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Category Archives for "Networking"

Get Familiar with Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics

An attendee of my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course asked me what the best learning path might be for a total (data center) beginner that has to design and install a small leaf-and-spine fabric in a near future.

This blog post was written for ipSpace.net subscribers who want to get the most out of ipSpace.net content. If you’re only interested in free stuff, you might feel it’s a waste of your time. You’ve been warned ;)

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Why I’m Joining Cloudflare

Why I'm Joining Cloudflare

I love working as a Chief Security Officer because every day centers around building something that makes people safer. Back in 2002, as I considered leaving my role as a cybercrime federal prosecutor to work in tech on e-commerce trust and safety, a mentor told me, “You have two rewarding but very different paths: you can prosecute one bad actor at a time, or you can try to build solutions that take away many bad actors' ability to do harm at all.” And while each is rewarding in its own way, my best days are those where I get to see harm prevented—at Internet scale.

Why I'm Joining Cloudflare

In 2016, while traveling the United States to conduct hearings on the condition of Internet security as a member of President Obama's cyber commission, my co-commissioners noticed I had fallen into a pattern of asking the same question of every panelist: “Who is responsible for building a safer online environment where small businesses can set up shop without fear?” We heard many answers that all led to the same “not a through street” conclusion: Most law enforcement agencies extend their jurisdiction online, but there are no digital equivalents to the Department of Continue reading

Dismantling Cisco’s Conservation of Complexity Gambit

From the very beginning, Cisco Systems tightly embraced the use of complexity as a market differentiator. Creating a complicated CLI to configure networking gear instead of a relatively simple GUI – Wellfleet’s choice — was an early move down this path.   The next cab off this particular rank was the creation of the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) program in the early 1990’s, which, in full disclosure, I had a hand in developing back in the day.  This program was explicitly designed to be as difficult and complicated as possible – mirroring the products themselves – so that a CCIE “diploma” on a cubicle wall would be considered a badge of honor and give bragging rights to its owner.  And, with something like 3-1/2-million CCIEs out there today, this particular bit of planned complexity was clearly a winner.

The inherent irony in all of this is that ante-Cisco life in networking was quite a simple place, really. (Show of hands anyone who remembers the two top bridging vendors, Halley Systems and Vitalink?)  But, at the end of the day, networks had to grow so that businesses and, eventually, the Internet, could run on them, and bridging technology simply Continue reading

Dismantling Cisco’s Conservation of Complexity Gambit

From the very beginning, Cisco Systems tightly embraced the use of complexity as a market differentiator. Creating a complicated CLI to configure networking gear instead of a relatively simple GUI – Wellfleet’s choice — was an early move down this path.   The next cab off this particular rank was the creation of the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) program in the early 1990’s, which, in full disclosure, I had a hand in developing back in the day.  This program was explicitly designed to be as difficult and complicated as possible – mirroring the products themselves – so that a CCIE “diploma” on a cubicle wall would be considered a badge of honor and give bragging rights to its owner.  And, with something like 3-1/2-million CCIEs out there today, this particular bit of planned complexity was clearly a winner.

The inherent irony in all of this is that ante-Cisco life in networking was quite a simple place, really. (Show of hands anyone who remembers the two top bridging vendors, Halley Systems and Vitalink?)  But, at the end of the day, networks had to grow so that businesses and, eventually, the Internet, could run on them, and bridging technology simply Continue reading

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

It's no secret that Cloudflare has been a big proponent of TLS 1.3, the newest edition of the TLS protocol that improves both speed and security, since we have made it available to our customers starting in 2016. However, for the longest time TLS 1.3 has been a work-in-progress which meant that the feature was disabled by default in our customers’ dashboards, at least until all the kinks in the protocol could be resolved.

With the specification finally nearing its official publication, and after several years of work (as well as 28 draft versions), we are happy to announce that the TLS 1.3 feature on Cloudflare is out of beta and will be enabled by default for all new zones.

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

For our Free and Pro customers not much changes, they already had TLS 1.3 enabled by default from the start. We have also decided to disable the 0-RTT feature by default for these plans (it was previously enabled by default as well), due to its inherent security properties. It will still be possible to explicitly enable it from the dashboard or the API (more on 0-RTT soon-ish in another blog post).

Our Business and Continue reading

Culture Shifts and Work Travel Learnings

I’ve seen a few Twitter threads recently about learning to live with the sudden plenty of working for tech companies. If you didn’t grow up that way, the adjustment takes time. It made me think about a few things I’ve learnt about corporate travel, and mistakes I’ve made along the way. People who grew in the corporate world instinctively know stuff I had to learn. Here’s some of the mistakes, and learnings:

Sudden Change of Scene

There’s been a few threads recently on Twitter related to the concept of “growing up poor, and learning how to adapt to working in well-paid industries.”

Here’s an example thread:

Read the thread - there’s some gems in there. Stuff like these hit home for me:

The Piikani Cultural and Digital Literacy Camp Program

The Piikani Nation in Southern Alberta, concerned they were in danger of losing their Blackfoot culture and traditions, sought out an innovative way to share it with younger generations. Elders and school officials in Piikani focused on how they could use technology to engage youth and preserve their knowledge and history. As a result, the Piikani First Nation, University of Alberta, First Nations Technical Service Advisory Group, and Piikani Board of Education created a youth-based project, the Piikani Cultural and Digital Literacy Camp Program, that combines digital technology and cultural and language studies for grade 9 students.

From the beginning, Piikani Elder Herman Many Guns and University of Alberta Assistant Professor Dr. Rob McMahon knew it was crucial to combine traditional Blackfoot and digital teaching styles in the program. To accomplish this, Herman reached out to community ceremonial Elders with transferred rights who could ensure the project followed traditional protocol. The partners decided to host a summer camp that would teach students about their culture, as well as gain digital skills, such as video production, editing, and data stewardship. Students apply these new digital skills to the preservation of the ancestral knowledge shared by the Elders at an outdoor Continue reading

Episode 27 – State Of The Podcast

In this episode we’re changing things up a bit. Eyvonne, Russ, and Jordan come together to chat a bit about the past year and share some exciting news about where we are heading as a podcast. Thank you for making Network Collective possible and we’re looking forward to producing even more great content over the coming year.


Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 27 – State Of The Podcast appeared first on Network Collective.

Datanauts 134: Preventing Failures With AI And HPE InfoSight (Sponsored)

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

The post Datanauts 134: Preventing Failures With AI And HPE InfoSight (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.