Boundary Offers Real-time Analytics For Big Data Network Traffic

I think we can all agree that knowing your network is everything. The more you know about how it works on a normal basis, the better you can detect and investigate anomalies. Current analytics work, as Stacy Higginbotham, writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, puts it, as snapshots of network activity. One company is seeking to change...

Skype Investigating Privacy-breaching Tool

May 1st, 2012

Skype announced today that it’s looking into a new tool that retains a user’s last known IP address. The tool, for which instructions were posted on Pastebin last Thursday, reveals a person’s IP address without the need to add the targeted person as a contact first.

According to ComputerWorld, the privacy-breaching tool can uncover the IP address of a Skype user by simply looking at the user’s general information and log files. Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft last year, assured the user community that they were on the case and said in a statement:

We are investigating reports of a new tool that allegedly captures a Skype user’s last known IP address. This is an ongoing, industry-wide issue faced by all peer-to-peer software companies. We are committed to the safety and security of our customers and we are takings measures to help protect them.

While knowing a last known IP address won’t reveal the Skyper’s name or physical address, it’s still a privacy concern nonetheless. As ghacks points out, the IP address can be used to pinpoint the general location (such as the city) of the Skype user, which could be concerning for the paranoid and can-never-be-too-carefuls.

Given that Skype’s seen a swell of users this year, it’s not likely that the exploit will remain unattended to for too long. Having recently crossed the milestone of 40 million concurrent users, Skype doesn’t want to see that number take a dip. They may already have a solution in the works for this exploit given that a research paper was published last October in which details of how to secretly determine a user’s IP address were explained.

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Can A New Quantum Encryption Foil Sophisticated Hackers?

April 9th, 2012

A research team led by University of Toronto Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo has found a new quantum encryption method to foil even the most sophisticated hackers. The discovery is outlined in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. Read More…

Balancing Security And Performance As A Network Admin

March 19th, 2012

Network Administrators play a delicate game of balancing uptime and security. Increased security often comes at the sacrifice of accessibility and/or performance. Steps to increase accessibility and uptime often create security issues. Thus, measures that can potentially bolster performance, uptime, and security are sought out as holy relics in network administration. The Pareto principle suggests that, in a majority of cases, 80% of the problems will arise from 20% of the sources. If it is possible to identify the 20% of countries causing 80% of our security problems, it is possible to ban the complete ip blocks from those countries and effectively eliminate 80% of our problems? Is this a reasonable solution, or just plain overkill?
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Making The Switch To NGINX

March 6th, 2012

I have a total success kid moment every time I switch one of our Apache HTTP servers to NGINX. Without any significant tweaking to NGINX, we take a highly configured and pageview hardened Apache server and increase its capacity ten fold with a switch to NGINX. It comes by no surprise to me, then, that NGINX is continuing its steady ascension in the web server market share. W3Techs reports that NGINX broke 10% in early 2012, and now is halfway to 11% market share. What’s more convincing than that, however, is it it’s apparent dominance in the high traffic websites. Read More…

Switching from Apache to Nginx: URL Rewriting

February 20th, 2012

With all the awe and wonder of the Internet, one of the most amazing things about its basic function is the speed at which great ideas are shared. Many people use the term “viral” to describe how quickly a great piece of content or information is rapidly spread across the Internet. However, viral content can quickly become quarantined if it is unable to be accessed by the masses. Apache, the current workhorse of the Internet, requires significant hardware resources to effectively handle the sheer volume of traffic synonymous with viral content. A majority of Internet sites can not financially afford the necessary resources to be ready 24/7 for massive traffic. Viral content can die as quickly as it is born, so being able to handle a significant increase in traffic is vital to any website’s potential success. The ideal situation would be to still serve thousands of active visitors on below average hardware: nginx makes that happen.

Pretty urls (http://somedomain.com/nice-article-title versus http://somedomain.com/?p=12345) have become the norm on the web. These little beauties leverage rewrite engines, and it’s very likely you’re familiar with mod_rewrite if you’ve been using Apache. Rewriting is something you won’t have to sacrifice when making the move to nginx, as it has a full functioning rewrite engine. The transition from mod_rewrite to nginx’s rewrite engine is relatively easy. If you’re familiar with Perl’s implementation of regular expressions, then the switch should be even easier, as nginx url rewriting has some Perl flavor to it.

mod_rewrite basic redirect
RewriteRule http://somedomain.com/old-busted-article http://somedomain.com/new-better-article [L,R=301]
nginx basic redirect
rewrite http://somedomain.com/old-busted-article http://somedomain.com/new-better-article permanent;
mod_rewrite WordPress redirect
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
nginx WordPress redirect
if (!-e $request_filename)
{
   rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php last;
}

Like Apache, nginx’s rewrite engine can leverage various system variables to make powerful and precise redirects.

Datacenter on Elm Street

January 27th, 2012

Sure, your 120 year old Grandpa might utter incoherent nonsense 90% of the time, but pay attention when that ten-percent of conversation actually makes sense. It seems that many values of the past have gotten lost in translation, or more likely, in laziness. Do the job right the first time and other work ethic idioms have, unfortunately, fallen by the wayside in modern American society. This was no more apparent than during a recent datacenter trip. A colleague and I completed a cross-country trip to install a NAS and a few MongoDB servers only to behold the following. WARNING The following images are graphic in nature, and may invoke cringing, vomiting, and/or diarrhea.
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Jaw-Dropping New Tech : Gigabit Wi-fi.

January 10th, 2012

There has been a ridiculous amount of buzz around tech world, as CES officially begins tomorrow, and one of the most exciting technologies that will be there is an upgrade Wi-fi standard.

I’m sure all of you already know (or should already know) that Wi-fi speeds are measured in Gigabits per second, but currently most Wi-fi implementations are running at 150mbps or less. Apparently, next-gen Wi-fi will come in two different frequencies, 5GHz (802.11ac) and 60Ghz (802.11ad), which will push out data at 1.3Gbps and 7Gbps, respectively. IEEE has moved away from using the 2.4GHz frequency, as it has become ridiculously crowded with a vast array of wireless devices. Anybody can see what a ridiculous jump in performance that is, and what a difference this is going to make for Wi-fi users (more or less everybody in the developed world).

I feel that I should go ahead and note that neither of these standards is fully developed yet, and will probably not be certified for about another year. There are companies that are already starting to premier their new pieces of hardware that implement the new standards, and some will be out before the certification.

Even if the new stuff isn’t working perfectly at that point, don’t worry too much as everything is backwards compatible. For example, even if you have an old card and there is only a 802.11ac access point in your vicinity, you can use it, just without the benefits of the new technology. Honestly, I love the idea of not having to wait forever for my movies on Netflix to load up, as I would like to get on with my life.

Amazon Web Services Continue to Improve

December 27th, 2011

If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.

My high school football coach used to consistently remind us that by failing to improve, we were actually getting worse. In the land of competition, there is no treading water. As soon as you think you no longer need to improve, your competition catches up, or worse, passes you up. Apparently, Amazon is well aware of this. As the leader in cloud services, they have chosen to continue to expand and improve upon their services, and have finished up 2011 strongly. In case you missed it, here’s some of the highlights for 2011.

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HP and Alcatel-Lucent Launch New Cloud Solution

December 5th, 2011

At HP Discover 2011 in Austria, the two companies unveiled their new joint offerings, CloudSystem and Data Center Network Connect. Read More…