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Orhan Ergun CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure Course Review 1

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Despite a persistent problem, using the DHCP features on a Cisco switch makes sense

Dynamic host-configuration protocol (DHCP) has a lot of benefits, including saving time by assigning IP addresses and other attributes to networked devices rather than IT pros having to do it manually.Sometimes, though, problems arise that eat up time in a different way. This is one such case affecting Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 9600 Layer 3 chassis switches used as distribution switches for our network, with different groups of buildings linked to them. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

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netsim-tools: Combining VLANs with VRFs

Last two weeks we focused on access VLANs and VLAN trunk implementation in netsim-tools. Can we combine them with VRFs? Of course.

The trick is very simple: attributes within a VLAN definition become attributes of VLAN interfaces. Add vrf attribute to a VLAN and you get all VLAN interfaces created for that VLAN in the corresponding VRF. Can’t get any easier, can it?

How about extending our VLAN trunk lab topology with VRFs? We’ll put red VLAN in red VRF and blue VLAN in blue VRF.

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netlab: Combining VLANs with VRFs

Last two weeks we focused on access VLANs and VLAN trunk netlab implementation. Can we combine them with VRFs? Of course.

The trick is very simple: attributes within a VLAN definition become attributes of VLAN interfaces. Add vrf attribute to a VLAN and you get all VLAN interfaces created for that VLAN in the corresponding VRF. Can’t get any easier, can it?

How about extending our VLAN trunk lab topology with VRFs? We’ll put red VLAN in red VRF and blue VLAN in blue VRF.

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Cloudflare is redefining employee well-being in Japan

This post is also available in 日本語

“You can accomplish anything if you do it. Nothing will be accomplished unless you do it. If nothing is not accomplished, that’s because no one did it.“
— Yozan Uesugi

Long hours and hard work. If you ask anyone in Japan what our work culture is like, chances are, these are the words that will come to mind. Different countries have their own cultures and also specific work habits and ways of having a work-life balance. The pandemic brought everyone (companies and their people) a new reality, new lessons, and new habits. Here at Cloudflare, our thinking around where and how we do our best work has evolved over the course of the pandemic. We care about addressing the diverse needs of our workforce and our policies and benefits are designed to optimize for their flexibility and needs. To that end, Cloudflare Japan is making a few important changes to our employee benefits:

• “take what you need” time off for all our employees
• 16-week gender-neutral paid parental leave
• flexible working hours

First, let’s try to understand a bit of the Japanese work culture. According to Japan’s labor laws, Japanese employed workers are Continue reading

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BGP communities part 3: Customer BGP Traffic Engineering communities

If you’ve ever been asked to prioritize one internet connection over another for any variety of reasons, cost, latency, SLA, etc… this is for you.

Often I hear the same tactics to solve this problem:

• AS-PATH prepending
• conditional advertisements
• scripting
• some other manual process

However, most carriers offer customer BGP TE communities that you can use to influence traffic within their AS, with one notable exception Hurricane Electric. If you’re not sure what a BGP community take a quick look at this post on them first.

Lets explore how to utilize these, where to find them, and how they might give more deterministic path selection than the options laid out above.

BGP Topology

Default behavior with no modification

First to get familiar with the topology and show reachability we’ll leave all settings as “defaults” with no modifications.

ISP-1-RTR-1#traceroute 203.0.113.1 source 192.0.2.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 203.0.113.1
VRF info: (vrf in name/id, vrf out name/id)
  1 100.123.0.1 1 msec 1 msec 1 msec
  2 100.124.0.2 1 msec 0 msec 0 msec
  3 100.126.0.10 2 msec *  1  Continue reading

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Using OpenSSL with Ed Harmoush 3/6 Troubleshooting: Matching Keys To Certificates – Video

ED, HIS TLS COURSE, AND THE FREE OPENSSL CHEATSHEET Twitter @ed_pracnet https://practicalnetworking.net Practical TLS course: https://pracnet.net/tls OpenSSL Cheatsheet: https://pracnet.net/openssl FILES FOR THE CERT/KEY MATCHING EXERCISE: ZIP VERSION: packetpushers-pracnet-openssl.zip https://ln5.sync.com/dl/1f1f63d90/kqztwkp9-hkcz3yvq-tuzx79ke-aewxgaip TAR.GZ VERSION: packetpushers-pracnet-openssl.tar.gz https://ln5.sync.com/dl/0791b8d50/q973jpyb-qrmz3cpd-xeiar9zn-qu99gi5w FOR MORE INFO Hashing, Hashing Algorithms, and Collisions – Cryptography Symmetric Encryption vs Asymmetric Encryption Public & Private Keys – Signatures & […]

