboard production server by Google in 1998

Remember the image on the right? It was the first “corkboard” production server Google used in 1998 (it’s a museum piece now).

From there they were using commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux for a “long” time which around 2005 even got their own 12V battery as UPS inside the machine and running 1160 machines in a 1AAA shipping container.

Later whey started using a mix of CPU and GPU increasing the performance per watt and recently went from 12V to 48V and even contributed 48V DC Data Center Rack to Open Compute.

In the mean time, Tensor Flow and AI got even more important for Google and during the Google I/O 2016 keynote, they revealed yet another step: TPU chips especially made for TensorFlow providing even better performance per watt for machine learning than GPU. The TPUs are not FPGAs (popular for instance when mining BitCoins), but ASICs that perform orders of magnitude better.

So in about 18 years, Google moved from cleverly assembled commodity hardware to highly specialised custom chips.

Exciting times are ahead of us. I’m really looking forward to the next steps.

–jeroen

Sources:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Google, History, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Two opinions on Netflix and blocking: they hate Netflix or contact tr@netflix.com and try to solve …

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/03/28

Basically there are two opinions on Netflix and blocking:

  • TL;DR: People use VPNs for security, Netflix fucks them up, they hate Netflix for that and just torrent that shit.
  • tl;dr If you have issues with Netflix on public Wifi, contact the provider and forward tr@netflix.com to them so they can settle issues.

I’m not a netflix user (or user of any form of DRM) as I really dislike the fact that DRM means for any reason your license can be ended. I’ve seen too many players going out of business or taking decisions turning.

So I buy CDs, DVDs, BlueRays or DRM-free media files. Now it’s my problem of making proper back-ups to ensure future access to them (:

The DRM walls and ladders war^w game has gone so far that in this case, Netflix is blocking even though the WiFi provider / proxy / VPN is in the same country like the below imgur image:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Netflix, Network-and-equipment, Power User, VPN | Leave a Comment »

It was fun while it lasted: Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/05

Copy had some advantages and disadvantages. For instance, it was better handling long file names, character encodings in filenames and a lot easier to configure over a CNTLM proxy than DropBox, but unlike DropBox didn’t keep history of changes.

Alas no more copy.com as of 20160501: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life.

They suggest using [WayBack] Mover with OneDrive as target: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Moving Your Data from Copy

Note that Mover has many more connectors, including cloud storage ones (Box, Copy, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Yandex.Disk are free):

[WayBack] Connectors • Mover: FTP, Dropbox, Box, GoogleDrive, Copy, Egnyte, Amazon S3, SharePoint, MySQL the list goes on!

For me it means it’s time to think about what kinds of cloud storage I want to use and how to share what data with others at which access level. As I’m already contemplating on how to use ZFS, I now have two storage concepts to think about.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Apps, Cntlm, Copy.com, DropBox, Infrastructure, NTLM, Power User, SocialMedia, Windows, Windows-Http-Proxy | Leave a Comment »

Koninklijke KPN N.V Data Centers

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/11/23

Koninklijke KPN N.V Data Centers.

There are many more (for me) “local” Data Centers in:

–jeroen

Posted in Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Batch file to open a specific TCP port in Windows 7 / 2008 Server and up

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/18

Thanks to the answer by Kevin Richardson on How to open ports on Windows firewall through batch file, I wrote this batch file that uses the add command of the Netsh AdvFirewall Firewall Commands which requires Admin privileges to run:


:: open port (first argument passed to batch script, second argument is description)
:checkPrivileges
net file 1>nul 2>nul
if '%errorlevel%' == '0' ( goto :gotPrivileges ) else ( goto :getPrivileges )
:isNotAdmin
:getPrivileges
echo You need to be admin running with an elevated security token to run %0
goto :exit
:isAdmin
:gotPrivileges
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Open Port %1 for %2" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=%1
:exit
::pause
exit /b

view raw

open-firewall-port.bat

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

–jeroen

via: How to open ports on Windows firewall through batch file – Stack Overflow

Posted in Firewall, Infrastructure, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 | Leave a Comment »

Was ist Cloud? Great presentation including transcript by Kristian Köhntopp.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/08/23

When one of my DevOps friends asks: Was ist Cloud?.

Kristian Köhntopp even published it as a SlideShare deck with transcript: Was ist Cloud?.

There is even a video: Froscon “Was ist Cloud?” – Video.

Thanks a million, Kris, this is very much worth reading for anybody doing Ops, Dev or DevOps.

There is even a

If you can’t read German: tough luck (;

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Development, Firewall, Infrastructure, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Blast from the past: the digital highway as imagined circa 1995.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/08/07

Blast from the past: the digital highway as imagined circa 1995 (thanks Kristian Köhntopp for sharing this a while ago).

Learned a new phrase too (handfeste Datenträger) for something a marching band friend of mine was involved in: before he suddenly passed away at 39 he was a “high bandwidth courier” giving meaning to the phrase by Tanenbaum “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway” by driving around magnetic tapes and optical media between various locations for about 600+ km a day.

Who could imagine in the age where ISDN at home (@ 64 kibit/s) was fast, that 20 years later you could have fiber (@ 500 Mibit/s) at home both for like EUR 50/month.

Like Steve Streeting posted: having high bandwidth (relative to the time you live in) makes you stop thinking about your internet speed

It allows you to find new usage patterns. Which is good for imagination, work, etc.

–jeroen

PS:

I lied a little. EUR 50/month is for the subscription only. Nowadays that means a permanent connection. In the ISDN days having a permanent connection to an ISP would set you down another EUR 50/month for the ISP, and about EUR 600/month of data usage to the telecom provider.

I did that for a couple of years until cable and ADSL became available. Why? Because it was the fastest way to stay informed (gopher, newsgroups, mailing lists, early forums and web-sites) and get the latest software (mainly over FTP).

Imagine this was only years after not even HCC being able to sustain the costs of a Fidonet transatlantic link, and now two decades later. I’ve posted about Fidonet before, and back-then it was the most affordable way to access information from across the world.

Now less than a century after the first transatlantic phone service was established in 1927, world wide communication is almost free (and there is even internet in space).

PPS:

Swets – where my friend worked for filed for bankruptcy last year. No more high bandwidth couriers…

via:

Posted in BBS, FidoNet, History, Infrastructure | Leave a Comment »

ENDIAN Firewall – Connected client can access EFW but no other hosts: enable promiscuous mode on VMware ESXi

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/12

While solving a problem with Windows 7 machines not being able to ping the machines on the GREEN LAN of an Endian when connecting through OpenVPN, but XP machines could, I did a few upgrades, then went on to solve the problem.

  • Upgraded from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1 (I needed this anyway because of Pass Through USB support)
  • Upgraded the community edition appliance from Endian 2.2 to Endian 2.4 (which has more configuration options, and better ways for reporting and logging)

Then I went on solving the issue, which I suspected was a kind of routing problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Endian, ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Firewall, Infrastructure, OpenVPN, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | 8 Comments »

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