Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Enhances Data Correlation With OpenTelemetry (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we’re talking about OpenTelemetry with sponsor Cisco ThousandEyes. OpenTelemetry is an open collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs to help share telemetry data among different monitoring and analysis platforms to improve data correlation and visibility. ThousandEyes, the first network visibility platform to support OpenTelemetry, joins the podcast to discuss how it works, use cases, and more.

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Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Enhances Data Correlation With OpenTelemetry (Sponsored)

Why Do YOU Have To Do It?

One of the things that I’ve seen as a common thread among people in the industry as of late is the subject of burnout. Sure, burnout is a common topic no matter what year we’re in but a lot more of what I’m starting to hear about is self-inflicted burnout. Taking on too many projects, doing more than one job, and even having too many things going on outside of your specific role are all contributors to burnout. How can we keep that from happening?

Atlas and His Burden

For me, one of the biggest reasons why I find myself swimming in frustration is because I am very quick to volunteer to do things. In part it’s because I want to make sure the job is done correctly. In another part it’s because I want to be seen as someone that is always willing to get things done. Add in a dash of people pleasing and you can see how this spirals out of control. I’m sure you’ve even heard that as a career advice at some point. I’ve even railed against it many times on this blog.

How can you overcome the impulse to want to volunteer to do Continue reading

US-led ‘Fab 4’ chip alliance meets to coordinate supply chain resilience

Senior officials from US, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea meet to discuss ways to establish an early warning system and help ensure a more resilient global semiconductor supply chain.

Wi-Fi HaLow: Wireless for the internet of things

Wi-Fi HaLow, the marketing term the Wi-Fi Alliance has chosen for the IEEE 802.11ah standard, is a long- range, low-power, low-speed version of traditional Wi-Fi. It shows promise with deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, wearables, machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, smart buildings, and smart cities.With the ability to connect low-bandwidth devices to IP networks including the internet, it supports enough bandwidth to handle HD-quality video and can even be used for rural communications and offloading cell phone tower traffic.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco, Intel collaborate to build private 5G services

Cisco and Intel have teamed up on private 5G for enterprise and IOT use cases.During the Mobile World Conference (MWC) this week, Cisco also made other 5G announcements including its Meraki 5G cellular gateways for fixed-wireless access and linking up with NTT, NEC, and Qualcomm to offer 5G services.Many enterprises are still kicking the tires on private 5G service, and many will continue to use 4G LTE for a long time, but 5G  is definitely drawing interest, according to Patrick Filkins, research manager, with the IoT and Telecom Network Infrastructure group at IDC. “We expect that by 2026, roughly 80% to 90% of enterprises will have incorporated private 5G as part of their network. Some will benefit from the enhanced mobile-broadband aspect, but many will dig into the advanced features yet to come.”To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 419: HPE Buys Athonet For Private 5G; Exit Public Cloud, Save Millions?

Is the private 5G market big enough to justify HPE's acquisition of Athonet? Is saving money worth retreating from public cloud? Why are organizations still getting bit by basic cloud misconfigurations? Will an appetite for AI deliver results for Nvidia? We explore these and other questions in the latest Network Break podcast.

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Network Break 419: HPE Buys Athonet For Private 5G; Exit Public Cloud, Save Millions?

How Cloud Technology Enables Proactive Security for Businesses

Fortinet’s John Maddison Discusses the Convergence of Network and Security and Its Role in An Evolving Threat Landscape

3 things network pros need to tell developers about why the network matters

Of the 47 enterprises I chatted with in December, guess how many were NOT users of hybrid cloud. Zero. Guess how many ever used another cloud model. Zero. Guess how many believe they will "move everything to the cloud". Zero. OK, I realize that you may not have read this sort of thing very often or at all, but I think it demonstrates just how important hybrid cloud is and how little we really know about it. That’s bad in that it’s always a bad thing when something critical is hardly understood, but it could be a good thing for network professionals looking to engage again with their company IT planning process.To read this article in full, please click here

Who Are The Most Overpaid Tech CEOs?

