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Category Archives for "Networking"

27% off TaoTronics Bluetooth Sweatproof Headphones with Built in Mic – Deal Alert

These headphones feature sweatproof construction, fast and reliable Bluetooth 4.1, and a generous 7 hours of play time on a charge. A built-in mic with noise concellation allows for taking crystal clear calls on the run. TaoTronics sports headphones average 4.2 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 4,800 people (read reviews), and its typical list price of $29.99 has been reduced right now 27% to $21.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off iClever BoostCube 12W Dual USB Wall Charger with Foldable Plug – Deal Alert

This mini USB charging cube from iClever claims to be one of the smallest on the market, and charges up to 2 smartphones, tablets, or other USB devices at your device's maximum rate with Smart ID technology. The wall plugs fold in for maximum convenience. The typical list price of $16.99 is reduced 50% right now to just $8.49 on Amazon, where it averages 4.6 out of 5 stars from just under 200 customers (82% rate full 5 stars: read recent reviews here). See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

47% off iClever BoostCube 12W Dual USB Wall Charger with Foldable Plug – Deal Alert

This mini USB charging cube from iClever claims to be one of the smallest on the market, and charges up to 2 smartphones, tablets, or other USB devices at your device's maximum rate with Smart ID technology. The wall plugs fold in for maximum convenience. The typical list price of $16.99 is reduced 47% right now to just $8.99 on Amazon, where it averages 4.6 out of 5 stars from just under 200 customers (82% rate full 5 stars: read recent reviews here). An additional promotion is currently available giving you an extra 10% off if you buy 2 of them, dropping the price further. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Aruba announces campus core switch for the digital enterprise

Digital transformation has been a hot topic with IT and business leaders over the past few years. In fact, it’s rare for me to talk to any organization, regardless of size, and not talk about the challenges of going digital.One of the interesting elements of this shift is that it makes the network significantly more important than it ever has been. Most of the technologies used to fuel digitization, such as IoT, cloud and mobility are all network centric in nature, so the network has a direct impact on a company’s ability to become a digital organization.RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day In today’s rapidly changing business climate, competitive differentiation revolves around speed, and that requires a highly dynamic and scalable IT foundation. However, a business can only be as agile as the least agile component, and that today is the network. Software-defined networks (SDNs) have helped transform the data center and SD-WANs the wide-area network, but what about the campus? That seems to have been forgotten about through this transition to a software-defined world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Aruba announces campus core switch for the digital enterprise

Digital transformation has been a hot topic with IT and business leaders over the past few years. In fact, it’s rare for me to talk to any organization, regardless of size, and not talk about the challenges of going digital.One of the interesting elements of this shift is that it makes the network significantly more important than it ever has been. Most of the technologies used to fuel digitization, such as IoT, cloud and mobility are all network centric in nature, so the network has a direct impact on a company’s ability to become a digital organization.RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day In today’s rapidly changing business climate, competitive differentiation revolves around speed, and that requires a highly dynamic and scalable IT foundation. However, a business can only be as agile as the least agile component, and that today is the network. Software-defined networks (SDNs) have helped transform the data center and SD-WANs the wide-area network, but what about the campus? That seems to have been forgotten about through this transition to a software-defined world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN : APIC Vv APIC-EM

Software Defined Network (SDN) is technology to allow network devices to be managed through software application, thus making configuration process automated and faster. Network devices have its own management plane, data plane and control plane. Traditional SDN decouples Control plane from all different devices and have all these control plane go live inside  SDN controller […]

Better Security Conversations – Thoughts for a Series

As many PacketU readers know, I have held the role as a vendor SE for a couple of years. In this role, a primary function is to correctly position our products into customer environments. What I’ve come to realize is that many of our conversations actually start incorrectly. I think we need to change that. I will be sharing, as well as structuring, my own thoughts with an upcoming series of posts on security.

I firmly believe that products are only tools and we need to back up to better understand the problems we are trying to solve. One analogy I use on a regular basis when talking about autonomous vehicles is that “no one needs a car [they only need the transportation].” So if technology can provide autonomous cars, transportation can become a service instead of a depreciating asset in our garage. 

Although it isn’t a parallel thought or analogy, no organization needs an NGFW for the sake of owning an NGFW. There is a need to provide proper tools required to enable the organization’s security program. Thinking in these terms guides the conversations to a more appropriate solution. My goal with this upcoming series is to help anyone that touches cybersecurity Continue reading

Tell the FCC you don’t want robo-voicemail, spammy direct-to-voicemail messages

If your phone doesn’t ring, yet you have received voicemail, did that voicemail qualify as a call? If it didn’t count as a call, then the telemarketer behind the pre-recorded voicemail message may claim it can leave “ringless voicemail” (RVM) for people even on the Do Not Call list.The FCC is currently deciding if it should ban ringless voicemail or if those spammy voicemail messages don’t count as calls as companies using direct-to-voicemail insertion technology claim.All About the Message, a ringless voicemail company, petitioned the FCC to “declare that the delivery of a voice message directly to a voicemail box does not constitute a call that is subject to the prohibitions on the use of an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) or an artificial or prerecorded voice” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (pdf).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tell the FCC you don’t want robo-voicemail, spammy direct-to-voicemail messages

