High-reliability OCSP stapling and why it matters
At Cloudflare our focus is making the internet faster and more secure. Today we are announcing a new enhancement to our HTTPS service: High-Reliability OCSP stapling. This feature is a step towards enabling an important security feature on the web: certificate revocation checking. Reliable OCSP stapling also improves connection times by up to 30% in some cases. In this post, we’ll explore the importance of certificate revocation checking in HTTPS, the challenges involved in making it reliable, and how we built a robust OCSP stapling service.
Why revocation is hard
Digital certificates are the cornerstone of trust on the web. A digital certificate is like an identification card for a website. It contains identity information including the website’s hostname along with a cryptographic public key. In public key cryptography, each public key has an associated private key. This private key is kept secret by the site owner. For a browser to trust an HTTPS site, the site’s server must provide a certificate that is valid for the site’s hostname and a proof of control of the certificate’s private key. If someone gets access to a certificate’s private key, they can impersonate the site. Private key compromise is a serious risk Continue reading
Encryption is Crucial to a Trusted Internet
The Five Eyes – Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand – recently met in Ottawa to discuss national security challenges. The resulting joint communiqué noted that “encryption can severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism.” The Internet Society believes that this view of encryption is misleading and bodes badly for a trusted Internet. Any weakening of encryption will hurt cybersecurity and individual rights and freedoms.
Mark Buell
Progress update – 10/07-2017
Hello folks,
Im currently going through the INE DC videos and learning a lot about fabrics and how they work along with a fair bit of UCS information on top of that!
Im spending an average of 2.5 hours on weekdays for study and a bit more in the weekends when time permits.
I still have no firm commitment to the CCIE DC track, but at some point I need to commit to it and really get behind it. One of these days 
I mentioned it to the wife-to-be a couple of days ago and while she didn’t applaud the idea, at least she wasn’t firmly against it, which is always something I guess! Its very important for me to have my family behind me in these endeavours!
Im still a bit concerned about the lack of rack rentals for DCv2 from INE, which is something I need to have in place before I order a bootcamp or more training materials from them. As people know by now, I really do my best learning in front of the “system”, trying out what works and what doesn’t.
Now to spin up a few N9K’s in the lab and play around Continue reading
Network Automation Resources for Beginners
Get started on the path to network programmability with these tools and educational resources.
How Networks Are Changing
Peter Welcher looks at trends reshaping enterprise and data center networks.
Q&A: Building Network Automation Solutions Online Course
I got tons of questions about the upcoming Building Network Automation Solutions online course. It always starts with the same one:
Is access to the self-study material granted upon enrollment?
Absolutely. You also get access to everything we did in January, and the new self-paced Ansible for Networking Engineers online course.
Read more ...Cisco Datacenter: Default Cisco OTV Configurations
Today I am going to talk about the Cisco OTV configuration and what components we need to configure when you are extended your L2 traffic over the L3 interface between the two Datacenter.
What is Cisco OTV ?
Cisco OTV stands for Overlay Transport Virtualization, So OTV is a Cisco propriety protocol used in Cisco Datacenter environment basically on Cisco Nexus device Cisco Nexus 7k to extend the L2 traffic via L3 route between two different datacenter.
OTV will provides a native built-in multi-homing capability with automatic detection, critical to increasing high availability of the overall solution. Cisco OTV has the concept of dynamic encapsulation for Layer 2 flows that need to be sent to remote locations.
Each Ethernet frame is individually encapsulated into an IP packet and delivered across the transport network. Cisco OTV eliminates the need to establish virtual circuits, called Pseudowires, between the data center locations and you can say that it os one of the demanding technology in datacenter environment where you have Cisco Nexus devices.
Each Ethernet frame is individually encapsulated into an IP packet and delivered across the transport network. Cisco OTV eliminates the need to establish virtual circuits, called Pseudowires, between the data center locations and you can say that it os one of the demanding technology in datacenter environment where you have Cisco Nexus devices.
Cisco OTV required the one single VDC to work, it means if you are going to have a one Cisco Nexus 7k switch you need to have the separate Continue reading
Everything Has a Cost
Everything comes at a cost: steak dinners & pre-sales engineering has to get paid for somehow. That should be obvious to most. Feature requests also come at a cost, both upfront, and ongoing. Those ongoing costs are not always understood.
It’s easy to look at vendor gross margins, and assume that there is plenty of fat. But remember that Gross margin is just Revenue minus cost of goods sold. It’s not profit. It doesn’t include sales & marketing costs, or R&D costs. Those costs affect net income, which is ‘real’ income. Companies need to recoup those costs somehow if they want to make money. Gross margin alone doesn’t pay the bills.
Four-Legged SalesDroids, and Steak Dinners
A “four-legged sales call” is when two people show up for sales calls. The usual pattern is an Account Manager for the ‘relationship’ stuff, with a Sales Engineer acting as truth police. These calls can be very useful. It’s a good way to talk about the current business challenges, discuss product roadmaps, provide feedback on what’s working, and what’s not. The Sales Engineer can offer implementation advice, maybe help with some configuration issues.
