Warning: The Cost of Cyberattacks Can Break the Bank

Automation 19. Enabling OCP SONiC To Be Managed Via GNMI With pyGNMI

Dear friend,

We hope you are doing great and had a nice time over the festive period to recharge your batteries towards the new year. We wish it to be successful, productive and prosperous. With this, let’s dive into the topic of today’s blog, which is network automation for OCP SONiC with GNMI and Python over pyGNMI.

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Do I Need to Automate SONiC? How Can I Do It?

SONiC, which stands for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, is a Network Operating System (NOS). SONiC’s main purpose is to run on the data center switches and provide simple and reliable connectivity between endpoints (Baremetal servers, virtual machines, containers, etc). As it is a piece of the network software, which runs on network hardware, it is for sure requires automation.

The good news is that it supports RESTCONF and GNMI with OpenConfig YANG modules, which we extensively cover in our Network Automation Trainings:

We offer the Continue reading

Should ‘Chrome Enhanced Protection’ Be The Default ?

SCP not working with MacOS 13 Ventura?

You have updated your MacOS to version 13 (Ventura) and a simple SCP to a network device does not work anymore? In fact, this is normal, here is the reason and how to solve this. The symptom The SCP command that you have already done thousands of times to upload or download a file from/to a network device gives an error, for example: ~ scp nxos64-cs.10.2.4.M.bin admin@myswitch:bootflash:/// (admin@myswitch) Password: subsystem request failed on channel 0 scp: Connection closed   The reason The SCP protocol has been deprecated in OpenSSH 9.0 which…

The post SCP not working with MacOS 13 Ventura? appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

Making It Work in 2023

We’re back to the first of the year once again. January 1, 2023 is a Sunday which feels somewhat subdued. That stands in contrast to the rest of the year that felt like a rollercoaster always one heartbeat away from careening out of control. As is the tradition, I’ll look at the things I wanted to spend more time working on in 2022:

• More Analytical Content: I have to honestly give myself a no on this one, at least from a technical perspective. I did spend some time making analytical content for my Tomversations series. However, the real difference in analytical content came from my posts about leadership and more “soft skill” focused ideas. I’ve gotten more comments about those posts than anything in 2022 and I couldn’t be more proud.
• Saying No to More Things: This is the part where I would insert an animated GIF of someone laughing manically. While I did make strides in telling people that I have way too much going on to take care of one extra thing the reality is that I took on more things that I probably should have. That’s something that I definitely do need to change but the real Continue reading

2023 Goals

https://codingpackets.com/blog/2023-goals

2022 Working Environment

The change of the year is always a good time to reflect. This year I’ve made major changes in my physical environment by reshaping many of the things about this house we recently moved to in Knoxville. Besides ripping out the entire kitchen, replacing all the floors, and reworking the fireplace, it was a good chance to rethink the office I work in every day. I’m rather persnickety about the lighting, layout, and tools I use (although a lot of people still think I’m crazy for using fairly standard tools, like Word, for writing).

This is my space, pretty much—

I use an adjustable height desk where I’m either leaning or standing—if I want to sit to read something, I normally grab a tablet and sit in the red chair off to the side, or even go someplace else in the house. I prefer not to read on my main computer screen most of the time. I normally keep ambient light to a minimum, and turn my monitor brightness down to pretty minimal, as well—below 20%.

I’m currently running an LG 38in curved monitor. I don’t game, so I care a lot more about resolution than refresh rate, etc. My Continue reading

Operating-Junos-Devices-Using-gRPC-Network-Operations-Interface-gNOI

Please visit following git wiki

https://github.com/kashif-nawaz/Operating-Junos-Devices-Using-gRPC-Network-Operations-Interface-aka-gNOI

2022 Year In Review

https://codingpackets.com/blog/2022-year-in-review

IT Job Market: 2022’s Wild Ride and What to Expect for 2023

Testing Your Weakest Links as a Chain

You may have heard in the news this week that there was a big issue with Southwest Airlines this holiday season. The issues are myriad and this is going to make for some great case studies for students in the future. However, one thing I wanted to touch on briefly in this whole debacle was the issue of a cascade failure.

The short version is that a weather disruption in the flight schedule became a much bigger problem when the process for rescheduling the flight crews was overwhelmed. Turns out that even after the big computer system upgrades and all the IT work that has gone into putting together a modern airfare booking system that one process was still very manual. The air crew rescheduling department was relatively small in nature and couldn’t keep up with the demands placed on it by the disruptions. It got to the point where Southwest had to reduce their number of flights in order to get the system back to normal.

Worst Case Scenario

I’m not an expert at airline scheduling but I have spent a lot of time planning for disaster recovery. One of the things that we focus on more than anything Continue reading

The state of HTTP in 2022

At over thirty years old, HTTP is still the foundation of the web and one of the Internet’s most popular protocols—not just for browsing, watching videos and listening to music, but also for apps, machine-to-machine communication, and even as a basis for building other protocols, forming what some refer to as a “second waist” in the classic Internet hourglass diagram.

