Cisco CEO John Chambers Gets Cocky on His Final Earnings Call
IoT greatness and the 'wrong' predictions about SDN are on John Chambers' mind in his last earnings call.
CloudFlare Supports the Passage of the USA Freedom Act
Earlier today, the lower house in the U.S. Congress (the House of Representatives) passed the USA FREEDOM Act. The Act, if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would seek to sunset the National Security Agency’s bulk collection and mass surveillance programs, which may or may not be authorized by Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Under this authority the U.S. government has established its broad surveillance programs to indiscriminately collect information. Other governments have followed this lead to create additional surveillance capabilities—most recently, the French Parliament has moved a bill that would allow broad surveillance powers with little judicial oversight.
Restricting routine bulk collection is important: it’s not the government’s job to collect everything that passes over the Internet. The new version of the USA FREEDOM Act keeps useful authorities but ends bulk collection of private data under the PATRIOT Act. It also increases the transparency of the secret FISA court, which reviews surveillance programs—a key start to understanding and fixing broken policies around surveillance. The Act would also allow companies to be more transparent in their reporting related to FISA orders.
To be clear, we continue to be supportive of law enforcement and work Continue reading
With VSAP, Nuage Can Read Any SDN Underlay
A network visibility tool lets Nuage users peer into any underlay network.
Cisco Still Loves ASICs, as EZchip Discovers the Hard Way
A chipmaker's stock plunges as Cisco returns to ASICs on a key platform.
VMware Says Customers Are Betting Big on NSX
A new twist on counting SDN customers: Who's really committed?
Featured Video & White Paper: Cisco’s GBP to OpenStack
Cisco highlights its group-based policy (GBP) abstractions for OpenStack, a declarative policy model that simplifies application-oriented interfaces.
Public Key Authentication on Cisco IOS
Have you ever been in that situation that you needed to apply the same configuration quickly on multiple Cisco routers? If yes, youPublic Key Authentication on Cisco IOS
Have you ever been in that situation that you needed to apply the same configuration quickly on multiple Cisco routers? If yes, you probably wrote a script that connected to routers and sent appropriate IOS commands. One problem that you certainly had to solved was forcing your script to enter login credentials such as username and password. Moreover if you secure an access to privileged user mode of routers with an enable secret command you had to tell the script how to enter that password as well.
All the issues I have mentioned above can be easily solved with Expect scripting language. Expect sends commands via telnet or ssh session as the human would. However encapsulating IOS commands to syntax recognized by Expect language every time you need to change routers' configuration seems to be not very comfortable. That is why public key authentication for Cisco routers can be handy.
Public key authentication allows you to log in to your routers using RSA key instead of a password. But firstly key-pair - public and private key must be generated and a public key copied into a config file of the router. Then you can connect to the router with your private key. A private key is the key that should Continue reading
SDN: Integration over Manipulation
I’d like to briefly express a sentiment that I pondered after listening to another one of Ivan’s great podcasts, specifically regarding the true value of a software-defined network approach. The statement was made that ACLs are terrible representations of business policy. This is not inaccurate, but the fact remains that ACLs are currently the de facto representation of business policy on a network device. The “network team” gets a request from an application team to “fix the firewall”, and the policy that is applied to enable that application typically results in an ACL change.
If you’ve ever been in this situation, you likely realize this entire process probably takes some time. Either the application team doesn’t know what exactly needs to be changed, or the network team is too busy, or both. Clearly, there’s a problem. And more often than not, this discussion becomes all about the forwarding architecture.
Oh yes, with old-school ACLs we could only match on a few things - IP subnets, TCP ports, that's about it. But now with OpenFlow - we can match on **EtherType**!! We're saved!!
Don’t be misled - the value of an SDN architecture does not lie in the fact that we can do Continue reading