On this episode of Datanauts, we chat with Brandon Olin, the creator of PoshBot, a PowerShell based chatbot for ops teams. What does PoshBot do? How was PoshBot built? How do chatbots impact Brandon’s delivery model?

ChatBots?

Bots have been around for a long time. They re really handy, too, often being able to answer simple questions by submitting a special command that has some sort of prefix or identifier associated with them. Especially if you re on Twitch and want to know how long your favorite streamer has been online.

Maybe that isn t the most helpful thing in the world, but what if we changed the narrative to be all about operations and how talking to a bot (with your peers watching) could actually up-level your day-to-day enjoyment of IT?

That’s our conversation today.

What is PoshBot?

PoshBot is a chat bot written in PowerShell. It makes extensive use of classes introduced in PowerShell 5.0. PowerShell modules are loaded into PoshBot and instantly become available as bot commands. PoshBot currently supports connecting to Slack to provide you with awesome ChatOps goodness.

For More Information About PoshBot

• PoshBot on GitHub, Home of the PoshBot Project
  https://github.com/poshbotio
• PoshBot Continue reading

Take a Network Break! Security researchers are tracking the VPNFilter malware, which has infected an estimated 500,000 devices, GDPR regulations have gone into effect, and the OpenStack Summit debuts a new project called Airship.

Startup Lumina Networks bags $10 million in funding from Verizon, AT&T, and others; Pica8 releases PicaPilot for network fabric orchestration; and Huawei wins “Supplier of the Decade” from Vodaphone.

HPE released its quarterly earnings and warned of challenges for the second half of the year, and Amazon’s Echo unexpectedly recorded and sent a couple’s conversations.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor message, and stay tuned for a Coffee Talk with Silver Peak.

Sponsor: Cisco Systems

Find out how Cisco and its trusted partners Equilibrium Security and ePlus/IGX can help your organization tackle the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Tune into Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode 147 to get practical insights on how to get your arms around these wide-ranging rules.

Coffee Talk: Silver Peak and Solis Mammography

On today’s Coffee Talk conversation we discuss SD-WAN with Solis Mammography and how its Silver Peak SD-WAN deployment helped the company streamline the movement of about a petabyte of imaging data efficiently and security.

Show Links:

Continue reading

The Internet is a network of networks. Where do each of these networks meet to form the global Internet? At Internet Exchange Points or IXPs. In North America, these IXPs are also known as network access points, or NAPs.

Over the years, connecting to a NAP has become increasingly crucial for service providers to get right because of the sheer volume of traffic the Internet carries these days (Hello, Netflix!), the complexity of service provider peering agreements, and endless troubles with security threats.

Joining us today to discuss how to better plan, design, operate, and secure peering is our sponsor Cisco. Our guests from Cisco are Phil Bedard, Service Provider TME; and Bruce McDougall, Consulting Systems Engineer.

We discuss the evolution of Internet traffic flow and interconnection, how peering designs among service providers have changed, the role of telemetry and data, and peering security issues.

Show Links:

BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) – IETF

Internet Edge Peering – Current Practice – GitHub

BGP Operations and Security – IETF

Observing BGP activity with BGP Monitoring Protocol – Cisco

Streaming Network Analytics System (SNAS) – snas.io

The Death of Transit And Beyond – Geoff Huston (PDF)

Eyeball network – Wikipedia

It turns out you can t do it all in the cloud. And thus, we have the rise of edge computing, in which data is collected, processed, and analyzed close to the source of its creation and close to where people and systems need it.

The goals of edge computing include improving performance, reducing the costs and time of data transmission, and creating new applications to take advantage of that data.

Our guide to edge computing is Alex Marcham. Alex is a technologist, writer and researcher. You can find his work at NetworkArchitecture2020.com.

We level-set with a working definition of edge computing, examine the notion of locality and what it means for edge computing, and discuss latency issues.

We explore edge computing use cases such as industrial processes and video surveillance, and dive into the infrastructure that drives this technology.

Show Links:

Network Architecture 2020

Alex Marcham on Twitter

Take a Network Break! In this week’s episode we examine why HPE acquired Plexxi, dig into the latest batch of security advisories from Cisco, and discuss Intel’s reference architecture for new uCPE gear.

The Appropriations Committee in the U.S. Congress wants to keep up sanctions pressure against ZTE, AWS adds Verizon as a customer, and a new DDoS attack technique looks to thwart a common filter.