This post originally appeared in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure newsletter. You can get the newsletter for free here. Or don’t. That’s fine too. The tech sector has recently gone through a spasm of layoffs. Tens of thousands of jobs have been cut at companies such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and Salesforce. The cuts are […]

The post Who Are The Most Overpaid Tech CEOs? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

War tests Ukrainian telecom, internet resilience

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s overall resilience and defiance has been inspiring, but telecommunications and internet connectivity has grown much more difficult.Initially the country’s internet network mostly withstood with some outages and slowdowns, but that has changed over time as the aggressors devote more effort in destroying physical locations and deploying malware and other cybersecurity weapons.For example, researchers at Top10VPN recently reported some distressing analysis including:To read this article in full, please click here

War tests Ukrainian telecom, internet resilience

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s overall resilience and defiance has been inspiring, but telecommunications and internet connectivity has grown much more difficult.Initially the country’s internet network mostly withstood with some outages and slowdowns, but that has changed over time as the aggressors devote more effort in destroying physical locations and deploying malware and other cybersecurity weapons.For example, researchers at Top10VPN recently reported some distressing analysis including:To read this article in full, please click here

Suspending Devices in netlab Labs

A networking engineer tired of waiting for network devices to start sent me this question:

Can you suspend VMs in netlab? I use this trick in vSphere with CSR1Kv.

TL&DR: Maybe. Probably not.

Automation 22. How to Use NetBox Scripts To Add Value To Your Network Source of Truth

Dear friend,

Source of Truth plays crucial role in network automation as this is the basis we are automating our IT and network infrastructure against. It doesn’t mean to be monitoring system in any capacity. At the same time, it may be useful to quickly do some checks against your network infrastructure and to update some metadata in the Source of Truth.

Oh, Are You Talking About NetBox Again?

Yes, we are. NetBox is a leading tool in the source of truth framework. Being open-source, it by far outpaces all other open-source and commercial tools existing worldwide in this area. On top of its wide built-in capabilities, it is highly extensible via plugins and scripts.

The good news is that we covered NetBox in our Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training, and you can benefit from learning it from the context of network automation with integrations to Python and Ansible tools, which you create during our training.

We offer the following training programs for you:

• Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training
• High-scale automation with Nornir
• Ansible Automation Orchestration with Ansble Tower / AWX
• Expert-level training: Closed-loop Automation and Next-generation Monitoring

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

• Success and failure Continue reading

What’s Next For DPUs? – Packet Pushers Livestream With Dell Technologies – Video

How will the Data Processing Unit (DPU) market evolve? Are there new use cases for this infrastructure platform? Greg Ferro from the Packet Pushers and Joseph White, Fellow at Dell Technologies, look into the crystal ball to see where DPUs might go. This video is sponsored by Dell Technologies. You can subscribe to the Packet […]

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Using Python Logging to Figure Out What You Did Wrong

As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

I use too many print statements to figure out what’s going on. Get an object and print it to screen to make sure it’s right. Do a calculation and print the result. There are so many print statements in my code that I had to start using a debug variable to tell it when to print stuff. I even use that technique in my functions.

# Don't do stuff like this
def myFunc(string_to_return, debug=False):
    if debug:
        print(f"Returning \"{string_to_return}\"")
    return string_to_return

local_debug = True
string_to_send = "Aaron wastes a lot of time with print statements."

if local_debug:
    print(f"I'm sending \"{string_to_send}\"")
myString = myFunc(string_to_send, debug=True)
print(myString)

It’s painful to look at this code. I need a better solution, and I found Python’s logging module.

Very simply, you associate your messages with one of five logging levels (debug, info, warning, error, Continue reading

Careful Control of Keys: How I Use MFA with the AWS CLI

Passwords suffer from an inherent risk: whoever possess the password inherits the privileges granted by that password. If the possessor is the intended person, then all is good. Otherwise, all is not so good because it means an unintended person has access to the system the password is guarding.

Read the rest of this post.

Weekend Reads 022423

A decade ago, waferscale architectures were dismissed as impractical. Five years ago, they were touted as a fringe possibility for AI/ML. But the next decade might demonstrate waferscale as one of only a few bridges across the post-Mooreâ€s Law divide, at least for some applications.

This is not a ‘silver bullet’, however. In comparison to the sophisticated deception available in traditional IT security, deception in ICS still faces some challenges.

As a numbers guy, Iâ€m always intrigued by the Ookla Speedtest Global Index since it provides an interesting look at broadband speeds in the U.S. and around the world.

Two new separate sets of research released this month underscore real, hidden dangers to physical operations in today’s OT networks from wireless devices, cloud-based applications, and nested networks of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) — effectively further dispelling conventional wisdom about the security of network segmentation as well as third-party connections to the network.

As organizations strengthen their defenses and take a more proactive approach to protection, attackers are adapting their techniques and increasing the sophistication of their operations.

As the security of the Android Platform has been steadily improved, some security researchers have shifted their focus towards other Continue reading