What makes HTTP so successful? One answer is that it hits a “sweet spot” for most applications that need an application protocol. “Building Protocols with HTTP” (published in 2022 as a Best Current Practice RFC by the HTTP Working Group) argues that HTTP’s success can be attributed to factors like:

- familiarity by implementers, specifiers, administrators, developers, and users;
- availability of a variety of client, server, and proxy implementations;
- ease of use;
- availability of web browsers;
- reuse of existing mechanisms like authentication and encryption;
- presence of HTTP servers and clients in target deployments; and
- its ability to traverse firewalls.

Another important factor is the community of people using, implementing, and standardising HTTP. We work together to maintain and develop the protocol actively, to assure that it’s interoperable and meets today’s needs. Continue reading

Securing Windows workloads

Containers are a great way to package applications, with minimal libraries required. It guarantees that you will have the same deployment experience, regardless of where the containers are deployed. Container orchestration software pushes this further by preparing the necessary foundation to create containers at scale.

Linux and Windows support containerized applications and can participate in a container orchestration solution. There is an incredible number of guides and how-to articles on Linux containers and container orchestration, but these resources get scarce when it comes to Windows, which can discourage companies from running Windows workloads.

This blog post will examine how to set up a Windows-based Kubernetes environment to run Windows workloads and secure them using Calico Open Source. By the end of this post, you will see how simple it is to apply your current Kubernetes skills and knowledge to rule a hybrid environment.

Windows containers

A container is similar to a lightweight packaging technique. Each container packages an application in an isolated environment that shares its kernel with the underlying host, making it bound by the limits of the host operating system. These days, everyone is familiar with Linux containers, a popular way to run Linux-based binary files in an Continue reading

5 Top Network Detection and Response Tools for 2023

Microsoft AZ-700 completed

I just passed the Microsoft AZ-700 exam, Designing and Implementing Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions, which means I am now certified in the two major clouds (AWS and Azure) when it comes to networking. As always after an exam, I write a summary of my experience with it and the resources I used. This is this post.

What is AZ-700?

This exam is for those that want to get certified on the networking component of Azure. Microsoft describes the exam in the following manner:

Candidates for this exam should have subject matter expertise in planning, implementing, and maintaining Azure networking solutions, including hybrid networking, connectivity, routing, security, and private access to Azure services

The breakdown of major topics and their percentage is the following:

• Design, implement, and manage hybrid networking (10-15%)
• Design and implement core networking infrastructure (20-25%)
• Design and implement routing (25-30%)
• Secure and monitor networks (15-20%)
• Design and implement Private access to Azure Services (10-15%)

There is a more detailed breakdown available as well. Always go through the exam blueprint before studying for a certification.

How to study for AZ-700

My goal when studying for this exam was to build a proficiency working with networking in Azure. That Continue reading

Understanding Kubernetes Autoscaling

Hedge 159: Roundtable on SONiC, Antipatterns, and Resilience through Acquisition

In this last episode of 2022, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ sit around and talk about some interesting things going on in the world of network engineering. We start with a short discussion about SONiC, which we intend to build at least one full episode about sometime in 2023. We also discuss state and antipatterns, and finally the idea of acquiring another company to build network resilience.

download

US-China chip war puts global enterprises in the crosshairs

While the Biden administration’s ban on exports of certain chip technology to China is targeted at China’s military and industrial use, enterprises across the world will find their supply chains disrupted.

Routing Protocol Implementation Evaluation in Fat-Trees

Network design discussions often involve anecdotal evidence, and the arguments for preferring something follow up with “We should do X because at Y place, we did this.”. This is alright in itself as we want to bring the experience to avoid repeating past mistakes in the future. Still, more often than not, it feels like we have memorized the answers and without reading the question properly, we want to write down the answer vs. learning the problem and solution space, putting that into the current context we are trying to solve with discussions about various tradeoffs and picking the best solution in the given context. Our best solution for the same problem may change as the context changes. Also, this problem is everywhere. For example: Take a look at this twitter thread

Maybe one way to approach on how to think is to adopt stochastic thinking and add qualifications while making a case if we don’t have all the facts. The best engineers I have seen do apply similar thought processes. As world-class poker player Annie Duke points out in Thinking in Bets, even if you start at 90%, your ego will have a much easier time with Continue reading

Learning Rust, assisted by ChatGPT

I finally got around to learn Rust. Well, starting to.

It’s amazing.

I’m comparing this to learning Basic, C, C++, Erlang, Fortran, Go, Javascript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Prolog and Python. I wouldn’t say I know all these languages well, but I do know C, C++, Go, and Python pretty well.

I can critique all these languages, but I’ve not found anything frustrating or stupid in Rust yet.

Rust is like taking C++, but all the tricky parts are now the default, and checked at compile time.

Copies

With C++11 we got move semantics, so we have to carefully disable the (usually) default-created copy constructor and copy assignments, or if you have to allow copies then every single use of the type has to be very careful to not trigger copies unless absolutely necessary.

And you have to consider exactly when RVO kicks in. And even the best of us will sometimes get it wrong, especially with refactors. E.g. who would have thought that adding this optimization would suddenly trigger a copy of the potentially very heavy Obj object, a copy that was not there before?

--- before.cc   2022-12-28 10:32:50.969273274 +0000
+++ after.cc    2022-12-28 10:32:50.969273274 +0000
 Continue reading