Packetlife.net has a very nice collection of “cheat sheets” for network engineering. These are great references for things that always seem hard to remember when you need them most, like “How do I filter out the CEO’s porn browsing from the packet trace on the Internet router that I am sending to a technical support person in Mumbai? I do this so often, yet I always forget…” Check them out here: http://packetlife.net/library/cheat-sheets/
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“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”
-Margaret Fuller
A touching reminder that when knowledge is shared nothing is lost, and everyone gains.
Apple announced this week the specs for the latest iteration of their MacBook Pro line. The numbers are impressive: up to quad-core processors in the 17″ model, an option for 1680 x 1050 high-resolution graphics on the 15″ model, and a new high-speed interface dubbed “Thunderbolt”. This totally new interface is an Intel development that Apple had a lot of direct input into, and Intel have announced that Apple is expected to be the only computer manufacturer shipping the new interface until some time in 2012. The possibility of success for this new interface is generating a lot of hot debate about the viability of this new interface.
Apple has a long history of pushing interfaces that few else use. It was a developer of the Firewire interface, it tried to push DisplayPort and then Mini DisplayPort, it temporarily tried to push CardBus Express, and it even had a proprietary audio connection on some of its computers briefly that combined audio signals and power into one cable. Some of these interfaces have been total failures, and eventually quietly slipped away. Others, like USB and to a lesser extent Firewire, have been wildly popular and became industry standards after initial speculation when Apple introduced them. So the question is whether Thunderbolt will be adopted by other manufacturers, or whether its headed for eventual obscurity.
It might seem like Intel’s decision to grant Apple a full year of exclusivity might doom this interface to limited adoption, but I think this ignores a simple fact: Apple is almost always a full year ahead of the industry anyway, so really this just provides a little guarantee that they maintain their usual lead on the competition. Thunderbolt also offers real advantages to USB 3.0 and DVI, and these interfaces are starting to prove to be a bottleneck for the newest, fastest hardware, so something needs to change industry-wide.
Thunderbolt’s specs are impressive: 10 Gigabits/sec of throughput, video and data on the same path, and both copper and fiber media. I predict that this interface is going to be a winner, and if the new iPad 2 has this interface, well, it’s pretty much game over for USB 3.0.
Happy New Year. Here’s a picture of a snowman that someone built in the Grapevine (Tejon Pass in California). So far, 2011 is going great. I wish I had the time and money to go snowboarding this year, the snow is great up in Tahoe. Maybe next year, although I’m keeping my eye out for good package deals.
This Amazonian wasp is nowhere near as scary as the bugs on the Internet
The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) which manages the Domain Name System (DNS) software that practically everyone uses announced today that practically everyone’s software is vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack. This means that you can expect major interruptions to Internet services for weeks (or months) to come.
DNS is the system by which the name of a place on the Internet gets translated to the address of a place on the Internet. It’s almost exactly like looking up an address on Google Maps, a name goes in, and address comes out. All of this happens behind the scenes in your Web browser or mail client or other Internet software.
The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) software has been the vector of some of the worst attacks on the Internet ever. Major portions of the Internet have been disabled due to problems with this software. You may have heard the old adage that the Internet was designed to route around damage to itself, and this is true (thanks to the US Department of Defense being involved in the early days), but the DNS system remains a single point of failure for the general Internet at large.
If you have some places that you absolutely must have connectivity to, you can prepare yourself for the worst:
- Open up a command-line (Start->Run->”cmd” on Windows, Terminal.app on Mac, Linux users need no advice)
- Run the command “nslookup <name>”, where <name> is the hostname, such as “gmail.com”
- Write down all the IP addresses associated with the name (there may be one or more)
- When the shit hits the fan, replace the name of the site with the IP address
Do this for your most importat sites, and that should protect you from losing connectivity if something goes horribly wrong. Do note that these name-to-address mappings change frequently, so it’s not a bad idea to do this every couple of weeks.
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/706148 http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/837744 http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/510208