The post Using OpenSSL with Ed Harmoush 3/6 Troubleshooting: Matching Keys To Certificates – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Controversial Reads 061122

In the hands of police and other government agencies, face recognition technology presents an inherent threat to our privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice.

From social credit scores and online censorship to electronic billboards that display a citizen’s “violations” like jaywalking, surveillance is a part of everyday life for millions of Chinese people.

But there’s a much bigger threat to democracy coming out of Silicon Valley and it’s this: America’s largest financial and tech increasingly act as independent countries, routinely exporting jobs, money and technology to our most significant global adversary.

It’s difficult to overstate how dramatic this shift is, both in substance and in tone. Overpaying, and even coddling, talented engineers has, for years, been seen as a point of pride among tech’s leadership class.

Excessive centralization can stymie coordination and erode freedom, democracy, and economic dynamism—decentralization is supposed to be the remedy. But the term on its own is too vague to be a coherent end goal.

In early March, weeks after senators advanced a sweeping bill to expand competition in the tech industry, a regional newspaper more than 2,000 miles from Silicon Valley ran a defensive op-ed.

Raskin didn’t foresee how tech giants would exploit Continue reading

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Segment Routing with MPLS (SR-MPLS)

In this lab we explore Segment Routing (SR) using Multiprotocol Label Switching as an encoding mechanism. Segment Routing, also known as “Source Packet Routing in Networking” (SPRING), is a method of routing in which ingress routers prepend instructions to traffic that cause actions to be performed by transit nodes as it travels across a network. This is sometimes as simple as a list of routers a packet must traverse to reach its destination.

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Weekend Reads 061022

Alongside the announcement of Ryzen 7000 processors, AMD revealed a new technology coming to the platform: Smart Access Storage.

The web of global intermediary liability laws has grown increasingly vast and complex as policymakers around the world move to adopt stricter legal frameworks for platform regulation.

Like other kinds of computing, if you put garbage data into a machine learning training run and then pour new data through it, what comes out as the answer is puréed garbage.

A critical code execution zero-day in all supported versions of Windows has been under active exploit for seven weeks, giving attackers a reliable means for installing malware without triggering Windows Defender and a roster of other endpoint protection products.

Although cyber conflict has existed for thirty years, the strategic utility of cyber operations remains unclear.

By expanding the breadth of device-to-application solutions with IPv6, LoRaWAN’s addressable IoT market is also broadened to include internet-based standards required in smart electricity metering and new applications in smart buildings, industries, logistics, and homes.

Earlier this year, the LockBit group posted a table listing encryption speeds for more than 30 ransomware families, highlighting the fact that LockBit 2.0 was the fastest.

In this post, I’ll Continue reading

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Heavy Networking 634: Why (Not) MikroTik?

Today's Heavy Networking gets into networking hardware from MikroTik, a vendor you may not have heard of. Our guest is Kevin Myers, a senior network architect and consultant who uses MikroTik with a variety of clients big and small. We'll find out what MikroTik is good for, and not good for, management and support, and more. This is a non-sponsored episode.

The post Heavy Networking 634: Why (Not) MikroTik? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Heavy Networking 634: Why (Not) MikroTik?

Today's Heavy Networking gets into networking hardware from MikroTik, a vendor you may not have heard of. Our guest is Kevin Myers, a senior network architect and consultant who uses MikroTik with a variety of clients big and small. We'll find out what MikroTik is good for, and not good for, management and support, and more. This is a non-sponsored episode.

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How to Retain Talent in Uncertain Circumstances

Recruiters may be calling your top talent right now. Here's what you can do to make your employees more likely to let those calls go to voice mail.

