The Network Break returns for another week of news and views on the event in the infrastructure business.

Links

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Design Guide – Cisco

The Cisco ACI software development team is guided by the following principles:

• Agile development
• Release early and release often

The user deploying Cisco ACI will most likely adopt them too because with Cisco ACI organizations can create and decommission networks in real time.

Using a Decoder Ring:

• release early = limited testing, bugs are likely, expect them
• release often = upgrade often, impacts on business will discovered as you go

Is this a risky

Support for old versions of Internet Explorer to be dropped in 2016 | Ars Technica

Once the new policy takes effect, Windows Vista and Server 2008 users must use Internet Explorer 9, and Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 users must use Internet Explorer 11. Windows Server 2012 users must use Internet Explorer 10, while Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 users must have Internet Explorer 11.

Microsoft brings some sanity to supporting insecure, unreliable software.

Old IE browsers perfrom badly. While they are good for IT they are bad for users who blame Microsoft for poor quality products. Legacy compatibility has real consequences in the Internet

Massive Bitcoin heist sees hacker divert traffic from 19 ISPs (Wired UK)

That BGP hijack allowed the hacker to redirect the miners’ computers to a malicious server controlled by the hijacker. From that server, the hacker sent the mining machines a “reconnect” command that changed the mining computers’ configuration to contribute their processing power to a pool that stockpiled the bitcoins they produced rather paying them out to the mining pool’s participants. “Some people are more attentive to their mining rigs than others,” says Joe Stewart, a Dell researcher whose own computers were caught up in one victimised mining pool.  “Many users didn’t check their setups for weeks, and they were doing all this work on behalf of the hijacker.”

BGP hijacking for profit remains a major issue.

Real World to SDN Vendors: Give Us a Break, Already | IT Connection Blogs

Apparently, no one does, yet every vendor in the industry is scrambling to present a cohesive SDN strategy, in part because the absence of one is starting to become some sort of death warrant. I do not completely agree with all the buzz about the importance of SDN, but I do know that I have yet to hear from a network admin who lies awake at night fretting about his lack of an SDN solution when it is far more common to fret about getting that dreaded, 4:00 AM support call a delight that SDN does not particularly promise to eradicate. For SDN to start making real inroads in the enterprise, network vendors need to find a way to articulate the value proposition of SDN far more clearly for environments where the benefits may not be readily apparent and to the people who keep things running.

SDN is not for the enterprise but the enterprise will use it. SDN starts with carriers and now needed by cloud providers. The Enterprise has no impact, leadership or input on SDN products because there is no money on the short term because they are moving too slow.

Blame The System Not The People – EtherealMind – don’t blame the people in Enterprise systems, blame the systems that are forced onto them.

On Foxholes and Corporate Silos

Getting in the same foxhole Leaders in companies that have silos should work to create opportunities for multiple teams to climb into the same foxhole together. At startups, this is frequently a big early customer or a product launch. At larger companies, you can manufacture these foxholes with larger initiatives around customer satisfaction or transformational changes. The key is creating opportunities where success is dependent on multiple teams.

Intrusion Prevention System for home computer networks — I feel two ways about this. On one hand, protecting the home computer network is important. On the other, IPS has proven very troublesome for enterprise networks, and I wonder how well something like this will work for the home market.