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Category Archives: Networking
BT Lights Up World’s First 800Gbps Fibre Super Channel
Laboratory tests have reached 800Gbps before, but this is the first time it’s gone long distance, covering the 410km between BT’s Adastral Park research centre, near Ipswich in Suffolk, and the BT Tower in London, using equipment from network kit vendor Ciena. The surprising thing is that the test was successful on fibre which was previously not considered good enough to carry 10Gbps.
Verizon Taps AlcaLu & Ericsson for 4G Small Cells
Verizon is calling 4G small cells a “complement” to its existing LTE network and distributed antenna system deployments in hard-to-cover areas like building basements. The operator currently has 497 live LTE markets, which represents 95 percent coverage of its existing 3G footprint.
via Light Reading – Verizon Taps AlcaLu & Ericsson for 4G Small Cells.
Connectify Launches Switchboard Kickstarter Project
Connectify Switchboard divides the user’s traffic between Wi-Fi, 3G/4G and Ethernet-based connections on a packet-by-packet basis. Even a single stream — such as a Netflix movie — can be split between two or three Internet connections for a higher resolution and faster buffering. This method promises 95 percent of the speed stemming from the combined Internet connection. Thus, users could see a single 19 Mbps stream when separate 10 Mbps and 10 Mbps connections are merged together.
Inside Google’s Software-Defined Network
The concept of software-defined networking has captured the attention of network engineers and the trade press, but very few examples of a live SDN implementation exist. One of those few is Google. The search giant presented details about its SDN network at the 2013 Open Networking Summit. Let’s take a look.
via Inside Google’s Software-Defined Network – Network Computing.
Open Compute to open source high-end network switches
That said, many high-speed switches today use BSD Unix as their basis. While many say that the OCP is starting with a “clean sheet of paper”, the ultimate goal of the project seems to be to give datacenter administrators a “bare metal network switch”. I think it’s likely that BSD will lie at its heart. After all, why reinvent the wheel?
via Open Compute to open source high-end network switches | ZDNet.
Vyatta.org Community
The free community Vyatta Core software(VC) is an award-winning open source network operating system providing advanced IPv4 and IPv6 routing, stateful firewalling, IPSec and SSL OpenVPN, and more. When you add Vyatta to a standard x86 hardware system, you can create an enterprise grade network appliance that easily scales from DSL to 10Gbps. Vyatta is also optimized to run in VMware, Citrix XenServer, Xen, KVM, and Hyper V, providing networking and security services to virtual machines and cloud computing environments. Vyatta has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times, has a community of hundreds of thousands of registered users and counts dozens of fortune 500 businesses among its commercial customers.
via Welcome to Vyatta.org | Vyatta.org Community.
On this site, you’ll find all the downloads, tools, documentation, and community resources to help you get up and running with your own Vyatta-based system. Ask questions in the Forums. Propose new features and vote on existing proposals. Participate and have fun. We have been working together with our community for over five years to continue to enhance the world’s leading software-based network OS.
Passive OS Fingerprinting
Active measures, like those employed by Nmap, are unfortunately not available when doing passive analysis of live traffic or when analyzing previously captured network traffic. Passive analysis requires much more subtle variations in the network traffic to be observed, in order to identify a computer’s OS. A simple but effective passive method is to inspect the initial Time To Live (TTL) in the IP header and the TCP window size (the size of the receive window) of the first packet in a TCP session, i.e. the SYN or SYN+ACK packet.
BT Retail Tests Controversial Carrier Grade NAT IP Address Sharing
The technique has been criticised because it imposes certain limits on users by virtue of the fact that their broadband connection no longer has the use of a fixed unique IP address, but is rather sharing an address with other users – in BT’s trial, up to nine other users. This means, for instance, that users can’t serve content to the wider Internet from servers on their home network; and BT admits that it can also affect activities such as online gaming and dynamic DNS services.
via BT Retail Tests Controversial Carrier Grade NAT IP Address Sharing.
Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet For Over Two Years
The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.
via Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet For Over Two Years | MIT Technology Review.
That may sound limiting but it still allows each node to send a one-time pad to the hub which it then uses to communicate securely over a classical link. The hub can then route this message to another node using another one time pad that it has set up with this second node. So the entire network is secure, provided that the central hub is also secure.