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Category Archives for "Networking"

Managing Network Services Configuration with Ansible

In the last few weeks I’ve seen numerous questions along the lines of “how do I manage VLANs on my switch with Ansible”. You can look at this question from two perspectives: the low-level details (which modules do I use, how do I push commands to the box…) or the high-level challenges (how do I make sure actual device state matches desired device state). Obviously I’m interested in the latter.

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All of Ethan’s Podcasts & Articles for January 2017

Packet Pushers Community Blog

Packet Pushers News

Packet Pushers Weekly Podcast

Datanauts Podcast

Citizens of Tech Podcast

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NetIntro Book

  • I’m contributing to a book along with Jeremy Filliben and Russ White explaining fundamental networking problems and their solutions. In January, I began work on a chapter on QoS.

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Apple crosses Samsung in smartphone market, helped by Note7 debacle

Apple has regained the top place in the smartphone market helped by the new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, while rival Samsung Electronics grappled with the recall of its flagship Galaxy Note7 over overheating batteries, according to a research firm.The iPhone maker shipped 78.3 million smartphones in the fourth quarter for a market share of 17.8 percent in comparison to 77.5 million smartphones shipped by Samsung, which had a market share of 17.7 percent, Strategy Analytics said Tuesday.For the full year, Samsung was the clear winner with shipments of 309.4 million smartphones to Apple’s 215.4 million, in part because Apple saw shipments of the iPhone drop in recent quarters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to make PC security alerts better? Make them twirl, jiggle

Have you ever ignored a security alert on your PC? You’re not the only one.The warnings are designed to save us from malware infections and hacking risks, but often times we’ll neglect them. It could be because we’re too busy or we’ve seen them too many times, and we've become conditioned to dismiss them -- even the most serious ones, according to Anthony Vance, a professor at Brigham Young University.Vance has been studying the problem and he’s found that introducing certain small, but noticeable changes, can make the alerts more useful and harder to ignore.  "Our security UI (user interface) needs to be designed to be compatible with the way our brains work," he said at the USENIX Enigma 2017 conference on Tuesday. "Not against it."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to make PC security alerts better? Make them twirl, jiggle

Have you ever ignored a security alert on your PC? You’re not the only one.The warnings are designed to save us from malware infections and hacking risks, but often times we’ll neglect them. It could be because we’re too busy or we’ve seen them too many times, and we've become conditioned to dismiss them -- even the most serious ones, according to Anthony Vance, a professor at Brigham Young University.Vance has been studying the problem and he’s found that introducing certain small, but noticeable changes, can make the alerts more useful and harder to ignore.  "Our security UI (user interface) needs to be designed to be compatible with the way our brains work," he said at the USENIX Enigma 2017 conference on Tuesday. "Not against it."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Anuta Networks NCX: Overcoming Skepticism

Anuta Networks demonstrated their NCX network/service orchestration product at Network Field Day 14.

Disclaimer
Anuta Networks page at TechFieldDay.com with videos of their presentations

Anuta's promise with NCX is to provide a vendor and platform agnostic network provisioning tool with a slick user interface and powerful management / provisioning features.

I was skeptical, especially after seeing the impossibly long list of supported platforms.

Impossible!
Network device configurations are complicated! They've got endless features, each of which is tied to others the others in unpredictable ways. Sure, seasoned network ops folks have no problem hopping around a text configuration to discover the ways in which ACLs, prefix lists, route maps, class maps, service policies, interfaces, and whatnot relate to one another... But capturing these complicated relationships in a GUI? In a vendor independent way?

I left the presentation with an entirely different perspective, and a desire to try it out on a network I manage. Seriously, I have a use case for this thing. Here's why I was wrong:

Not a general purpose UI
Okay, so it's a provisioning system, not a general purpose UI. Setup is likely nontrivial because it requires you to consider the types of services Continue reading

BrandPost: The business case for continuous delivery

Originally posted on the Puppet blog, and republished here with Puppet's permission.We’re often so focused on crafting code that we forget the reason why: to deliver a better experience for our users and help our business grow. Let's take a step back and look at how continuous delivery can help your organization reach its goals. And when you’re done here, make sure to get even more details on continuous delivery in the full ebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 Common tech hiring mistakes to avoid

This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editorsFinding the right hire for IT can be a chore, and if you get it wrong, the consequences can be substantial. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a bad hire costs at least 30% of the initial annual salary, but that number is believed to be much higher. It’s a mistake that companies simply can’t afford to make in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 Common tech hiring mistakes to avoid

