17. July 2011 by admin.

www.sanjaysays.comIt seems Cisco is back with vengeance and focusing vigorously on their core routing and switching technology. They are releasing VNET on ASR 1K platform. They are set to introduce OTV on Cat6K and it seems OTV will be on the roadmap for ASR.It will be awesome if Cisco decouples their IOS from their hardware platforms and makes it available for some hypervisors like ESXi or OpenStack to address Cloud markets.. Enterprise and HPC environments should still implement Cisco hardware but virtual environments should have the ability to choose the vendors for the virtual network components.The network OS market should follow the PC OS market. Like MS Windows or Linux, IOS should be compatible with any x86 based hardware. The user should have the choice to run IOS on any hypervisor on any hardware platform. But again for service-provider class services IOS-XR may be only available on Cisco hardware platform.If Cisco and Juniper open up their Network OS (IOS and JunOS) for virtualized environments (Private/Public/Hybrid clouds), there will be a healthy competition and result in more innovation in this space.

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7. September 2010 by admin.

vShield edge

• Firewall, VPN, Load Balancer, DHCP and DNS
  
• Integrated with vCloud Director and manageable through vCloud APIs

vShield App

• Hypervisor firewall
  

vShield Endpoint

• Offloading agents like AV (Now Trend Micro, MacAfee next year) from guest to hypervisor
  
   

All products are managed by vShield manager

Sometimes can be self managed by customers

Scalability benchmarking for load balancing ?

1000 tenants per vShield manager

Firewall approximately - 2 Gbps throughput per tenant

BTW this is my first post by using the Wordpress API from MS WORD 2007

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9. April 2010 by admin.

Loaded the spice server software as the VDI front end. Check back for more info…

Here is the partial specifications from the paper:

“Virtual Device Interfaces (VDI) provide a standard way to publish
interfaces of virtual devices by a software component. This enables
other software components to interact with these devices. Going
forward, the first component will be called the back-end and the second
component will be called the front-end. An example for using Virtual
Device Interfaces is as part of a virtual machine system, where the
back-end will be the hardware emulation layer. The back-end will expose
interfaces like display port, mouse input etc. The front-end will plug
into the display output and will render its output according to it's
specific implementation. The front-end will also plug into the mouse
input and send mouse events to be processed by the back-end. In
addition many other interface types can be exposed by the back-end.
Another example of back-end is a remote display system in a physical
machine environment. Here, the back-and is implemented using known
techniques for interacting with the native OS for the purpose of
receiving display updates and pushing inputs. The back-end exposes
interfaces like display output, mouse input etc. The front-end can be
exactly the same as in the previous example.

By using VDI one back-end an use many types of front-ends without any
special code modification. It is also possible for the back-end to
dynamically switch front-ends, and improve back-end usability and
flexibility. The use of front-ends by many back-ends allows for a
better sharing of development, maintenance, and overall product
quality.”

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11. January 2010 by admin.

I never expected a gripping plot. A science-fiction movie is all about CGI and FX. Oh boy! this one just blew my mind. The plot is about love, good-over-evil, sacrifices and power of nature over stampeding technology. But this movie is great because of the seemless mix of special effects with CGI.

The year is 2154 and the advanced space-faring human civilization is colonizing the planet Panodar, a moon to a gas giant Polyphemus, to mine Unobtanium. The corporation in charge, is trying to relocate the 9 feet blue-skinned natives… Anyway the plot is hackneyed but the story telling is great. So is the CGI. So last year you didn’t miss anything if you hadn;t seen Watchmen. But this movie needs to be watched.

 Also watched Shelock Holmes, the year 2010 take on Mr Holmes. The set is very authentic late 19th century London.  But Sherlock and Watson are very modern 20th century James Bond with a sidekick. But a over all good movie from Guy Ritchie - gritty like RocknRolla…

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11. January 2010 by admin.

I am a non-theist and a skeptic. I don’t want to get branded as an atheist much like I don’t want to get mistaken for a religious person. Just like religion and faith it takes one to have a fundamentalist belief system to be an atheist. I feel more comfortable being a non-theist who is a skeptic on the God question and feel more kinship with the atheists.

