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Category Archives for "Networking"

More than 80% of healthcare IT leaders say their systems have been compromised

Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other kind of cyberattack during the past two years, according to a survey by KPMG.The KPMG report also states that only half of those executives feel that they are adequately prepared to prevent future attacks. The attacks place sensitive patient data at risk of exposure, KPMG said.The 2015 KPMG Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey polled 223 CIOs, CTOs, chief security officers and chief compliance officers at healthcare providers and health plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Musing on Nerd Knobs

Henk left a wonderful comment on my SDN will not solve real-life enterprise problems blog post. He started with a bit of sarcasm:

SDN will give more control and flexibility over the network to the customer/user/network-admin. They will be able to program their equipment themselves, they will be able to tweak routing algorithms in the central controller. They get APIs to hook into the heart of the intelligence. They get more config-knobs. It's gonna be awesome.

However, he thinks (and I agree) that this vision doesn’t make sense:

Read more ...

Creating Templates for TextFSM and ntc_show_command

Less than two weeks ago I wrote a post about an Ansible module called ntc_show_command. For those that didn’t read that post, you should, but ntc_show_command is a multi-vendor module that can automate converting raw text from show commands into structured data, namely JSON.

We’ve already had several pull requests enhancing the architecture, so the community support is off to a great start! But in order to really make an impact, we (me, you, and fellow network engineers) need to continue to contribute templates to the project repository. Templates are key to converting the raw text into JSON.

This post will walk through how to create a template for two different commands. We’ll take a look at show version for Cisco NX-OS and display version for HP Comware 7.

The first thing that we’ll need to do is get the raw text output that we want to JSONify. We’ll start with show version.

Below is the sample output that we’ll work with and this file will be saved as tests/cisco_nxos/cisco_nxos_show_version.raw within our project directory.

Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) Software
TAC support: http://www.cisco.com/tac
Copyright (C) 2002-2014, Cisco and/or its affiliates.
All rights reserved.
The copyrights to certain  Continue reading

Codec Negotiations in Your CCIE Collaboration Preparation

Codec negotiation is a topic that gets glossed over without much consideration in the studies of most students. There’s really not much to it, right? All we have to do is slap a couple of Regions on two different system endpoints and…voila, we have successfully negotiated a codec! Can it be that simple? Like most answers to rhetorical questions in the tech world, “It depends.” A simplistic approach like the one just described above is a great place to start, but it doesn’t take into account key call flow elements such as early/delayed offer, Audio Codec Preference Lists, or call routing across CUBE, CUCM or CUCME. What if the codec should be different based on the originator of the call? These are all examples of key issues involving codec negotiation that we must wrap our mind around if we are to be successful in our CCIE Collaboration endeavors.

Let’s examine the requirement of routing a call between a 9971 Phone registered to the HQ CUCM cluster (HQ Phone 1) and a 7965 Phone registered to the SB CUCM cluster (SB Phone 1). In this example, consider that a SIP Trunk is configured directly between clusters in order to route Continue reading

Linux Core 6.3 as Routing and Switching VMware Appliance

Two weeks ago I finished creating a network host based on Linux Core 6.3 installed on WMware x86-64 virtual machine. I loaded Core Linux with several network extensions that allows host to generate, measure, route network traffic and scan networks. I also wrote a short article that contains a list of loaded extension.

Then I went further with the ​project and my goal was to build L3 switch and router based on  Core Linux 6.3 loaded with Open vSwitch, Quagga, Bird and Keepalived extension. Those are the right extensions that turned the network host  to routing and switching appliance. Furthermore the routing daemons Quagga and Bird and multilayer switch Open vSwitch are used in many large production networks.

The R&S appliance I built can be used for learning networking on Linux, routing and switching. It is available for download in Download section. For those who are interested in installation steps the whole process of extension installation  is described in this article.

The virtual VMware appliance is based on Linux Core network host image and it contains all the extensions listed here plus the following extensions:

openvswitch - 2.4.90
quagga - 0.99.24.1
bird - 1.5.0
keepalived - 1.2.19

Note Continue reading

Smart refrigerator hack exposes Gmail login credentials

A team of hackers recently discovered a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in a Samsung smart refrigerator that can be exploited to steal Gmail users' login credentials, The Register reported this week.Hackers from security company Pen Test Partners discovered the flaw while participating in an Internet of Things (IoT) hacking challenge at the Def Con security conference earlier this month. The smart refrigerator, Samsung model RF28HMELBSR, is designed to integrate the user's Gmail Calendar with its display. Samsung implemented SSL to secure the Gmail integration, but the hackers found that the device does not validate SSL certificates, opening the opportunity for hackers to access the network and monitor activity for the user name and password used to link the refrigerator to Gmail.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here