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Category Archives for "Networking"

VMware And NVIDIA Focus On The Far Edge To Host Network Services On SmartNICs

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on October 19, 2020. The network edge is desirable new territory for software and hardware vendors. The objective is to get compute, networking, storage, and security features as close as possible to data sources and data-hungry applications. VMware and NVIDIA have launched new initiatives to […]

The post VMware And NVIDIA Focus On The Far Edge To Host Network Services On SmartNICs appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Topology aware fabric analytics

Real-time telemetry from a 5 stage Clos fabric describes how to emulate and monitor the topology shown above using Containerlab and sFlow-RT. This article extends the example to demonstrate how topology awareness enhances analytics.
docker run --rm -it --privileged --network host --pid="host" \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /run/netns:/run/netns \
-v ~/clab:/home/clab -w /home/clab \
ghcr.io/srl-labs/clab bash
Start Containerlab.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sflow-rt/containerlab/master/clos5.yml
Download the Containerlab topology file.
sed -i "s/prometheus/topology/g" clos5.yml
Change the sFlow-RT image from sflow/prometheus to sflow/topology in the Containerlab topology. The sflow/topology image packages sFlow-RT with useful applications that combine topology awareness with analytics.
containerlab deploy -t clos5.yml
Deploy the topology.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sflow-rt/containerlab/master/clos5.json
Download the sFlow-RT topology file.
curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d @clos5.json \
http://localhost:8008/topology/json
Post the topology to sFlow-RT.
Connect to the sFlow-RT Topology application, http://localhost:8008/app/topology/html/. The dashboard confirms that all the links and nodes in the topology are streaming telemetry. There is currently no traffic on the network, so none of the nodes in the topology are sending flow data.
docker exec -it clab-clos5-h1 iperf3 -c 172.16.4.2
Generate traffic. You should see the Nodes No Flows number drop Continue reading

How 6 top SD-WAN and SASE vendors are evolving

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on and continues to impact the way people work, SD-WAN vendors are responding by investing heavily in new capabilities that extend the enterprise edge to wherever workers happen to be—branches, campuses, home offices, co-working spaces, mobile, etc.The main thrust of this evolution in SD-WAN technology is the merger of networking and security functions into a single platform, which most vendors now call Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).Who’s selling SASE, and what do you get? SASE, a term coined by Gartner in 2019, converges SD-WAN with basic security offerings, including encryption, anti-malware, and firewalls, while adding advanced services, such as Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS), Data Leak Prevention (DLP), Secure Internet Gateway (SIG), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).To read this article in full, please click here

Running a Ubuntu VM on a Mac M1

If you’re brand-new to Python and Ansible, you might be a bit reluctant to install a bunch of packages and Ansible collections on your production laptop to start building your automation skills. The usual recommendation I make to get past that hurdle is to create a Ubuntu virtual machine that can be destroyed every time to mess it up.

Creating a virtual machine is trivial on Linux and MacOS with Intel CPU (install VirtualBox and Vagrant). The same toolset no longer works on newer Macs with M1 CPU (VMware Fusion is in tech preview, so we’re getting there), but there’s an amazingly simple alternative: Multipass by Canonical.

A Bird feeder from re-usable plastics – we have to start something small to protect other beings.

Disclaimer: I speak about reducing plastic and still I use a 3d printer to print a very specific fixture, I have weighed in options and plastic that I end up printing will be out there hopefully feeding birds or can safely be re-cycled until I come up with something innovative, as of now this is the least I could come upon re-using old bottles, helping birds feed and using some plastic to print a fixture. If I have to buy a commercial one, that is again some plastic and I won’t end up re-using it as well, so 3d printing this small fixture for me outweighs the other currently viable solution and this is something I can give out to neighbours and they can easily associate with.

Am proud to say that I have started to take some responsibility towards the environment and other living beings, that to say it’s my first step and now I appreciate even more what environmentalists and other people do to protect other beings, earth and fellow human beings which we don’t have any time to notice and appreciate them.

Once I started doing the below things which are very trivial I feel good and Continue reading

Heavy Networking 619: Pluribus Empowers NetOps With Kubernetes Network Visibility (Sponsored)

Today's sponsored Heavy Networking dives into the latest features from Pluribus Networks, including Pluribus KubeTracker, which correlates containers with applications, maps hosts to the network fabric, and more. We also cover FlowTracker and a virtualized packet broker service. Our guest is Alessandro Barbieri, VP Product Management at Pluribus.

The post Heavy Networking 619: Pluribus Empowers NetOps With Kubernetes Network Visibility (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 619: Pluribus Empowers NetOps With Kubernetes Network Visibility (Sponsored)

Today's sponsored Heavy Networking dives into the latest features from Pluribus Networks, including Pluribus KubeTracker, which correlates containers with applications, maps hosts to the network fabric, and more. We also cover FlowTracker and a virtualized packet broker service. Our guest is Alessandro Barbieri, VP Product Management at Pluribus.