But I also subscribe to the view point that Religion is a by product of our evolutionary need and was crucial in our group evolution. But like appendix it has now beconme redundant and will do more harm to the human socierty than good. Reliogion has out-lived its usefulness.

More on this later.

Posted in Atheism, Religion | Print | 2 Comments »

11. January 2010 by admin.

So far, the summit sessions are very balanced. Couple of them are very technical while the others are more for informational and managerial. I enjoyed Ben Wright’s philosophical discussion around the legal framework. I agree with him that some of these privacy laws and PCI compliance as such are ridiculuous and of no practical use. I liked also the technical presentations by Chris Brenton and Rich Mogull. They rekindled my interest in doing a PoC with open source (FOSS) DLP tools before investing heavily in commercialized DLP product.

Reached New Orleans yesterday. The flight was almost 2 hours late and I missed the opening gala for the SANS alumni in Sheraton. Today is the first day of training. Looking forward for tomorrow’s presentation.

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19. March 2009 by admin.

The attack allows for privilege escalation from Ring 0 to the SMM on many recent motherboards with Intel CPUs. This particular exploit can hide itself in the SMM space when tied with a rootkit. While we are all concerned about a probable hypervisor exploit, the SMM attacks work at an even deeper hardware level of abstraction, as SMM is more privileged than a hypervisor. The Operating System cannot disable or ignore SMI calls. To disable SMM one has to disassemble the the firmware physically. Since SMI takes precedence over any OS call, an SMM rootkit is extremely stealthy. Rafal Wojtczuk released the paper explaining the exploit and the code. Now somebody has to integrate it with a hypervisor rootkit like Blue Pill or GMER. 

The paper and the code can be found at:

http://sanjaysays.com/__oneclick_uploads/2009/03/smm_cache_fun1.pdf

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18. March 2009 by admin.

Technical details: F
Support for Microsoft Hyper-V: F
Support for VMWARE: A
Support for XenServer: B
SMB usefulness: F
Green Field applicability: A
Forklift upgrade needed: A
320 blades per managed entity: A
640 sockets (2560 cores): A
192GB RAM/blade (60TB): A

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24. February 2009 by admin.

I think it is now clear or becoming clear that Cloud Computing is the next logical step in the evolution of information communication outsourcing primarily for a Web-enabled world.The entire spectrum of cloud computing covers more traditional models like managed and hosted applications to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to the emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS). Customers should be able to pay and consume infrastructure modules or applications packages as per their day-to-day needs. The major benefits are a) lower capex in this global economic downturn, b) reducing internal IT costs, c) consolidating services and IT functions. Over the next few years it seems Cloud Computing acceptance will be accelerated as a result of the credit crunch. Cloud Computing service providers should have a robust, scalable and highly performant infrastructure to play in this emerging market. I think the Managed Service Providers will move towards Open Transport where Public and Private Internets will play a major role.BT is already offering a MPLS based Private Internet service to large enterprises. Verizon is coming out with one and last I heard Equant is piloting one in Asia Pac.When combined with the public Internet transit backbone, the Private Internet services offers expanded reach of the Internet along with the privacy and security of a private network. Since the service Provider owns and operates both networks worldwide, and can offer multinational organisations a single point of contact to connect their operations anywhere in the world.Private Internet provides connection speeds ranging from 64 Kbps to 1 Gbps (higher in some locations). Customers who need to support IP-based application e-business initiatives such as customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), provide Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes services or who simply require basic data any-to-any communication, will find that Private Internet, coupled with our Managed Firewall Services and Internet Gateway Service deliver a comprehensive service that meets all of their IP network needs. Additionally, Private Internet supports remote-access services, so even dial-in locations can access a company’s secure VPN.

Posted in Misc | Print | 4 Comments »

23. February 2009 by admin.

Most stars in our observable Universe are categorized under one of the seven spectral types: O, B, A, F, G, K and M. Recently three more types have been added - W on the upper end of the temperature spectrum and R and N on the lower end.

These spectral types are further subdivided into 10 subclasses numerical 0 through 9.

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