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We returned to record our twelfth episode on Sunday September 18, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

• Cloud Field Day – September 14 – 15 by Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth
• The power of protocol analyzers by Brian Hill
• iPhone 7, iOS 10, Samsung Note 7 recall, Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Bash shell)
• You can hail a self-driving Uber in Pittsburgh starting today by Nathan Ingraham
• have i been pwned?
  Another 6.6 million accounts have been leaked from ClixSense
• DEF CON
  The results from this year’s IoT hacking contest are in and it’s not a pretty picture by Lucian Constantin – “47 new vulnerabilities affecting 23 devices from 21 manufacturers were disclosed during the IoT security talks, workshops and onsite hacking contests.”
• Flea Market find: Hacking Bible from the Chaos Computer Club 1998

Roundtable Discussion – Fiber and Twisted Pair Cabling Plant

Cable plant considerations when upgrading network.

Fiber

If you are considering upgrading your network make sure you check the specs on your fiber plant. If you are already running 1Gbps you might not be able to run 10Gbps. There’s a big difference between a grey, orange (OM1 62.5um MM), aqua/blue (OM3 50um MM) , pink (OM4 MM) and yellow (Single Mode) fiber patch cables.

Examples;

• Client was trying to replace ATM OC-3 links with 1Gbps links over 62.5um OM1 multi-mode
• Client was trying to run 10GEBase-LR over 62.5um multi-mode which was over 1100ft in distance.

There are ‘newer’ workarounds available including mode conditioning patch cables and LRM transceivers that allow long haul optics to function over legacy OM1 fiber plants.

Connectors: ST, SC , LC, MTRJ, E2000, MPO

Copper

The same caveat applies to legacy UTP (unshielded twisted pair) wiring.
You only need 4 wires to run 100Mbps.
You need all 8 wires to run 1Gbps.

Example;

• Client complained that desktops were only running at 100Mbps and not 1Gbps, eventually found that cable plant only had been wired for 4-wire and not 8-wire.

LED cables

What tools are you using?

Differentiating Application Performance vs Network Performance Issues

iPerf / iPerf3 – measure bandwidth and throughput across your network infrastructure. Great tool for gathering baseline observations and then validating real-world performance.

Cheers!

References:

• 1000Base-What? by Stephen Foskett
• 10GBase-SR and Fiber Cable Plants by Michael McNamara
• 10Gbps over 62.5µm Multimode Fiber by Michael McNamara