Integrating our Integrations: Getting WHMCS and cPanel Talking
CloudFlare provides integrations for several of the most popular hosting control panels and billing systems such as WHMCS, cPanel, and Plesk. Each of these integrations provide a simple interface for our partners’ customers to sign-up for CloudFlare and start adding domains almost immediately.
But what about partners that use more than one system? The best experience occurs when we can get our integrations talking to each other, as our recently updated WHMCS and cPanel plugins do.
Integration Basics
All of our hosting integrations speak directly to CloudFlare through our host API. With just a single click, the integration passes the necessary information for CloudFlare to create an account and provision the domain. We respond when the provisioning completes, and the integration finishes the setup by making the necessary changes locally (adding and adjusting several DNS records) to route traffic to the domain through CloudFlare.
This makes signing up through a hosting partner integration even easier than signing up directly with CloudFlare. These proven systems make DNS changes accurately in order to save a lot of headaches.
Where do I integrate CloudFlare?
Many hosting companies expose two different applications to their customers: a billing system and a hosting control panel. The Continue reading
The trajectory of Open Daylight
When the Open Daylight project started, it was clear that the intent on the part of IBM and RedHat was to replicate the success of Linux.
Linux is today a de-facto monopoly on server operating systems. It is monetized by Redhat (and in smaller part by Canonical) and it essentially allowed the traditional I.T. companies such as IBM, Oracle, HP to neutralize Sun microsystems which was in the late 90s, early naughts, the platform of choice for Web application deployment.
Whether the initial target of these companies was Sun or Microsoft, the fact is that, by coming together in support of a open source project that had previously been an hobby of university students they inaugurated the era of corporate open source.
This was followed by a set of successful startup companies that used open source as a way to both create a much deeper engagement with their customers and of marketing their products. By originating and curating an open source project, a startup can achieve a much greater reach than before. The open source product becomes a free trial license, later monetized in
production deployments that typically need support. Open source also provides a way to engage with Continue reading
CALIENT Technologies Featured Interview: Pod Architecture & Cloud Data Centers with LightConnect Fabric
In this featured interview with Atiq Raza, chairman and CEO of Calient, we learn about the new challenges driving the future of data center design and how the growing popularity of POD architecture simplifies the need for managing operations.
sFlow Creator Peter Phaal On Taming The Wilds Of SDN & Virtual Networking
InMon president Peter Phaal shares his thoughts on the power of Open Switching Platforms and the Software Defined Data Center.
Lab: iBGP and OSPF Traffic Engineering
Click to enlarge
Here’s the scenario: An enterprise network with an MPLS core and two branch locations connected to their own Provider Edge (PE) router. In addition to the MPLS link, the PEs are also connected via a DMVPN tunnel. The PEs are peering via iBGP (of course) and are also OSPF neighbors on the DMVPN. Both Customer Edge (CE) routers at the branch are OSPF neighbors with their local PE.
Task: Use the high speed MPLS network as the primary path between the CE routers and only use the DMVPN network if the MPLS network becomes unavailable.
Question: Is the solution as simple as adjusting the Admin Distance (AD) so that the iBGP routes are more preferred?
Default State
The obvious first issue is the default AD for iBGP (200) is higher than the default AD of OSPF (110) which means the OSPF path over the DMVPN is going to be preferred. This is confirmed if we do a traceroute from R5 to R6:
R5#traceroute 6.6.6.6 source lo5
1 10.0.45.4 2 msec 0 msec 1 msec
2 10.10.10.7 17 msec 17 msec 17 msec
3 10.0.67.6 18 Continue readingThe Problem with Peanuts
I was hungry. Perhaps that’s a good excuse, or perhaps not. Either way, I sat down after ordering, took a peanut, broke the nuts out of the shell, and ate them.
After eating the peanut, I felt less hungry. So I picked up another one and ate it, as well. Soon enough, long before I order came out in fact, I wasn’t really hungry any longer. I still ate, of course, because I’d bought the burger, and it was a good burger. The fries were pretty good, too. The sweet tea wasn’t shabby, either.
But I thought about the peanut it all started with as I ate the burger. You see, a peanut solved my hunger problem. So it one peanut solves my hunger, why couldn’t a pile of peanuts solve world hunger? So I took a pile of peanuts and put them on the table, considering something I’d never thought about before — I could solve world hunger. Right here, right now, in this place, I could actually solve a major problem the world has been struggling with for thousands of years.
Okay, but then where would I get these peanuts? The place I was in had boxes stacked Continue reading