Often a sales call includes lunch or dinner. Breaking bread together Continue reading
Everything Has a Cost
Everything comes at a cost: steak dinners & pre-sales engineering has to get paid for somehow. That should be obvious to most. Feature requests also come at a cost, both upfront, and ongoing. Those ongoing costs are not always understood.
It’s easy to look at vendor gross margins, and assume that there is plenty of fat. But remember that Gross margin is just Revenue minus cost of goods sold. It’s not profit. It doesn’t include sales & marketing costs, or R&D costs. Those costs affect net income, which is ‘real’ income. Companies need to recoup those costs somehow if they want to make money. Gross margin alone doesn’t pay the bills.
Four-Legged SalesDroids, and Steak Dinners
A “four-legged sales call” is when two people show up for sales calls. The usual pattern is an Account Manager for the ‘relationship’ stuff, with a Sales Engineer acting as truth police. These calls can be very useful. It’s a good way to talk about the current business challenges, discuss product roadmaps, provide feedback on what’s working, and what’s not. The Sales Engineer can offer implementation advice, maybe help with some configuration issues.
Often a sales call includes lunch or dinner. Breaking bread together Continue reading
Three Issues of Being a Part-Time Security Professional
In Information Technology, we commonly hear the mantra of “doing more with less.” That may sound great, and in some cases it can actually be beneficial. It obviously drives the requirement of streamlining performance and the simplification of processes. It can drive innovators to innovate and the attrition of unnecessary systems. The predominate reason for this philosophy is cost cutting.
My argument would generally be that IT should NOT simply be keeping the lights on, it should be adding value by creating competitive differentiators for the business. Being able to execute on that effectively SHOULD change the perspective of IT as it is viewed by the rest of the leadership team. One particular concern I have in regards to those businesses that continue aggressively down this path of cost cutting (or don’t proper initially fund) IT, is in regards to Cybersecurity.
In many cases smaller shops, or shops that don’t fully understand the risks, tend to place their technical team members into split roles. Maybe the view is that someone should be a part-time security person and a part-time network or system administrator. This introduces several concerns and I wanted to quickly share three that are top of mind.
Issue One — What do I Continue reading
Participate in the Net Neutrality Day of Action
We at Cloudflare strongly believe in network neutrality, the principle that networks should not discriminate against content that passes through them. We’ve previously posted on our views on net neutrality and the role of the FCC here and here.
In May, the FCC took a first step toward revoking bright-line rules it put in place in 2015 to require ISPs to treat all web content equally. The FCC is seeking public comment on its proposal to eliminate the legal underpinning of the 2015 rules, revoking the FCC's authority to implement and enforce net neutrality protections. Public comments are also requested on whether any rules are needed to prevent ISPs from blocking or throttling web traffic, or creating “fast lanes” for some internet traffic.
To raise awareness about the FCC's efforts, July 12th will be “Internet-Wide Day of Action to save Net Neutrality.” Led by the group Battle for the Net, participating websites will show the world what the web would look like without net neutrality by displaying an alert on their homepage. Website users will be encouraged to contact Congress and the FCC in support of net neutrality.
We wanted to make sure our users had an opportunity to participate in this Continue reading
Research: Intent Based SDN at ESnet
Demonstration of the ESnet research on a research project using intent based networking including an ontological engine for plain english requests. While this is specific to the ESnet requirements there is some really interesting ideas around interpreting user intent and the architecture of an intent-based system.
The post Research: Intent Based SDN at ESnet appeared first on EtherealMind.
Implementing VXLAN Routing- Arista Networks
Today I am talking about the VXLAN protocol routing. VXLAN routing is enabled by creating a VLAN interface (SVI) on a VLAN that is associated to a VNI. As you know that VXLAN is called as Virtual extensible LAN. VXLAN is a way to extend the Layer 2 subnets over layer 3 network. VXLAN is now one of the demanding way of extended the Layer 2 traffic.
Earlier we have so many technologies to do so like we have VPLS, MPLS and OTV( Cisco) in the Datacenter network. But VXLAN is used for the fabric network where you can have end to end tunnels within your LAN network. Now a days if you are looking the enterprise network you will find that VXLAN is used in the Datacenter and Campus networks with the Software defined.
Let's talk about the VXLAN implementation routing on Arista devices. We have two switches connected via core routers and end devices are connected to that switches. In the case of VXLAN you should aware about the three things and these things are
Earlier we have so many technologies to do so like we have VPLS, MPLS and OTV( Cisco) in the Datacenter network. But VXLAN is used for the fabric network where you can have end to end tunnels within your LAN network. Now a days if you are looking the enterprise network you will find that VXLAN is used in the Datacenter and Campus networks with the Software defined.
Let's talk about the VXLAN implementation routing on Arista devices. We have two switches connected via core routers and end devices are connected to that switches. In the case of VXLAN you should aware about the three things and these things are
- VLAN : Virtual LAN and i guess everybody knows about it
- VNI: Virtual Network Identifier, VXLAN network identified by a unique VNI is Continue reading