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Category Archives for "Networking"

Building a Sustainable Community Network in Sarantaporo Greece

For over a year now we in the Sarantaporo.gr Non Profit Organization have been in contact with Internet Society in meetings, over online interactions, and through in-person collaboration with people of the organization who visited our village last summer. From the beginning we saw that Internet Society is an organization which we share a lot of common elements with in terms of vision, and that its network is a natural space for our Community Network to be a part of.

In September 2017 we applied for the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme to approach the organization more closely and pursue funding to finance our Community Network. We are very happy to announce that our proposal was successful and will be funded with $30,000 USD through 2018 and 2019. This grant arrives very timely, in a period of transformation for our Community Network.

Continuously growing since 2010 to expand from Sarantaporo to even more villages in the region, today Sarantaporo.gr Community Network has reached a point where it is no longer possible to keep growing under the previous model, which was heavily dependent on the volunteering work of the nonprofit’s core team. Local inhabitants need to step in and Continue reading

The Winds of Change From January

Some quick thoughts on networking from my last couple of weeks at Networking Field Day 17 and Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe:

  • Cisco is in the middle of turning a big ship away from hardware. All their innovation is coming in the software side of the house. Big announcements around network assurance. It’s not enough any more to do the things. Now you need to prove they were done and show your work. Context and Intent only work if you can quantitatively show that they were applied.
  • Containers are still a thing. Cisco has a new container platform. I also had the chance to chat with a startup called AppOrbit that’s doing some interesting things around containers but including storage and networking. They should be primed for some announcements soon, so stayed tuned for that!
  • Automation is cool again. Well, maybe it never stopped being cool. But thanks to Extreme Networks and Juniper people are really hopping on the train to talk more about removing the limitations of the CLI and doing it with tools like Slack. Check out Lindsay Hill and Matt Oswalt showing this off to people in some finely crafted demos.
  • 2018 is Continue reading

Tips for securing IoT on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips to improve IoT security on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips to improve IoT security on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.The analyst firm Gartner, for example, puts the number of Internet connected “things” at just 8.4 billion in 2017 – counting both consumer and business applications. That’s a big number, yes, but much smaller number than the “50 billion devices” or “hundreds of billions of devices” figures that get bandied about in the press.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips for securing IoT on your network

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Video: What Is PowerNSX?

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).

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AT&T’s dNOS Initiative Spotlights Fake News from Cisco (et al.)

network-serverOne thing that’s clear from recent events is that the “alternative” path for network infrastructure refresh and build-outs – disaggregation – has just become exciting again due, in part, to AT&T’s recent announcement of the company’s dNOS (disaggregated Networking Operating System) initiative. Actually, prior to this proposal the fact that Pica8 and Cumulus – the only two pure open-standards-based NOS vendors in the market – combined have close to 2,000 current customers running on common hardware suggests that it’s been pretty exciting for some time now.

But AT&T’s new proposal does present us with a perfect opportunity to finally throw a bright spotlight on the palette of Fake News that has been tossed around the industry about disaggregated networking solutions and white-box networking in general. Of course, the elephant in the networking room is always Cisco, so let’s start there to see why AT&T pushed out this proposal in the first place.

Over the years, Cisco has successfully stared down any real threats to its account-control-plus-per-hardware-port-revenue business model, building itself up to the hegemony that it has today and, in the process, inadvertently laying waste to its customers’ ability to innovate in their own market segments based on differentiated network services. Continue reading