Audit and Compliance with Calico
In this blog post, I will be talking about audit and compliance and how to implement it with Calico. Most IT organizations are asked to meet some standard of compliance, whether internal or industry-specific. However organizations are not always provided with the guidance to implement it. Furthermore, when guidance has been provided, it is usually applicable to a more traditional and static environment and doesn’t address the dynamic nature of Kubernetes. Existing compliance tools that rely on periodic snapshots do not provide accurate assessments of Kubernetes workloads against your compliance standards.
Getting started with audit and compliance for Kubernetes clusters
A good starting point is understanding what type of compliance requirements needs to be enforced and confirming that the enforcement is successful. Following this is finding a way to easily report on the current state of your environment so you can proactively ensure you are complying with the standards defined. You should also be prepared to provide a report on-demand when an audit team is investigating.
This blog is not meant to be a how-to guide to meet HIPAA, PCI-DSS or SOC. However, it will provide you with the guidance regarding these regulations so you can apply it and understand Continue reading
Hedge 185: Retrocomputing
Computers only have a history stretching back some 60 or 70 years—and yet much of that history has already been lost in this mist of time. Are we focusing so deeply on the future that we have forgotten our past? What might we learn from the past, even the recent past, and how does forgetting our past impact the future. Federico Lucifredi joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss some of his projects finding, repairing, and operating old personal computers.
transcript will be linked in a few days
If you are interested in retrocomputing, you might want to start with this Stack Exchange, the Retrocomputing Forum, this Reddit forum.
The NWC Guide to Implementing Zero-Trust Networks
In this guide, we dive into zero-trust networks, offering expert guidance for successfully implementing and maintaining a zero-trust approach in your organization.Resolving Patchwork Systems for Smoother Operations
To resolve the issues related to patchwork systems, companies must consider consolidating and migrating data to streamline operations.Day Two Cloud 201: Building A Product That Uses LLMs
Today we talk about Large Language Models (LLMs) and writing products and applications that use LLMs. Our guest is Phillip Carter, Principal PM at Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb makes an observability tool for site reliability engineers, and Carter worked on a project called Query Assistant that helps Honeycomb users get answers to questions about how to use the product and get insights from it. We discuss taking natural language input and turning it into outputs to help SREs do their jobs.
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Day Two Cloud 201: Building A Product That Uses LLMs
Today we talk about Large Language Models (LLMs) and writing products and applications that use LLMs. Our guest is Phillip Carter, Principal PM at Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb makes an observability tool for site reliability engineers, and Carter worked on a project called Query Assistant that helps Honeycomb users get answers to questions about how to use the product and get insights from it. We discuss taking natural language input and turning it into outputs to help SREs do their jobs.Turbocharging host workloads with Calico eBPF and XDP
In Linux, network-based applications rely on the kernel’s networking stack to establish communication with other systems. While this process is generally efficient and has been optimized over the years, in some cases it can create unnecessary overhead that can impact the overall performance of the system for network-intensive workloads such as web servers and databases.
XDP (eXpress Data Path) is an eBPF-based high-performance datapath inside the Linux kernel that allows you to bypass the kernel’s networking stack and directly handle packets at the network driver level. XDP can achieve this by executing a custom program to handle packets as they are received by the kernel. This can greatly reduce overhead, improve overall system performance, and improve network-based applications by shortcutting the normal networking path of ordinary traffic. However, using raw XDP can be challenging due to its programming complexity and the high learning curve involved. Solutions like Calico Open Source offer an easier way to tame these technologies.
Calico Open Source is a networking and security solution that seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes and other cloud orchestration platforms. While infamous for its policy engine and security capabilities, there are many other features that can be used in an environment by installing Continue reading
Cutting Costs and Reducing Complexity in 2023
Enterprises must move away from siloed tools and combine technologies as a way of reducing complexity to improve outcomes.AskJJX: How To Handle Rogue APs Without Getting Arrested
AskJJX: “What’s the best way to find and disable rogue APs on the network? We had an audit finding and got our hand slapped.” Ahhh, I love this question for so many reasons. First, because my answer to this today, in 2023, is very different than my answer would have been years ago. You may […]
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Building a WAN Impairment Device in Linux on VMware vSphere
In some scenarios it is really useful to be able to simulate a WAN in regards to latency, jitter, and packet loss. Especially for those of us that work with SD-WAN and want to test or policies in a controlled environment. In this post I will describe how I build a WAN impairment device in Linux for a VMware vSphere environment and how I can simulate different conditions.
My SD-WAN lab is built on VMware vSphere using Catalyst SD-WAN with Catalyst8000v as virtual routers and on-premises controllers. The goal with the WAN impairment device is to be able to manipulate each internet connection to a router individually. That way I can simulate that a particular connection or router is having issues while other connections/routers are not. I don’t want to impose the same conditions on all connections/devices simultaneously. To do this, I have built a physical topology that looks like this:
All devices are connected to a management network that I can access via a VPN. This way I have “out of band” access to all devices and can use SSH to configure my routers with a bootstrap configuration. To avoid having to create many unique VLANs in the vSwitch, Continue reading
Multichannel fast file transfers over AX.25
Lately I’ve been thinking about a better data protocol for amateur radio.
“Better” is, of course, relative. And the space is so big. Are we talking HF or VHF/UHF? Should it work with existing radios (just working the audio spectrum), or be its own radio? Should it be just RF improvements, or higher networking layers?
File transfers on the application layer
In my previous post I started off trying ZMODEM, but was fairly disappointed. The Linux AX.25 implementation sucks, and ZMODEM is too chatty. Every roundtrip is expensive. But even tuning the parameters, there are better ways to avoid needless retransmits and roundtrips.
I’ve started a tool called hamtransfer. The implementation is currently only point-to-point, but the protocol will work for more “bittorrent” style too.
It uses Raptor codes, but I’ll save you some time: It encodes the file (it calls a “block”) into smaller chunks (it calls “symbols”). It then sends the symbols to the receiver, which will be able to reassemble the original block.
The trick is that the set of symbols is infinite, and the block can be assembled by almost any subset of symbols. If the block is 10kB, then with more than Continue reading