Most engineers talking about network automation focus on configuration management: keeping track of configuration changes, generating device configurations from data models and templates, and deploying configuration changes.
There’s another extremely important aspect of network automation that’s oft forgotten: automatic response to internal or external events. You could wait for self-driving networks to see it implemented, or learn how to do it yourself.
On March 20th live session of Building Network Automation Solutions online course David Gee will dive deeper into event-driven network automation. As he explains the challenge:
When it comes to running infrastructure and infrastructure services, a lot of the decision making is human based. Someone reads a ticket, someone decides what to do. Someone gets alerted to an event and that someone does something about it. This involvement causes friction in the smooth-running nature of automated processes. Fear not! Something can be done about it.
We all know the stories of ITIL and rigid process management and David will show you how event-driven automation could be made reality even with strict and rigid controls, resulting in an environment that reacts automatically to stimuli from your services and infrastructure. We will discuss what events are, when they're important, how Continue reading
Enterprises remain concerned over complexity and support challenges.
The update makes it easier to run production-ready appliances on Kubernetes.
5G uses the underlying LTE control plane, making it faster to deploy.
In simple terms Meltdown and Spectre are simple vulnerabilities to understand. Imagine a gang of thieves waiting for a stage coach carrying a month’s worth of payroll.
There are two roads the coach could take, and a fork, or a branch, where the driver decides which one to take. The driver could take either one. What is the solution? Station robbers along both sides of the branch, and wait to see which one the driver chooses. When you know, pull the resources from one branch to the other, so you can effectively rob the stage. This is much the same as a modern processor handling a branch—the user could have put anything into some field, or retreived anything from a database, that might cause the software to run one of two sets of instructions. There is no way for the processor to know, so it runs both of them.
To run both sets of instructions, the processor will pull in the contents of specific memory locations, and begin exexuting code across these memory locations. Some of these memory locations might not be pieces of memory the currently running software is supposed to be able to access, but this is not Continue reading
The service includes cloud-based security information and event management.
Its product overlays application delivery and monitoring on SD-WANs from Cisco and Versa Networks.
The bill would prohibit the U.S. government from buying from the companies.
Fox-IT is recommending that IPv6 is disabled when it is not being used, as disabling Proxy Auto Detection. This of course means that Windows-based hosts are unable to switch preference to IPv6 when it is available (which all versions since Windows Vista will do), and that IPv6 would need to be explicitly re-enabled on hosts.
The article makes some important points, but IPv4 and IPv6 are fundamentally incompatible on a wire level and it needs to be understood they can’t communicate with each other except through translation devices. There are a number of known issues (including this one) with the security of automatic configuration mechanisms running on Local Area Networks, both under IPv6 and IPv4, but these require physical access to Continue reading
Here at Cloudflare, we have a lot of experience of operating servers on the wild Internet. But we are always improving our mastery of this black art. On this very blog we have touched on multiple dark corners of the Internet protocols: like understanding FIN-WAIT-2 or receive buffer tuning.
CC BY 2.0 image by Isaí Moreno
One subject hasn't had enough attention though - SYN floods. We use Linux and it turns out that SYN packet handling in Linux is truly complex. In this post we'll shine some light on this subject.
First we must understand that each bound socket, in the "LISTENING" TCP state has two separate queues:
In the literature these queues are often given other names such as "reqsk_queue", "ACK backlog", "listen backlog" or even "TCP backlog", but I'll stick to the names above to avoid confusion.
The SYN Queue stores inbound SYN packets[1] (specifically: struct inet_request_sock
). It's responsible for sending out SYN+ACK packets and retrying them on timeout. On Linux the number of retries is configured with:
$ sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries
net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 5
One of my readers sent me this question:
Do you have any thoughts on this meltdown HPTI thing? How does a hardware issue/feature become a software vulnerability? Hasn't there always been an appropriate level of separation between kernel and user space?
There’s always been privilege-level separation between kernel and user space, but not the address space separation - kernel has been permanently mapped into the high-end addresses of user space (but not visible from the user-space code on systems that had decent virtual memory management hardware) since the days of OS/360, CP/M and VAX/VMS (RSX-11M was an exception since it ran on 16-bit CPU architecture and its designers wanted to support programs up to 64K byte in size).
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