The Value of Old Ideas

I had a fun exchange on Twitter this week that bears some additional thinking. Emirage (@Emirage6) tweeted a fun meme about learning BGP:

I retweeted it and a few people jumped in the fun, including a couple that said it was better to configure BGP for reasons. This led to a blog post about routing protocols with even more great memes and a good dose of reality for anyone that isn’t a multi-CCIE.

Explain It Like I’m Five

I want you to call your mom and explain BGP to her. Go on and do that now because I’m curious to see how you’d open that conversation. Unless your mom is in networking already I’m willing to bet you’re going to have to start really, really basic. In fact, given the number of news organizations that don’t even know what the letters in the acronym stand for I’d guess you are going to have a hard time talking about the path selection process or leak maps or how sessions are established.

Now, try that same Continue reading

What Does An ‘R’ Before A String Mean In Python?

R Means ‘Raw String’

An ‘r’ before a string tells the Python interpreter to treat backslashes as a literal (raw) character. Normally, Python uses backslashes as escape characters. Prefacing the string definition with ‘r’ is a useful way to define a string where you need the backslash to be an actual backslash and not part of an escape code that means something else in the string.

Examples

1. In this example, Python will interpret each ‘\t’ found in this string as a tab. That is, the backslash+t is interpreted as an escape sequence with a special purpose.

>>> 'path\to\the\thing'
'path\to\the\thing'
>>> print('path\to\the\thing')
path o he hing
>>>

2. By adding the leading r, Python will know that the backslashes are to be interpreted as literal characters and not escape sequences. Interestingly, note how Python represents the literal backslash–as an escape sequence of backslash + backslash.

>>> r'path\to\the\thing'
'path\\to\\the\\thing'
>>> print(r'path\to\the\thing')
path\to\the\thing
>>>

3. This means another way to handle the literal backslash problem is to use backslash + backslash in your string definition. However, this feels like a clunkier way to define the string to me when compared to using ‘r’. Using ‘r’ makes for, I think, more readable Continue reading

The post-quantum future: challenges and opportunities

The post-quantum future: challenges and opportunities
“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”
Ray Bradbury, from Beyond 1984: The People Machines
The post-quantum future: challenges and opportunities

The story and the path are clear: quantum computers are coming that will have the ability to break the cryptographic mechanisms we rely on to secure modern communications, but there is hope! The cryptographic community has designed new mechanisms to safeguard against this disruption. There are challenges: will the new safeguards be practical? How will the fast-evolving Internet migrate to this new reality? In other blog posts in this series, we have outlined some potential solutions to these questions: there are new algorithms for maintaining confidentiality and authentication (in a “post-quantum” manner) in the protocols we use. But will they be fast enough to deploy at scale? Will they provide the required properties and work in all protocols? Are they easy to use?

Adding post-quantum cryptography into architectures and networks Continue reading

Post-quantumify internal services: Logfwrdr, Tunnel, and gokeyless

Post-quantumify internal services: Logfwrdr, Tunnel, and gokeyless
Post-quantumify internal services: Logfwrdr, Tunnel, and gokeyless

Theoretically, there is no impediment to adding post-quantum cryptography to any system. But the reality is harder. In the middle of last year, we posed ourselves a big challenge: to change all internal connections at Cloudflare to use post-quantum cryptography. We call this, in a cheeky way, “post-quantum-ifying” our services. Theoretically, this should be simple: swap algorithms for post-quantum ones and move along. But with dozens of different services in various programming languages (as we have at Cloudflare), it is not so simple. The challenge is big but we are here and up for the task! In this blog post, we will look at what our plan was, where we are now, and what we have learned so far. Welcome to the first announcement of a post-quantum future at Cloudflare: our connections are going to be quantum-secure!

What are we doing?

The life of most requests at Cloudflare begins and ends at the edge of our global network. Not all requests are equal and on their path they are transmitted by several protocols. Some of those protocols provide security properties whilst others do not. For the protocols that do, for context, Cloudflare uses: TLS, QUIC, WireGuard, DNSSEC Continue reading

HPE lets you build integrated private 5G/Wi-Fi networks

HP Enterprise will offer private 5G equipment integrated with its Aruba Wi-Fi gear to provide the option of using the technology that best meets the various wireless demands within an enterprise.As the name implies, Private 5G gear supports private 5G networks, not as a replacement for but as complementary to Wi-Fi.HPE says 5G surpasses Wi-Fi in terms of wide-area coverage as well as speed, but Wi-Fi has the advantage when it comes to cost-effective indoor connectivity. So the hybrid network will automatically switch between 5G and Wi-Fi depending on need and use.The technology itself is an evolution of the HPE 5G Core Stack introduced in 2020, and which is open, cloud-native, and container-based. HPE has added two new features to the product: integration with Wi-Fi networks through use of its Aruba wireless technology, and the integration of 5G radio access network (RAN) equipment from third-party vendors to enable deploying a 5G core at customer sites.To read this article in full, please click here