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Category Archives for "Networking"

Useful links for Observium + Rancid

I recently decided that i would like to utilize Observium as well as rancid for configuration backups on my home network. To that effect, the following links really helped me out getting it all setup correctly:

https://docs.observium.org/rancid/

http://packetsandpings.blogspot.com/2013/05/installing-and-configuring-rancid.html

https://layer77.net/2016/08/10/upgrading-from-rancid-2-3-8-to-3-4-1/

Let me know if you run into anything i might help out with.

/Kim

Custom Load Balancing With Cloudflare Workers

The following is a guest post by Jayaprabhakar Kadarkarai, Developer of Codiva.io, an Online IDE used by computer science students across the world. He works full stack to deliver low latency and scalable web applications.

Have you launched your website? Getting a lot of traffic? And you are planning to add more servers? You’ll need load balancing to maintain the scalability and reliability of your website. Cloudflare offers powerful Load Balancing, but there are situations where off-the-shelf options can’t satisfy your specific needs. For those situations, you can write your own Cloudflare Worker.

In this post, we’ll learn about load balancers and how to set them up at a low cost with Cloudflare Service Workers.

This post assumes you have a basic understanding of JavaScript, as that’s the language used to write a Cloudflare Worker.

The Basic Pattern

The basic pattern starts with adding ‘fetch’ event listener to intercept the requests. You can configure which requests to intercept on the Cloudflare dashboard or using the Cloudflare API.

Then, modify the hostname of the URL and send the request to the new host.

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  var url = new URL(event.request.url);

  // https://example.com/path/  Continue reading

Network Automation Development Environments

Building the network automation lab environment seems to be one of the early showstoppers on everyone’s network automation journey. These resources might help you get started:

Hint: after setting up your environment, you might want to enroll into the Spring 2019 network automation course ;)

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Whenever you get into a conversation about exotic travel or ponder visiting the four corners of the globe, inevitably you end up discussing Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. Travelers want to experience the rich culture and vivid blue skies of Mongolia; a feature which gives the country its nickname of “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky”.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar (or Ulan Bator; but shortened to UB by many) is the capital of Mongolia and located nearly a mile above sea level just outside the Gobi Desert - a desert that spans a good percentage of Central Asia’s Mongolia. (The rest of the Gobi Desert extends into China). The country is nestled squarely between Russia to the north and China to the south. It’s also home to some of the richest and ancient customs and festivals around. It’s those festivals that successfully draw in the tourists who want to experience something quite unique. Luckily, even with all the tourists, Mongolia has managed to keep its local customs; both in the cities and within its nomadic tribes.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

via Wikipedia

History also has drawn explorers and conquerors to and from the region; but more on that later.

Cloudflare is also drawn into Mongolia

Any avid reader of Continue reading

Technology often thought of as SDN !!!

What is SDN ? SDN Definition varies  from Vendor to vendor ,commonly  the architecture of SDN defined by each vendor includes use of different technology to make  network automate, flexible, agile, dynamic ,scalable and most importantly cost effective.

I was going through Network automation article and found the different technology/trends which are some or other way often thought of  a SDN, or are important  part of SDN discussion .It’s good to go through it  :-

OpenFlow : Its low level protocol used to decouple the control plane from the data plane.

NFV Network function Virtualization: It refers to taking functions that have traditionally have been deployed as hardware ,instead deploy them as software.

Virtual Switching :They are software based  switches VDS(VMware Distributed switch ) ,AVS(cisco application virtual switch ),VSS(VMware Std. switch) etc.  that resides in hypervisor kernel providing local network connectivity b/w virtual  machines.

Network Virtualization: It refers to software-only overlay-based solution. A key characteristic of these solutions is that an overlay-based protocol such as Virtual eXtensible LAN (VxLAN) is used to build connectivity between hypervisor-based virtual switches.  This connectivity and tunneling approach provides Layer 2 adjacency between virtual machines that exist on different physical hosts independent of Continue reading

Cloudflare Access: Sharing our single-sign on plugin for Atlassian

Here at Cloudflare, we rely on a set of productivity tools built by Atlassian, including Jira and Confluence. We secure them with Cloudflare Access. In the past, when our team members wanted to reach those applications, they first logged in with our identity provider credentials to pass Access. They then broke out a second set of credentials, specific to Atlassian tools, to reach Jira. The flow is inconvenient on a desktop and downright painful on a mobile device.

While Access can determine who should be able to reach an application, the product alone cannot decide what the user should be able to do once they arrive at the destination. The application sets those specific permissions, typically by requiring another set of user credentials. The extra step slows down and frustrates end users. Access saves time by replacing a cumbersome VPN login. However, we wanted to also solve the SSO problem for our team.

We created a plugin, specific to Atlassian, that could take identity data from the token generated by Access and map it to a user account. Our team members log in with our identity provider to pass Access, and then Access could set their user permissions in Jira Continue reading

Cisco, SAP team up to ease cloud, container integration, management

Cisco today said it has teamed with SAP to make it easier for customers to manage high volumes of data from multi-cloud and distributed data center resources.The companies announced that Cisco’s Container Platform will work with SAP’s Data Hub to integrate large data sets that may be in public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, Microsoft or Google, and integrate them with private cloud or enterprise apps such as SAP S/4 HANA.[ Check out our 12 most powerful hyperconverged infrasctructure vendors. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Cisco introduced its Kubernetes-based Container Platform in January and said it allows for self-service deployment and management of container clusters. SAP rolled out the Data Hub about a year ago, saying it provides visibility, orchestration and access to a broad range of data systems and assets while enabling the fast creation of powerful, organization-spanning data pipelines.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco, SAP team up to ease cloud, container integration, management

Cisco today said it has teamed with SAP to make it easier for customers to manage high volumes of data from multi-cloud and distributed data center resources.The companies announced that Cisco’s Container Platform will work with SAP’s Data Hub to integrate large data sets that may be in public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, Microsoft or Google, and integrate them with private cloud or enterprise apps such as SAP S/4 HANA.[ Check out our 12 most powerful hyperconverged infrasctructure vendors. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Cisco introduced its Kubernetes-based Container Platform in January and said it allows for self-service deployment and management of container clusters. SAP rolled out the Data Hub about a year ago, saying it provides visibility, orchestration and access to a broad range of data systems and assets while enabling the fast creation of powerful, organization-spanning data pipelines.To read this article in full, please click here