Automating Palo Alto HA Firewall Upgrades with Ansible

Automating Palo Alto HA Firewall Upgrades with Ansible

In this blog post, we will cover upgrading Palo Alto firewalls in HA using Ansible. This only covers upgrading minor versions, so it won't work if you are going from 10.x to 11.x, for example. This also only supports an HA pair.

This playbook is based on the repo from Palo Alto itself. There are many playbooks there covering scenarios like upgrading the major version, upgrading the content, and so on, but we will only focus on one specific playbook for HA, which I tweaked a little bit to suit my own setup.

Manual Upgrade Process

Of course, this post assumes you already know how to upgrade the firewalls manually. In case you don't, here are the steps. Palo Alto also recommends upgrading the active unit first and then the passive. You download the image to the active unit and tick the box to sync it to the peer, then suspend the active unit to trigger a failover so the passive takes over. Install the image on the suspended unit, reboot it, and wait for it to come back online so the HA pair syncs again. Once it is back, suspend the current active unit (the original passive) Continue reading

TNO065: The Operational Reality of Modern Wireless Networks

Scott sits down with Wi-Fi engineer Eva Santos to explore the realities of modern wireless operations. Eva shares insights on navigating site surveys, the differences between Wi-Fi bands, and the challenges of troubleshooting inconsistent client performance. The conversation also explores the evolving standards of Wi-Fi 6, 7, and 8, the role of security protocols like... Read more »

Technology Short Take 197

Welcome to Technology Short Take 197! I’ve been traveling for business for the last week, so this Technology Short Take has a tad fewer links than I typically include. Even so, I still have links on radical new network designs, the impacts of AI on code security, things beginners get wrong about AWS IAM, and more! Let’s get into the content.

Networking

Security

Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents

Everyone's writing code with AI agents today. But the moment an agent needs to deploy something — and needs to sign up and create an account — it slams face-first into a wall built for humans: a browser-based OAuth flow, a dashboard to click through, an API token to copy-paste, a multi-factor authentication prompt to satisfy. For an interactive copilot sitting next to a developer, that's annoying. For a background agent, it's a hard stop.

Today we're rolling out Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for Agents.

Agents can now deploy websites, APIs, and agents right away, without first needing to sign up for an account.

Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.

Our goal? Let your agent code and ship.

Why frictionless deployments matter for AI agents

Frictionless temporary accounts matter more than it might first seem:

  • Background AI sessions have no human in the loop, and are becoming the norm. Any auth step that needs a browser, a copy-paste, or "click here Continue reading

Hedge 309: DNS Persist

As DNS is more widely used to distribute certificate information, proving ownership of a resource becomes more critical. The constant challenges required to prove resource ownership, however, increase delay in connecting or using a resource. DNS persists–as the name implies–creates a persistent connection between a resource and a certificate authority. Henry Birge-Lee, Michael Slaughter, and Shiloh Heurich join Russ and Tom to explain how this new record type works and it’s importance to DNS.
 

 
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Worth Reading 061926


In this post, I discuss our recent work that models and analyses the resilience of authoritative DNS infrastructure that supports individual domain names on the Internet.

 


The RIPE NCC made its all-powerful single sign-on tokens available to over 1000 third parties. From a single link click, any logged-in RIPE NCC user would leak their session token.

 


Identifying active IPv6 addresses is a challenging task, but it’s also an important one. As researchers and network operators, it helps us understand the current deployment, identify weak spots that need strengthening, and detect vulnerable devices for disclosure.

 


The fundamental bubble barometer is that speculators buy an asset because they expect the price to keep rising, not because they want the income generated by the asset. Indeed, most speculators don’t plan on holding the asset long enough receive any income.

 


Recently, there has been a surge in progress in quantum computing that has shortened the hypothetical timeline on which quantum computers can ‘break’ traditional public-key cryptography that uses the RSA scheme.

Build your own vulnerability harness

A few weeks ago, we published our initial findings from Project Glasswing, looking at what happens when you point frontier security models at an enterprise codebase. We also explored how our defensive structures adapt to protect our infrastructure and customers from threats posed by frontier AI. Since then, the AI ecosystem has continued to shift rapidly — developers who've built tightly around a single model have already experienced what happens when that model is no longer available or gets superseded by a more capable one. These market shifts only reinforce our core thesis: no matter which underlying model is leading the pack on any given day, the future of agentic workflows will not be found in standalone models, prompts, or single-agent sessions.

