Just FYI: a week after I wrote this (don't forget to go through the comments), VMware made it official:
…we’ve found that VMware’s native virtual switch implementation has become the de facto standard for greater than 99% of vSphere customers today. … Moving forward, VMware will have a single virtual switch strategy that focuses on two sets of native virtual switch offerings – VMware vSphere® Standard Switch and vSphere Distributed Switch™ for VMware vSphere, and the Open virtual switch (OVS).
Serious and easily exploited flaws in older Cisco IOS software. Commonly used, but old, switches used for Campus and SME Data Centres. Serious problem.
Thoughts:
The Cluster Management Protocol utilizes Telnet internally as a signaling and command protocol between cluster members. The vulnerability is due to the combination of two factors
- The failure to restrict the use of CMP-specific Telnet options only to internal, local communications between cluster members and instead accept and process such options over any Telnet connection to an affected device, and
- The incorrect processing of malformed CMP-specific Telnet Continue reading
Its become clear that the only way to improve security of certificate authorities is to follow through on threats. Symantec has been delinquent since 2012 in securing their processes and software. We have seen multiple instances of certificate falsely issued to domains (including Google’s domain). As the owner of Chrome browser, it has decided that Symantec is no longer fit to be considered a root authority for TLS (SSL) certificate.
Effective immediately, Chrome plans to stop recognizing the extended validation status of all certificates issued by Symantec-owned certificate authorities, Ryan Sleevi, a software engineer on the Google Chrome team, said Thursday in an online forum. Extended validation certificates are supposed to provide enhanced assurances of a site’s authenticity by showing the name of the validated domain name holder in the address bar. Under the move announced by Sleevi, Chrome will immediately stop displaying that information for a period of at least a year. In effect, the certificates will be downgraded to less-secure domain-validated certificates.
This is necessary. Politically this is a sound move. Taking down a major company that is US-based following removed of Chinese and Eastern European CA root certificates sends a message of fairness and balance. The repeat Continue reading
Some of you will recall that I had previously written a set of SaltStack states to provision a bare metal Kubernetes cluster. The idea was that you could use it to quickly deploy (and redeploy) a Kubernetes lab so you could get more familiar with the project and do some lab work on a real cluster. Kubernetes is a fast moving project and I think you’ll find that those states likely no longer work with all of the changes that have been introduced into Kubernetes. As I looked to refresh the posts I found that I was now much more comfortable with Ansible than I was with SaltStack so this time around I decided to write the automation using Ansible (I did also update the SaltStack version but I’ll be focusing on Ansible going forward).
However – before I could automate the configuration I had to remind myself how to do the install manually. To do this, I leaned heavily on Kelsey Hightower’s ‘Kubernetes the hard way‘ instructions. These are a great resource and if you haven’t installed a cluster manually before I suggest you do that before attempting to automate an install. You’ll find that the Ansible role Continue reading
It should come as no surprise that there are numerous activities related to Trust, Identity, and Privacy on the agenda for IETF 98. Below I will highlight a few of the many activities and provide pointers to a number of additional ones. There is something for everyone interested in these areas in Chicago in the coming week!