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Category Archives for "Networking"

Firewall Ruleset Automation with CI Pipeline

One of my readers sent me a description of their automation system that manages firewall rulesets on Fortigate firewalls using NAPALM to manage device configurations.

In his own words:

We are now managing thousands of address objects, services and firewall policies using David Barroso’s FortiOS Napalm module. This works very well and with a few caveats (such as finding a way to enforce the ordering of firewall policies) we are able to manage all the configuration of our firewalls from a single Ansible playbook.

The did the right thing and implemented an abstracted data model using GitOps to manage it:

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No Time Like the Present for Network Automation

The time has come for IT to once again dive into the world of homegrown automation for running their networks.

Network teams have a love/hate relationship with automation, and have had for decades. Time after time, they have tentatively extended the reach of automation, working with everything from PERL scripts, CLIs, and screen scrapes to Python and proper APIs in an effort to reduce the tedium of managing the enterprise campus, WAN, and data center networks. When network teams find ways to waste less time on rote work, they make IT more responsive.

Time after time, though, something goes wrong with the cobbled together systems. Soon, rolling back and correcting mistakes or nursing along the automation as platforms and environments evolve takes more time and effort than is ultimately saved by using it. IT folks pull back and wait for better circumstances, tools, and platforms. Eventually they get some of what they want via new consoles and management tools that hide within them some of the automation IT sought. Then the cycle starts up anew.

Now, the confluence of several trends in IT has made it clear that it is automation time again. First and foremost, the focus on digital Continue reading

Blending into software infrastructure


Electronic networks existed long before electronic compute and storage.   Early on, the network was simple wires and switch boards, and the endpoints were humans.  Telegraphs transcoded taps into on/off voltage on the wire and back to audible clicks.   Telephones transcoded voice into amplitude modulated voltage and back to voice. 

Since then, the network has existed as a unique entity apart from the things it connected.  Until now.  

Less than two decades ago most applications were built in vertical silos.  Each application got its own servers, storage, database and so on.  The only thing applications shared was the network.  The network was the closest thing to a shared resource pool — the original “cloud”.  With increasing digital transformation, other services were also pooled, such as storage and database.  However each application interfaced with these pooled resources and with other applications directly.  Applications had little in common other than Continue reading

Upgrading Cloud Infrastructure Made Easier and Safer Using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

Upgrading Cloud Infrastructure Made Easier and Safer Using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

This is a guest post by Ben Chartrand, who is a Development Manager at Timely. You can check out some of Ben's other Workers projects on his GitHub and his blog.

At Timely we started a project to migrate our web applications from legacy Azure services to a modern PaaS offering. In theory it meant no code changes.

We decided to start with our webhooks. All our endpoints can be grouped into four categories:

  1. Integration with internal tools i.e. HelpScout, monitoring endpoint for PagerDuty
  2. Payment confirmations
  3. Calendar integrations i.e. Google Calendar
  4. SMS confirmations

Despite their limited number, these are vitally important. We did a lot of testing but it was clear we’d only really know if everything was working once we had production traffic. How could we migrate traffic?

Option 1

Change the CNAME to point to the new hosting infrastructure. This is high risk. DNS takes time to propagate so, if we needed to roll back, it would take time. We would also be shifting over everything at once.

Option 2

Use a traffic manager to shift a percentage of traffic using Cloudflare Load Balancing. We could start at, say, 5% traffic to the new infrastructure Continue reading

Intel announces new data center processors and more

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) may seem like an odd place to announce server processors, but Intel knows full well the eyes of the tech world are on the show. And what better place to corral a bunch of journalists?First up was shipment of the new Xeon Scalable CPU, code-named Cascade Lake, featuring improved artificial intelligence (AI) and memory capabilities. Cascade Lake is the first to feature support to the company's Optane DC persistent memory and instruction set, called DL Boost, to facilitate AI-based deep learning (DL) inference.Optane memory goes in the memory slots and has the persistence of flash but better performance. Think of it as a cache between the SSD and the main memory. It will also support multiple terabytes of memory per socket.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel announces new data center processors and more

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) may seem like an odd place to announce server processors, but Intel knows full well the eyes of the tech world are on the show. And what better place to corral a bunch of journalists?First up was shipment of the new Xeon Scalable CPU, code-named Cascade Lake, featuring improved artificial intelligence (AI) and memory capabilities. Cascade Lake is the first to feature support to the company's Optane DC persistent memory and instruction set, called DL Boost, to facilitate AI-based deep learning (DL) inference.Optane memory goes in the memory slots and has the persistence of flash but better performance. Think of it as a cache between the SSD and the main memory. It will also support multiple terabytes of memory per socket.To read this article in full, please click here

Geo IP Databases are Highly Inaccurate

Lots of network monitoring platforms use GeoIP databases to track/monitor sources. These databases are, perhaps, 75% accurate (for some definition of accurate). This is your regular reminder to have a sense of caution about location based on public IP address. John S. and his mother Ann live in the house, which is in Pretoria, the […]

The post Geo IP Databases are Highly Inaccurate appeared first on EtherealMind.

How edge computing can help secure the IoT

Data created by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors must be secured better, say some. A simple password-on-device solution is no longer sufficient thanks to increasing data protection regulations, a new public awareness of tracking, and hugely proliferating devices. A new kind of architecture using Security Agents should be aggressively built into local routers and networks to handle IoT security and computation rather than offloading the number-crunching to a data center or the cloud, or indeed trying to perform it on the resource-limited IoT device, IEEE researchers say. In other words, IoT security should be handled at the network level rather than device for best results.To read this article in full, please click here

How edge computing can help secure the IoT

Data created by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors must be secured better, say some. A simple password-on-device solution is no longer sufficient thanks to increasing data protection regulations, a new public awareness of tracking, and hugely proliferating devices. A new kind of architecture using Security Agents should be aggressively built into local routers and networks to handle IoT security and computation rather than offloading the number-crunching to a data center or the cloud, or indeed trying to perform it on the resource-limited IoT device, IEEE researchers say. In other words, IoT security should be handled at the network level rather than device for best results.To read this article in full, please click here

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