Moving from a localized security "skill" to a continuous, fleet-wide scanning pipeline requires an architecture where models are treated as interchangeable components. Relying on a single model inherently limits defensive coverage, as the same system will tend to look at code paths through the exact same lens. To counter this, models should be frequently interchanged and cross-tested. By varying the models across the pipeline — such as using one model for initial discovery and an entirely different Continue reading

How Lynx Works: A Technical Walkthrough

We launched Lynx this week. Instead of restating the pitch, I want to explain how it’s built and why we made the architectural choices we did. If you run Kubernetes and you’re starting to put AI agents on it, this is roughly the system you’d end up designing yourself.

Lynx is a control and data plane for all agentic AI traffic, providing a registry, gateway, audit, authentication with token exchange, policy enforcement, agent sandboxing, shadow agent discovery, and advanced AI capabilities such as red team agent and a guardian supervising agent to keep your agents on track. Lynx is single control point in the path of every agent call – agent-to-agent, agent-to-MCP, agent-to-LLM. Every call is authenticated, authorized against policy, and recorded, with no changes to agent code.

The constraints we started from

Four principles shaped the design:

  1. No agent code changes. Governance has to be applied by the platform, not adopted as a library. If it requires a code change, it won’t land uniformly – and uniformity is the entire point.
  2. No new database in the control plane. The source of truth is the Kubernetes API server and the data model is custom resources – there’s no separate datastore Continue reading

Celebrating 12 years of Project Galileo

Twelve years ago this month, Cloudflare launched an ambitious project built on a simple idea: people shouldn’t be knocked offline just because someone more powerful disagrees with them. Today, Project Galileo provides free access to cybersecurity services to more than 3,400 websites belonging to journalists, human rights defenders, and other nonprofit organizations in 120 countries. We continue to believe that a better Internet is one where anyone with an idea can reach a global audience. 

Each year on the anniversary of Project Galileo, we announce new products, programs, and strategic partnerships. To celebrate our 12th anniversary this year, we’re publishing our first comprehensive report on cyberattacks targeting civil society, releasing case studies that explore the security needs of 16 Project Galileo participants, and announcing new project partners.

Introducing a new annual report on cyberattacks against global civil society

Because Project Galileo now includes 3,400 domains belonging to organizations in over 120 countries, Cloudflare has access to unique data regarding the cyber threats, attacks, and trends targeting civil society — a critical pillar of global democracy. In addition, because the Cloudflare network spans more than 335 cities in 125 countries and more than 20% of the web sits behind it, Continue reading

Initial Setup of Catalyst SDWAN Controllers

It’s been a while since I did an on-premises installation of the Catalyst SDWAN controllers and as I recently had to go through the process, I thought I would document it and post it here for people that want to build their own lab.

The first thing that happens after booting the Manager is that you need to login with admin/admin and then set a new password:

vmanage login: Admin
Password:
Welcome to Viptela CLI
admin connected from 127.0.0.1 using console on vmanage
You must set an initial admin password different from default password.
Password:
Re-enter password:

After that we must select the persona (what services the Manager should run). For a non-cluster install it’s going to be both COMPUTE and DATA:

1) COMPUTE_AND_DATA
2) DATA
3) COMPUTE
Select persona for vManage [1, 2 or 3]:

Select 1.

You will be asked to confirm:

You chose persona COMPUTE_AND_DATA (1)
Are you sure? [y/n]

Type y.

You will then be asked what storage device to be used (you need a secondary disk):

vManage has been deployed with persona : {"persona": "COMPUTE_AND_DATA"}
Available storage devices:
sdb      100GB
1) sdb
Select storage device to use:

Here I’ll select 1.

Continue reading

I fixed shell pipes

In a previous post I made pipes in unix shells more reliable. Well, it had some drawbacks. I’ll summarize the problem, the failed previous version, and then show the new and improved one.

Problem summary

Downstream processes in a unix shell pipe cannot know if the upstream finished successfully, or exited with an error. This means that it can’t know if it should “commit” the data it received.

Example uses:

$ pg_dumpall | xz -9 | google_cloud_storage_upload gs://bucket/path/postgres.dump
$ generate_data | psql --single-transaction

In both of these cases you want the right hand side to STOP, and not finalize the upload or commit the transaction.

The previous version

$ goodpipe <<EOF
[
  ["gsutil", "cat", "gs://example/input-unsorted.txt"],
  ["sort", "-S300M", "-n"],
  ["gzip", "-9"],
  ["gsutil", "cp", "-", "gs://example/input-sorted-numerically.txt.gz"]
]
EOF

This works fine for simple cases, but doesn’t support tee or per-command environment variables very well.

And I don’t want to invent a complex language, so my replacement took a different path.

wp — Wrap Pipe

wp on github.

wp instead wraps the input and/or output with a very minimal encapsulating protocol. This allows normal data to pass through, but still allows the downstream to get EOF as metadata.

If Continue reading

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