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Category Archives for "Networking"

IDG Contributor Network: Closing the PC/TC experience gap for good

When thin clients were first introduced to the market in 1995, there was a cultural backlash. Thin clients may have made working with company data less costly and more secure, but from the workers’ perspective, their PC was replaced by a little box connected by a serial cable, with limited graphics that was much slower than the PC they were used to working on every day.In those early days, even as we swapped the serial cables for network ones, shrunk the cases, and doubled the performance, it didn’t take long before thin clients were banished to niche use cases, becoming the territory of call centers, nurses’ stations and manufacturing plants—often to those workers’ disappointment.To read this article in full, please click here

Internet Shutdowns cannot be a solution to political challenges in Chad

The Internet Society is concerned with the continuous disruptions of Internet and social media services in Chad in the month of April, 2018.

Internet shutdowns are not a solution to political and economic challenges.

Government ordered disruptions have been reported from 2nd of April 2018, in the context of political protests and unrest across the country.  This is not the first time Internet access has been suspended in Chad. In January 2018, the Internet was disrupted following demonstrations organized by civil society organizations. Again in 2016, Chad experienced an eight-month social media cutoff following controversial elections in 2016.

While we recognize that the Chadian government has a duty to maintain public order, there is little evidence on the benefits of shutdowns in preventing any sort of violent protests. On the other hand, there is growing evidence on the collateral damages resulting from taking people off the network.

One of these damages is economic. These disruptions have been estimated to have costed the country €18 million (approximately 13 billion CFA francs), according to Internet Without Borders. These are extremely conservative numbers that do not even take into account a set of cumulative economic factors.

Shutdowns also affect thousands of local entrepreneurs Continue reading

On the ‘web: How to Bridge the Network Skills Gap

The landscape is littered with training for all these new skills, but there is little time, or guidance, through the process of retraining into these new skills. The process of retraining, far too often, feels like leaving all your old skills behind and learning completely new ones. The seeming wide array of paths the average engineer faces, combined with the uncertainty of which of these paths forward represent the real future, can seem overwhelming. @TechTarget

NSX-T Automation with Terraform

Do you want to maintain your network and security infrastructure as a code? Do you want to automate NSX-T? One more option has been just added for you!

Following my previous post about NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs you might have figured out how easy it is to generate different language bindings for NSX-T. Thankfully to this, we have generated Go Lang NSX-T SDK that we use as a foundation of the new NSX-T Terraform provider.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software by HashiCorp. It allows creation, modification, and deletion of an infrastructure using a high-level configuration files that can be shared between team members, treated as a code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. These configuration files are written in HCL(HashiCorp Configuration Language) which is actually JSON with some fine-tuning. Plain JSON can be also used.

There are several important components in Terraform:

1. Providers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of the resources: create, read, update, delete. The Providers usually require some sort of configuration to provide authentication, endpoint URLs, etc. By default, resources are matched with the provider with the start of the name. For example, a resource nsxt_logical_switch is associated with provider called nsxt.

Example of Continue reading

NSX-T Automation with Terraform

NSX-T Automation with Terraform Do you want to maintain your network and security infrastructure as a code? Do you want to automate NSX-T? One more option has been just added for you! Following my previous post about NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs you might have figured out how easy it is to generate different language bindings for NSX-T. Thankfully to this, we... Read more →

Fixing reachability to 1.1.1.1, GLOBALLY!

Fixing reachability to 1.1.1.1, GLOBALLY!

Recently we announced our fast, privacy-centric DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, supported by our global network. As you can see 1.1.1.1 is very easy to remember, which is both a blessing and a curse. In the time leading up to the announcement of the resolver service we began testing reachability to 1.1.1.1, primarily using the RIPE Atlas probes. The RIPE Atlas project is an extensive collection of small monitoring devices hosted by the public around the world. Currently there are over 10,000 active probes hosted in over 3,000 networks, giving great vantage points for testing. We found large numbers of probes unable to query 1.1.1.1, but successfully able to query 1.0.0.1 in almost all cases. 1.0.0.1 is the secondary address we have assigned for the resolver, to allow clients who are unable to reach 1.1.1.1 to be able to make DNS queries.

This blog focuses on IPv4. We provide four IPs (two for each IP address family) in order to provide a path toward the DNS resolver independent of IPv4 or IPv6 reachability.

1.0.0.0/8 was assigned in Continue reading

BrandPost: Can Your IT Infrastructure Withstand Extreme Weather?

It seems that every three to five years, the impact of inclement weather, storms, and floods appears to peak. And the periods in between weather events seem to be getting shorter. As the number and severity of storms continues to increase far beyond what we have typically experienced, many small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) are now forced to re-evaluate how well their IT infrastructure can continue to support the organization when there is a weather event. This is becoming a critical issue, as many SMBs may find themselves without power for multiple days, which has been the case with the recent nor-easters plaguing the East Coast.Too many SMBs have not assessed the ability of their power and cooling infrastructure to support critical IT equipment in the event of a short- or long-term power outage. Despite frequent and substantial changes at the hardware and application levels, power management and UPS solutions may be decades old. The impact of today’s digital business could not even be conceived of, let alone considered, in the design of these older, legacy backup systems. Further, many of the batteries that provide emergency power haven’t been changed or maintained in years. And many older UPS products Continue reading

Fake News, Loss of Privacy are Hurting the Internet, Mozilla says

The Internet has a case of the sniffles, with several symptoms keeping it from being as robust as it could be, according to a new Internet Health Report from Mozilla.

Major challenges facing the Internet include a collapse of privacy protections, the unabated spread of fake news, and the consolidation of power at giant tech companies, said Mozilla, the nonprofit creator of the Firefox browser and other open-source software.

Many people “have started to argue that technology companies are becoming too dominant; social media has been weaponized as a tool of harassment; our personal information has been stolen; and democratic processes have been undermined by the manipulation of online media and ads,” the report says.

The software maker called on Internet users to take action by learning how to better protect their privacy and to identify misinformation. “We believe the only way to keep the Internet in the hands of all of us is to ask for it, build it, and demand it,” Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, said by email. “Consumers, governments and technologists need to push for fair competition, open innovation, interoperability and standards so the Internet can evolve in more healthy and humane ways. Continue reading

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