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Category Archives for "Networking"

Juniper iBGP

8 steps to configure iBGP. Configure a router-id Configure an autonomous system number Configure transport routing protocol Configure a BGP group and define the peer type Configure a BGP group local address Add neighbors to the peer group Define a routing policy to...continue reading

Juniper OSPFv3

3 steps to configure OSPFv3. Create a router-id (optional) Assign OSPF neighbor facing interfaces to OSPF area Inject routes into OSPF via passive interfaces Configuration Create a router-id. cmd set routing-options router-id 10.255.1.1 Assign OSPF neighbor facing...continue reading

Worth Reading: Blockchain and Trust

One of the rules of sane social media presence should be don’t ever engage with evangelists believing in a particular technology religion, more so if their funding depends on them spreading the gospel. I was called old-school networking guru from ivory tower when pointing out the drawbacks of TRILL, and clueless incompetent (in more polite words) when retweeting a tweet pointing out the realities of carbon footprint of proof-of-work technologies.

Interestingly, just a few days after that Bruce Schneier published a lengthy essay on blockchain and trust, and even the evangelists find it a bit hard to call him incompetent on security topics. Please read what he wrote every time someone comes along explaining how blockchains will save the world (or solve whatever networking problems like VTEP-to-MAC mappings).

The Week in Internet News: Researchers Develop AI Writing App but Worry about Fake News

Too easy to fake: OpenAI, a research institute in San Francisco, has developed an Artificial Intelligence program to write news articles, but has declined to release a full-featured version of it because of fears that the AI could easily produce fake news, the MIT Technology Review says. OpenAI, associated with AI skeptic Elon Musk, will make only a simplified version publicly available. The institute will publish a research paper outlining its work.

Secure your IoT: Eleven organizations, including the Internet Society and Mozilla, have asked retailers to stop selling Internet-connected devices that don’t meet minimum security and privacy requirements, Techbizweb reports. A letter from the organizations, sent to Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon, asks them to publicly endorse minimum security and privacy guidelines for Internet of Things devices.

Competing in AI: U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order meant to boost AI development in the country, The Hill reports. The order comes as some AI experts fear the U.S. is losing ground to China. Trump’s order directs federal agencies to prioritize and set aside funding for AI programs.

Broadband for all: Botetourt County in Virginia, where only about 70 percent of residents have access to Internet Continue reading

BrandPost: Edge Computing is Here to Unlock the Power of your IOT Applications

Gartner defines edge computing as “solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation,” a nice, succinct explanation of this booming technology. If you don’t need it already, you most likely will soon as it’s a key enabler of cloud-based applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and others supporting the digital transformation of business.“Organizations that have embarked on a digital business journey have realized that a more decentralized approach is required to address digital business infrastructure requirements,” says Santhosh Rao, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.”To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Edge Computing is Here to Unlock the Power of your IOT Applications

Gartner defines edge computing as “solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation,” a nice, succinct explanation of this booming technology. If you don’t need it already, you most likely will soon as it’s a key enabler of cloud-based applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and others supporting the digital transformation of business.“Organizations that have embarked on a digital business journey have realized that a more decentralized approach is required to address digital business infrastructure requirements,” says Santhosh Rao, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.”To read this article in full, please click here

Learn More about IXPs at the Middle East Network Operators Group

Internet Exchange Points are now considered to be an integral part of the Internet infrastructure worldwide. In very simple terms they are layer 2 switches that are used to route traffic that can be kept local instead of sending that traffic to the nearest major Internet node (usually located in Europe) and back. None of the countries of the Middle East contain enough globally-connected major Internet infrastructure so basically, all Internet traffic generated and terminated in the same country has to be routed through Europe. With well-implemented Internet Exchange Points, local Internet traffic stays local. Examples of local Internet traffic are financial transactions with your bank through online banking, requesting copies of your birth record from an e-government service, or any interaction with locally-hosted content.

Internet Exchange Points have three main benefits: lower latency, better cost efficiency, and control-of-traffic-sovereignty.

In the day and age of instant gratification and communications through social media and videos, latency, or the time it takes to fetch a web page, needs to be minimal and under 10ms as per industry standard (every 100km causes 1ms delay). In order to optimize the user experience, content providers have built their own global networks and spread their servers Continue reading

Introducing Cf-Terraforming

Ever since we implemented support for configuring Cloudflare via Terraform, we’ve been steadily expanding the set of features and services you can manage via this popular open-source tool.

If you're unfamiliar with how Terraform works with Cloudflare, check out our developer docs.

We are Terraform users ourselves, and we believe in the stability and reproducibility that can be achieved by defining your infrastructure as code.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to describe your infrastructure and cloud services (think virtual machines, servers, databases, network configurations, Cloudflare API resources, and more) as human-readable configurations.

Once you’ve done this, you can run the Terraform command-line tool and it will figure out the difference between your desired state and your current state, and make the API calls in the background necessary to reconcile the two.

Unlike other solutions, Terraform does not require you to run software on your hosts, and instead of spending time manually configuring machines, creating DNS records, and specifying Page Rules, you can simply run:

terraform apply

and the state described in your configuration files will be built for you.

Enter Cloudflare Terraforming

Terraform is a tremendous time-saver once you have your configuration files Continue reading

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 2: Implementing Subdomains

Recap

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 2: Implementing Subdomains

In Part 1, the merits and tradeoffs of subdirectories and subdomains were discussed.  The subdirectory strategy is typically superior to subdomains because subdomains suffer from keyword and backlink dilution.  The subdirectory strategy more effectively boosts a site's search rankings by ensuring that every keyword is attributed to the root domain instead of diluting across subdomains.

Subdirectory Strategy without the NGINX

In the first part, our friend Bob set up a hosted Ghost blog at bobtopia.coolghosthost.com that he connected to blog.bobtopia.com using a CNAME DNS record.  But what if he wanted his blog to live at bobtopia.com/blog to gain the SEO advantages of subdirectories?

A reverse proxy like NGINX is normally needed to route traffic from subdirectories to remotely hosted services.  We'll demonstrate how to implement the subdirectory strategy with Cloudflare Workers and eliminate our dependency on NGINX. (Cloudflare Workers are serverless functions that run on the Cloudflare global network.)

Back to Bobtopia

Let's write a Worker that proxies traffic from a subdirectory – bobtopia.com/blog – to a remotely hosted platform – bobtopia.coolghosthost.com.  This means that if I go to bobtopia.com/blog, I should see the content of Continue reading