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Category Archives for "Networking"

A Makefile for your Go project (2019)

My most loathed feature of Go was the mandatory use of GOPATH: I do not want to put my own code next to its dependencies. I was not alone and people devised tools or crafted their own Makefile to avoid organizing their code around GOPATH.

Hopefully, since Go 1.11, it is possible to use Go’s modules to manage dependencies without relying on GOPATH. First, you need to convert your project to a module:1

$ go mod init hellogopher
go: creating new go.mod: module hellogopher
$ cat go.mod
module hellogopher

Then, you can invoke the usual commands, like go build or go test. The go command resolves imports by using versions listed in go.mod. When it runs into an import of a package not present in go.mod, it automatically looks up the module containing that package using the latest version and adds it.

$ go test ./...
go: finding github.com/spf13/cobra v0.0.5
go: downloading github.com/spf13/cobra v0.0.5
?       hellogopher     [no test files]
?       hellogopher/cmd [no test files]
ok      hellogopher/hello       0.001s
$ cat go.mod
module hellogopher

require github.com/spf13/cobra v0.0.5

If you want a specific version, you can Continue reading

Sustainable Python scripts

Python is a great language to write a standalone script. Getting to the result can be a matter of a dozen to a few hundred lines of code and, moments later, you can forget about it and focus on your next task.

Six months later, a co-worker asks you why the script fails and you don’t have a clue: no documentation, hard-coded parameters, nothing logged during the execution and no sensible tests to figure out what may go wrong.

Turning a “quick-and-dirty” Python script into a sustainable version, which will be easy to use, understand and support by your co-workers and your future self, only takes some moderate effort. As an illustration, let’s start from the following script solving the classic Fizz-Buzz test:

import sys
for n in range(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2])):
    if n % 3 == 0 and n % 5 == 0:
        print("fizzbuzz")
    elif n % 3 == 0:
        print("fizz")
    elif n % 5 == 0:
        print("buzz")
    else:
        print(n)

Documentation​

I find useful to write documentation before coding: Continue reading

Rant: Some Internet Service Providers Should Really Know Better…

I was listening to a nice podcast with Nick Buraglio discussing the recent BGP hijack SNAFU impacting Cloudflare (and their reaction) and while I usually totally agree with Nick, I think that he tried to be way too nice when saying (paraphrasing) “I think Cloudflare was a bit harsh - I would prefer a more community-oriented approach along the lines of how could we help you do your job better”

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RightsCon 2019: Human Rights in the Digital Age

Since its creation in 2011, RightsCon has gathered people from different sectors to discuss human rights in the digital age. It started as an event with a few hundred experts, but has become a major conference, with nearly 3000 participants in 2019. The 2019 program consisted of 17 tracks focusing on major issues, which totalized more than 450 sessions held in a period of four days.

As the conference started to attract a wider group of people, it adopted a series of measures to increase its diversity. The recent host countries, including Tunisia and Costa Rica, reflect the worldwide nature of the event, which now gathers individuals from all over the globe.

RightsCon has also gathered a considerable number of young people. They’ve had the opportunity to connect not only through regular conference activities, but during a summit on Day Zero. The summit aimed to engage youth and also brief them on the discussions taking place during the  rest of RightsCon.

The sessions at RightsCon were designed with different formats, which was reflected in the physical structure of the meeting rooms. They were organized not just in an audience format, but also roundtables, allowing for people to feel equal footing Continue reading

10x Engineers – Don’t Believe The Hype

The idea of a 10x engineer is just too good to be true. In this Short Take I take a look at the recent controversy and share my thoughts about the twitter thread that sparked it all. Here’s a hint, there’s no such thing as a 10x engineer but there are some things to be learned from what the author had to say.

Jordan Martin
Host

The post 10x Engineers – Don’t Believe The Hype appeared first on Network Collective.

Ansible + ServiceNow Part 2: Parsing facts from network devices using PyATS/Genie

blog_ansible-and-service-now-part2

This blog is part two in a series covering how Red Hat Ansible Automation can integrate with ticket automation. This time we’ll cover dynamically adding a set of network facts from your switches and routers and into your ServiceNow tickets. If you missed Part 1 of this blog series, you can refer to it via the following link: Ansible + ServiceNow Part 1: Opening and Closing Tickets.

Suppose there was a certain network operating system software version that contained an issue you knew was always causing problems and making your uptime SLA suffer. How could you convince your management to finance an upgrade project? How could you justify to them that the fix would be well worth the cost? Better yet, how would you even know?

A great start would be having metrics that you could track. The ability to data mine against your tickets would prove just how many tickets were involved with hardware running that buggy software version. In this blog, I’ll show you how to automate adding a set of facts to all of your tickets going forward. Indisputable facts can then be pulled directly from the device with no chance of mistakes or accidentally being overlooked Continue reading

Securing infrastructure at scale with Cloudflare Access

Securing infrastructure at scale with Cloudflare Access

I rarely have to deal with the hassle of using a corporate VPN and I hope it remains this way. As a new member of the Cloudflare team, that seems possible. Coworkers who joined a few years ago did not have that same luck. They had to use a VPN to get any work done. What changed?

Cloudflare released Access, and now we’re able to do our work without ever needing a VPN again. Access is a way to control access to your internal applications and infrastructure. Today, we’re releasing a new feature to help you replace your VPN by deploying Access at an even greater scale.

Access in an instant

Access replaces a corporate VPN by evaluating every request made to a resource secured behind Access. Administrators can make web applications, remote desktops, and physical servers available at dedicated URLs, configured as DNS records in Cloudflare. These tools are protected via access policies, set by the account owner, so that only authenticated users can access those resources. These end users are able to be authenticated over both HTTPS and SSH requests. They’re prompted to login with their SSO credentials and Access redirects them to the application or server.

Continue reading

TOGAF 9 Certified

After passing more technical certification tests than I care to count, the concept of studying for a non-technical exam seemed surreal. Studying for exam that was not going to teach or test me about protocols, signals, or configurations just sounded so foreign. I do have to admit that there were doubts, the thought of studying […]

Worst DNS attacks and how to mitigate them

The Domain Name System remains under constant attack, and there seems to be no end in sight as threats grow increasingly sophisticated.DNS, known as the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between familiar names and the numbers computers need to access a website or send an email. While DNS has long been the target of assailants looking to steal all manner of corporate and private information, the threats in the past year or so indicate a worsening of the situation.To read this article in full, please click here

Worst DNS attacks and how to mitigate them

The Domain Name System remains under constant attack, and there seems to be no end in sight as threats grow increasingly sophisticated.DNS, known as the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between familiar names and the numbers computers need to access a website or send an email. While DNS has long been the target of assailants looking to steal all manner of corporate and private information, the threats in the past year or so indicate a worsening of the situation.To read this article in full, please click here

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