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Using OpenSSL with Ed Harmoush 2/6 Generating Certificates – Video

ED, HIS TLS COURSE, AND THE FREE OPENSSL CHEATSHEET Twitter @ed_pracnet https://practicalnetworking.net Practical TLS course: https://pracnet.net/tls OpenSSL Cheatsheet: https://pracnet.net/openssl FILES FOR THE CERT/KEY MATCHING EXERCISE: ZIP VERSION: packetpushers-pracnet-openssl.zip https://ln5.sync.com/dl/1f1f63d90/kqztwkp9-hkcz3yvq-tuzx79ke-aewxgaip TAR.GZ VERSION: packetpushers-pracnet-openssl.tar.gz https://ln5.sync.com/dl/0791b8d50/q973jpyb-qrmz3cpd-xeiar9zn-qu99gi5w FOR MORE INFO Hashing, Hashing Algorithms, and Collisions – Cryptography Symmetric Encryption vs Asymmetric Encryption Public & Private Keys – Signatures & […]

The post Using OpenSSL with Ed Harmoush 2/6 Generating Certificates – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Friday Thoughts Pre-Cisco Live

It’s weird to think that I’m headed out to Cisco Live for the first time since 2019. The in-person parts of Cisco Live have been sorely missed during the pandemic. I know it was necessary all around but I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed being around others and learning from the community until I wasn’t able to do it for an extended period of time.

Now we’re back in Las Vegas and ready to take part in something that has been missed. I’ve got a busy lineup of meetings with the CCIE Advisory Council and Tech Field Day Extra but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and have a little fun along the way. And yes, before you ask, I’m going to get the airbrush tattoo again if they brought the artist back. It’s a tradition as old as my CCIE at this point.

What else am I interested in?

• I’m curious to see how Cisco responds to their last disappointing quarter. Are they going to tell us that it was supply chain? Are they going to double down on the software transition? And how much of the purchasing that happened was pull through? Does that mean Continue reading

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AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.

The impact

Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.

It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.

In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn Continue reading

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8 certifications to prepare for hybrid and multi-cloud

As mixed cloud environments take hold and enterprises combine hosted infrastructure with private cloud and on-premises IT, networking professionals need to stay up on the latest developments in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies. A good way to do that is by earning certifications.There are plenty of certifications to choose from – which has its advantages and disadvantages. There’s no one prominent hybrid cloud or multi-cloud certification, most of them are vendor specific, and some of them overlap in terms of what they cover. That means network pros have to choose wisely when they're considering which certifications to pursue.To read this article in full, please click here

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Video: Rogue IPv6 RA Challenges

IPv6 security-focused presentations were usually an awesome opportunity to lean back and enjoy another round of whack-a-mole, often starting with an attacker using IPv6 Router Advertisements to divert traffic (see also: getting bored at Brussels airport) .

Rogue IPv6 RA challenges and the corresponding countermeasures are thus a mandatory part of any IPv6 security training, and Christopher Werny did a great job describing them in IPv6 security webinar.

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Video: Rogue IPv6 RA Challenges

IPv6 security-focused presentations were usually an awesome opportunity to lean back and enjoy another round of whack-a-mole, often starting with an attacker using IPv6 Router Advertisements to divert traffic (see also: getting bored at Brussels airport) .

Rogue IPv6 RA challenges and the corresponding countermeasures are thus a mandatory part of any IPv6 security training, and Christopher Werny did a great job describing them in IPv6 security webinar.

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A Look at Meta’s Low-Latency Metaverse Infrastructure

Tackling the challenge of providing fast, smooth, jitter-free gameplay with super low end-to-end latency, social media giant in a blog post Thursday. This low-latency gaming platform could also serve as the base Meta’s pending Metaverse, they asserted. Facebook launched its cloud gaming platform in 2020, providing users quick access to native Android and Windows mobile games across all the browsers. Along with high a volume of consumer access came a high volume of developer and engineering challenges. Network, Hosting, and Cluster Management The first step Meta took in providing low end-to-end latency was a physical one — to reduce the distance between the cloud gaming infrastructure and the players themselves. For this Meta used edge computing and deployed in edges that were close to large populations of players. The goal of edge computing is to “have a unified hosting environment to make sure we can run as many games as possible as smoothly as possible,” Meta engineers Xiaoxing Zhu wrote. The more edge computing sites, the lower the user latency. Continue reading