Toshiba clears its last hurdle to sell is semiconductor business, Cisco posts a positive third quarter, and Symantec announces an internal audit into its financial results.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can smoothly migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Sponsor: Cisco Systems

Find out how Cisco and its trusted partners Equilibrium Security and ePlus/IGX can help your organization tackle the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Tune into Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode 147 to get practical insights on how to get your arms around these wide-ranging rules.

Show Links:

HPE Acquires Plexxi For HCI, Continue reading

Today on the Packet Pushers Weekly show, we investigate how to monitor hybrid and SD-WAN.

If your WAN looks like a mix of legacy MPLS, SD-WAN, and uplinks to cloud, this is your show. Our sponsor today is LiveAction, who is going to shine a light on the hybrid and SD-WAN through monitoring and automation.

Our guest is John Smith, Founder, CTO and EVP of LiveAction.

We talk about LiveAction’s software and how it works, why it’s essential to have visibility into your hybrid WAN and SD-WAN, and how LiveAction can provide highly visual and intuitive insights and actionable intelligence for day-to-day operations, troubleshooting, and long-term planning.

Show Links:

LiveAction’s Packet Pushers Resources – LiveAction

LiveAction on Facebook

LiveAction on Twitter

LiveAction on LinkedIn

LiveAction on YouTube

LiveAction on Google+

The Datanauts travel to a galaxy of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The good ship InfoSight is piloted by sponsor HPE Nimble Storage as we explore automating infrastructure on today s episode.

Our guest is Ryan Brown, Enterprise Storage Architect and Chief Technologist for Storage in Canada at HPE.

We talk about InfoSight, HPE’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform that works with HPE’s Nimble Storage arrays, and soon to work with other products from HPE. InfoSight applies machine learning and AI to help customers better manage storage resources and predict problems before they affect the business.

We look at the kind of information that InfoSight gathers, how it collects that information and ships it to the cloud, and how it’s protected.

We also delve into the value that InfoSight can provide for resource allocation and operational benefits such as preventing outages, maintaining uptime, and improving performance.

Show Links:

HPE InfoSight

HPE InfoSight at Tech Field Day

Take a Network Break! Arista challenges Cisco in the campus with a new a new core switch, Qualcomm is reportedly considering backing away from data center server processors, and a security survey shows woeful patching habits.

Another security survey reveals that three quarters of respondents have been breached at least once in 2017, Apple abandons a planned data center site in Ireland, and ZTE halts major operations because of a US export ban on parts and software from American companies.

Finally, Google acquires cloud onboarding startup VeloStrata, while Google’s Duplex voice assistant raises hackles.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor messages.

Sponsor: InterOptic

InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.

Sponsor: Cisco Systems

Find out how Cisco and its trusted partners Equilibrium Security and ePlus/IGX can help your organization tackle the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Tune into Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode 147 to get practical insights on how to get your arms around these wide-ranging rules.

Coffee Continue reading

Today on the Weekly show, MPLS in the enterprise, especially for the use case of segmentation.

Should you do it? Why would you do it? Considering the equipment you ve got, could you do it even if you wanted to? And even if you should, you would, and you can, what about all those other people you work with?

Discussing this emotionally fraught topic of MPLS in the enterprise is Tom Ammon, a senior network engineer who s supported it in a few different environments. He blogs at blog.tomammon.net.

We start by discussing the general case for MPLS in the enterprise, walk through the hardware and software requirements necessary to support MPLS, and then drill into segmentation more specifically.

We also look at reasons why you’d want to use MPLS for segmentation, and explores issues around operations, skillsets and training, and troubleshooting.

In January 2018, the WiFi Alliance announced that WPA3 was coming this year, a collection of security enhancements to address issues with WPA2.

Today, we discuss WPA3 with Dan Harkins, a scientist at Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. Dan has been closely involved with WPA3 s development, and I heard Dan present on his work at Aruba Atmosphere 2018 in March of this year.

Dan was kind enough to join us today for a preview of what s coming, with a special focus on one aspect of WPA3 that interests me personally, Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE).

We also discuss the fixes that WPA3 makes to WPA2, and when we can anticipate product support.

Sponsor: Paessler AG

Paessler AG is the maker of PRTG Network Monitor. PRTG monitors your whole IT infrastructure 24/7 and alerts you to problems before users even notice. Find out more about the monitoring software that helps system administrators work smarter, faster, better. Visit paessler.com today.

Show Links:

Wi-Fi Alliance® introduces security enhancements – Wi-Fi Alliance

Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (RFC 8110) – IETF

Dragonfly Key Exchange (RFC 7664) – IETF