If your phone doesn’t ring, yet you have received voicemail, did that voicemail qualify as a call? If it didn’t count as a call, then the telemarketer behind the pre-recorded voicemail message may claim it can leave “ringless voicemail” (RVM) for people even on the Do Not Call list.The FCC is currently deciding if it should ban ringless voicemail or if those spammy voicemail messages don’t count as calls as companies using direct-to-voicemail insertion technology claim.All About the Message, a ringless voicemail company, petitioned the FCC to “declare that the delivery of a voice message directly to a voicemail box does not constitute a call that is subject to the prohibitions on the use of an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) or an artificial or prerecorded voice” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (pdf).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chinese Malware ‘Fireball’ Has Infected 250 Million Devices

A malware attack dubbed Fireball has infected more than 250 million computers worldwide and is redirecting web browsers on compromised machines to generate revenue for its attackers. First discovered by cybersecurity firm Check Point Threat Intelligence, the browser-hijacking malware attack of Chinese origin has reportedly spread to 20 percent of corporate computer networks. Read: Android …

EuroDIG 2017: ISOC Speaks on Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Human Rights, IoT, Internet Shutdowns and more

How do we create a more secure and trusted Internet within the multistakeholder model of Internet governance? That will be among the many questions addressed this week at the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) in Tallinn, Estonia. From June 5-7, we will have an Internet Society team on site participating in many sessions. Our EuroDIG 2017 page has all the details - including links to live video streams - but at a high level here are some of the workshops we are participating in:

Dan York

War Stories: Always Check Your Inputs

The extremely irregular War Stories series returns, with an anecdote from 15 years ago, investigating a problem with a web app that only seemed to crash when one particular person used it. Ultimately a simple problem, but it took me a while to track it down. I blame Perl.

ISPY With my Little Eye

“ispy” was our custom-built system that archived SMS logs from all our SMSCs, aggregating them to one server for analysis. Message contents were kept for a short period, with CDRs stored for longer (i.e. details of sending and receiving numbers, and timestamps, but no content).

The system had a web interface that support staff could use to investigate customer reports of SMS issues. They could enter source and/or destination MSISDNs, and see when messages were sent, and potentially contents. Access to contents was restricted, and was typically only used for things like abuse investigations.

This system worked well, usually.

Except when it didn’t.

Every few weeks, we’d get reports that L2 support couldn’t access the system. We’d login, see that one process was using up 99% CPU, kill it, and it would be OK for a while. Normally the system was I/O bound, so we Continue reading

War Stories: Always Check Your Inputs

The extremely irregular War Stories series returns, with an anecdote from 15 years ago, investigating a problem with a web app that only seemed to crash when one particular person used it. Ultimately a simple problem, but it took me a while to track it down. I blame Perl.

ISPY With my Little Eye

“ispy” was our custom-built system that archived SMS logs from all our SMSCs, aggregating them to one server for analysis. Message contents were kept for a short period, with CDRs stored for longer (i.e. details of sending and receiving numbers, and timestamps, but no content).

The system had a web interface that support staff could use to investigate customer reports of SMS issues. They could enter source and/or destination MSISDNs, and see when messages were sent, and potentially contents. Access to contents was restricted, and was typically only used for things like abuse investigations.

This system worked well, usually.

Except when it didn’t.

Every few weeks, we’d get reports that L2 support couldn’t access the system. We’d login, see that one process was using up 99% CPU, kill it, and it would be OK for a while. Normally the system was I/O bound, so we Continue reading

Ultimate Go, Ardanlabs, Training Course Writeup

After being in the IT industry for a while, courses generally don’t impress or engage you for very long. If it’s something you’re interested in, you stand a better chance of hanging on in there, but even then, someone talking at you is always difficult. Those that attend conferences regularly will appreciate the shift to ‘brown bag’ lightening talks where a nervous energy fuelled speaker delivers the interesting snippets of a topic with the knowledge to guide question asking talk goers to the right info if they have beyond surface level curiosity.

Therefore, many of us don’t attend classroom based training anymore. Short webinars and self-lead courses are generally the way forward for those of us not in college or university. I need to add here, technology itself is changing too. Gone are the days where Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco lead the world. Sorry folks, they truly are gone. Technology now is ‘passing through’. I have a transformed view of technology akin to cattle herding; rope it, guide it to the right place to feed, then shoot it, eat it and make some handbags. Technology is more and more transient. It’s not about being an expert, it’s about the techniques Continue reading

Intel’s new chip puts a teraflop in your desktop. Here’s what that means

It’s as fast as a turn-of-the-century supercomputer. Intel’s Core i9 Extreme Edition processor costs about $2,000. Intel Corporation Earlier this week in Taipei, Intel announced the most powerful desktop chip for consumers that it has ever sold. With 18 cores and a price tag of $1,999, the processor is known as a teraflop chip, meaning …