How to Keep Distractions From Hampering IT Staff Performance
In today's turbulent world, staying focused can be a serious challenge. Keeping your IT team on-target requires both understanding and support.History of Ethernet Encapsulations
Henk Smit conscientiously pointed out a major omission I made when summarizing Peter Paluch’s excellent description of how bits get parsed in network headers:
EtherType? What do you mean EtherType? There are/were 4 types of Ethernet encapsulation. Only one of them (ARPA encapsulation) has an EtherType. The other 3 encapsulations do not have an EtherType field.
What is he talking about? Time for another history lesson1.
History of Ethernet Encapsulations
Henk Smit conscientiously pointed out a major omission I made when summarizing Peter Paluch’s excellent description of how bits get parsed in network headers:
EtherType? What do you mean EtherType? There are/were 4 types of Ethernet encapsulation. Only one of them (ARPA encapsulation) has an EtherType. The other 3 encapsulations do not have an EtherType field.
What is he talking about? Time for another history lesson1.
Partial Cloudflare outage on October 25, 2022
Today, a change to our Tiered Cache system caused some requests to fail for users with status code 530. The impact lasted for almost six hours in total. We estimate that about 5% of all requests failed at peak. Because of the complexity of our system and a blind spot in our tests, we did not spot this when the change was released to our test environment.
The failures were caused by side effects of how we handle cacheable requests across locations. At first glance, the errors looked like they were caused by a different system that had started a release some time before. It took our teams a number of tries to identify exactly what was causing the problems. Once identified we expedited a rollback which completed in 87 minutes.
We’re sorry, and we’re taking steps to make sure this does not happen again.
Background
One of Cloudflare’s products is our Content Delivery Network, or CDN. This is used to cache assets for websites globally. However, a data center is not guaranteed to have an asset cached. It could be new, expired, or has been purged. If that happens, and a user requests that asset, our CDN needs Continue reading
Palo commit and rollback
Palo Alto firewalls use the concept of a running config to hold the devices live configuration and the candidate config is copy of the running config where changes are made. A Commit operation causes the running config to be overwritten by the candidate config activating the changes.
4 Ways SSDs Are Failing Your Applications…and What You Can Do About It
Accelerated SSDs can help overcome the challenges commodity SSDs have in keeping up with the demands of the modern data center.Zero trust in the cloud: Best practices and potential pitfalls
Architecturally speaking, cloud-native applications are broken down into smaller components that are highly dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral. Because each of these components is communicating with other components inside or outside the cluster, this architecture introduces new attack vectors that are difficult to protect against using a traditional perimeter-based approach. A prudent way to secure cloud-native applications is to find a way to reduce the number of attack vectors, and this is where the principles of zero trust come into play.
With today’s multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, networks are no longer restricted to a clear perimeter with clearly defined borders to defend—and cyber criminals are taking advantage of this fact by tricking users and systems into providing unauthorized access. While a lot of zero trust is focused on limiting access from users and devices, organizations are now also recognizing that in the world of distributed cloud-native applications, workloads themselves are communicating with each other and the same principles of zero trust need to be extended to cloud-native applications.
Because traditional security methods such as network firewalls rely on fixed network addresses, they are insufficient to protect dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral cloud-native workloads, which do not have fixed network addresses. They simply Continue reading
Email Routing leaves Beta
Email Routing was announced during Birthday Week in 2021 and has been available for free to every Cloudflare customer since early this year. When we launched in beta, we set out to make a difference and provide the most uncomplicated, more powerful email forwarding service on the Internet for all our customers, for free.
We feel we've met and surpassed our goals for the first year. Cloudflare Email Routing is now one of our most popular features and a top leading email provider. We are processing email traffic for more than 550,000 inboxes and forwarding an average of two million messages daily, and still growing month to month.
In February, we also announced that we were acquiring Area1. Merging their team, products, and know-how with Cloudflare was a significant step in strengthening our Email Security capabilities.
All this is good, but what about more features, you ask?
The team has been working hard to enhance Email Routing over the last few months. Today Email Routing leaves beta.
Also, we feel that this could be a good time to give you an update on all the new things we've been adding to the service, including behind-the-scenes and not-so-visible improvements.
Let’s Continue reading
The Number of the Beast or the Practical usage of the Blackhole Community
BGP blackhole filtering is a routing technique used to drop unwanted traffic. Black holes are placed in the parts of a network
The post The Number of the Beast or the Practical usage of the Blackhole Community appeared first on Noction.
Notes from OARC 39
OARC held its fall meeting in Belgrade on October 22 and 23. Here are my impressions of some of the presentations from that meeting.Network Automation Considered Harmful
Some of the blog comments never cease to amaze me. Here’s one questioning the value of network automation:
I think there is a more fundamental reason than the (in my opinion simplistic) lack of skills argument. As someone mentioned on twitter
“Rules make it harder to enact change. Automation is essentially a set of rules.”
We underestimated the fact that infrastructure is a value differentiator for many and that customization and rapid change don’t go hand in hand with automation.
Whenever someone starts using MBA-speak like value differentiator in a technical arguments, I get an acute allergic reaction, but maybe he’s right.
Network Automation Considered Harmful
Some of the blog comments never cease to amaze me. Here’s one questioning the value of network automation:
I think there is a more fundamental reason than the (in my opinion simplistic) lack of skills argument. As someone mentioned on twitter
“Rules make it harder to enact change. Automation is essentially a set of rules.”
We underestimated the fact that infrastructure is a value differentiator for many and that customization and rapid change don’t go hand in hand with automation.
Whenever someone starts using MBA-speak like value differentiator in a technical arguments, I get an acute allergic reaction, but maybe he’s right.
Cleaning Out The Cruft
I spent the weekend doing something I really should have done a long time ago. I went through my piles of technology that I was going to get around to using one day and finally got rid of anything I didn’t recognize. Old access points, old networking gear, and even older widgets that went to devices that I don’t even remember owning.
Do you have one of these piles? Boxes? Corners of your office or cave? The odds are good there’s a pile of stuff that you keep thinking you’re eventually going to get around to doing something with some day. Except some day hasn’t come yet. So maybe it’s time to get rid of that pile. Trust me you’re going to feel better for getting rid of that stuff.
What to do with it? It needs to be properly recycled so don’t just toss it in the trash can. Anything with electric circuits needs to be properly disposed of so look for an electronics recycling facility. Yes, there are stories that electronics recycling isn’t all it’s cracked up to be but it’s better than polluting with e-waste everywhere.
Consider donating the devices to a trade school or other maker Continue reading