This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editors

Finding the right hire for IT can be a chore, and if you get it wrong, the consequences can be substantial. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a bad hire costs at least 30% of the initial annual salary, but that number is believed to be much higher. It’s a mistake that companies simply can’t afford to make in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meet the $114,725 Ubuntu server with eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs

The Ibex Pro is one supercharged machine that will probably hurt your electric bill.System76's fastest Ibex Pro with Ubuntu Server 16.10 packs some crazy horsepower with Intel's latest 22-core Xeon E5 v4 chips and eight Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics processors.It's got the same number of GPUs as Nvidia's superfast DGX-1, which is being used for deep learning. System76 is targeting the Ibex Pro -- which is a rack server -- at the same market as the DGX-1. The server has fewer, but newer, CPUs, compared to the DGX-1.An entry-level Ibex Pro priced at US $9,575 will run Ubuntu Server 16.10, with a six-core Intel Xeon E5-2603v4 chip, 16GB of memory, a Tesla K40 GPU, and 250GB of storage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump immigration halt casts dark cloud over next IETF gathering

The Internet Engineering Task Force’s upcoming meeting in Chicago might have fewer attendees than usual, thanks to the Trump administration’s broad immigration ban.Several lengthy discussions on the group’s mailing list highlight the fact that some regular attendees at the IETF’s meetings could have trouble attending IETF 98, which is scheduled for Chicago in March.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Busted: Federal Reserve employee mined bitcoin using government server + Trump to sign cybersecurity order calling for government-wide reviewTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump stresses cybersecurity but postpones executive order

U.S. President Donald Trump called on government agencies to better protect their networks, but he delayed signing an executive order to kick-start a government-wide review of cybersecurity policy.A draft copy of the order, leaked earlier, would give the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security 60 days to submit a list of recommendations to protect U.S. government and private networks. Trump had been scheduled to sign the executive order Tuesday but canceled shortly before it was due to happen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump stresses cybersecurity but postpones executive order

U.S. President Donald Trump called on government agencies to better protect their networks, but he delayed signing an executive order to kick-start a government-wide review of cybersecurity policy.A draft copy of the order, leaked earlier, would give the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security 60 days to submit a list of recommendations to protect U.S. government and private networks. Trump had been scheduled to sign the executive order Tuesday but canceled shortly before it was due to happen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper battles Cisco, Huawei with new cloud infrastructure software, switches

Helping customers transform their enterprise environments to the cloud is the driving strategy behind new software, switches and services introduced this week from Juniper Networks. The networking company is introducing what it calls the third pillar of its Unite architecture – the previous two focusing on enterprise and branch office networking. Unite Cloud combines Juniper’s switches and software to simplify management and growth of corporate cloud computing. +More on Network World: Has Cisco broken out of the network hardware box?+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: BGP in 2016

Figure 2 illustrates an important principle in BGP, that there is no single authoritative view of the routing table – all views are in fact relative to the perspective of the BGP speaker. It also illustrates that at times the cause of changes in routing is not necessarily a change at the point of origination of the route which would be visible to all BGP speakers across the entire Internet, but it may well be a change in transit arrangements within the interior of the network that may expose, or hide, collections of routes. And thirdly, this illustrates the prevalent use of more specifics to affect traffic engineering. It is often the case that these more specifics are advertised with a limited scope, and if the changes to the transit arrangements move a BGP speaker in or out of this scope, then one can expect changes in the set of visible routes as a consequence. —Potaroo

The post Worth Reading: BGP in 2016 appeared first on 'net work.

The $475 S key

I have a Macbook Air, purchased from the Apple Refurb store about two years ago. It now has a dead key. It’s the S key. After cleaning it with compressed air, it worked badly for a while and is now dead. A query to the local Apple repair shop indicates it’s fixable for about $380. One look at the iFixit repair PDF, and it’s easy to see that it’s very labor intensive. For. One. Key. I obtained an appointment at the area Apple Store Genius Bar. After about 40 minutes, it was determined that Apple could repair my MacBook Air. The price would be $475, but that would include other refurbishments as determined at the time, perhaps including a new battery or whatever else was found “wrong” with the machine. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google upgrades G Suite with tools for IT pros

Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google upgrades G Suite with tools for IT pros

Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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