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Category Archives for "Networking"

Verizon Business adds VMware SD-WAN to its managed services

Verizon Business has added VMware to its global managed-SD-WAN portfolio as part of its Network as a Service (NaaS) strategy. Verizon made the announcement at the Mobile World Conference event in Barcelona.Verizon’s Managed SD-WAN is designed for hybrid-cloud environments and uses application-aware routing to make sure customer data takes the right path to its destination. This allows customers to use their private network for demanding, latency-sensitive apps while sending less critical data over public networks.VMware SD-WAN features orchestration around centralized policy, monitoring, reporting, and analytics via Verizon Enterprise Center. It also offers SD WAN gateways with controllers. VMware Gateways are points of presencelocated around the world to provide physically close, low-latency connectivity to customer edge devices.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: SSE is SASE minus the SD-WAN

SASE adoption has been skyrocketing since the start of the pandemic. Secure access service edge, a term Gartner coined in 2019, combines security and networking in a single, scalable, cloud-based platform that fits well in a world in which employees work from home and mostly access cloud-based apps and services.Now Gartner is pushing a new acronym. Turns out, companies might prefer to get their SASE without the “A” — just security service edge, or SSE. Gartner this month published a Magic Quadrant for SSE (something the company never did for SASE); it's available from vendors listed in the report (here and here, for example).To read this article in full, please click here

SKINCARE TRENDS; TRY EXFOLIATING GLOVES AND CLEANSERS.

Everyone wants smooth, shiny, and vibrant skin. But unfortunately, not everyone is privileged to have it. Various methods have been used to give this result and one of the popular methods is the manual use of exfoliating gloves. This trend has been acceptably used by many. It’s a very convenient and easy way to fix dry and even oily skin. It is a coarse-textured glove that could be worn by anyone for convenient use. The following about exfoliating gloves shall be considered:

  • Benefits of using exfoliating gloves
  • Cons of using exfoliating gloves
  • How to use exfoliating gloves
  • How often you should use an exfoliating glove.

Benefits of using exfoliating gloves:

Exfoliating gloves work by getting rid of the dead skin cells on your skin. The skin naturally sheds and most times, the dead cells stay on the skin and could even clog your pores. Using exfoliating gloves could help scrub out the dead cells away thereby allowing products to penetrate the skin. With consistent use, it can also increase the production of collagen leading to clearer and smoother skin and improving the overall look of your skin. It could also reduce the appearance of acne and acne scars and give Continue reading

Back to basics: Make sure VMs don’t exceed host capacity

At the agency where I work we recently bought software products that required new virtual machines, and that provided the opportunity to review some of the important basices of properly assigning the hardware memory and compute to each VM.That’s important so we stay in a failover-ready state, and in our environment, that means appropriately allocating resources of the two clustered physical hosts that run VMs for our production applications. It’s even more important now because the new software is particularly resource-intensive.What is a virtual machine? The task also provided the opportunity to review and adjust the resources assigned to all of our existing virtual servers so they, too, were properly sized.To read this article in full, please click here

Back to basics: Make sure VMs don’t exceed host capacity

At the agency where I work we recently bought software products that required new virtual machines, and that provided the opportunity to review some of the important basices of properly assigning the hardware memory and compute to each VM.That’s important so we stay in a failover-ready state, and in our environment, that means appropriately allocating resources of the two clustered physical hosts that run VMs for our production applications. It’s even more important now because the new software is particularly resource-intensive.What is a virtual machine? The task also provided the opportunity to review and adjust the resources assigned to all of our existing virtual servers so they, too, were properly sized.To read this article in full, please click here

netsim-tools Release 1.1.3

netsim-tools release 1.1.3 brings a number of goodies, including:

If you’re building your own libvirt boxes, you might also appreciate:

netsim-tools Release 1.1.3

netsim-tools release 1.1.3 brings a number of goodies, including:

Starting with release 1.3, we renamed netsim-tools to netlab.

Steps we’ve taken around Cloudflare’s services in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia

Steps we've taken around Cloudflare's services in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia

At Cloudflare, we've watched in horror the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As the possibility of war looked more likely, we began to carefully monitor the situation on the ground, with the goal of keeping our employees, our customers, and our network safe.

Helping protect Ukraine against cyberattacks

Attacks against the Internet in Ukraine began even before the start of the invasion. Those attacks—and the steady stream of DDoS attacks we’ve seen in the days since—prompted us to extend our services to Ukrainian government and telecom organizations at no cost in order to ensure they can continue to operate and deliver critical information to their citizens as well as to the rest of the world about what is happening to them.

Going beyond that, under Project Galileo, we are expediting onboarding of any Ukrainian entities for our full suite of protections. We are currently assisting more than sixty organizations in Ukraine and the region—with about 25% of those organizations coming aboard during the current crisis. Many of the new organizations are groups coming together to assist refugees, share vital information, or members of the Ukrainian diaspora in nearby countries looking to organize and help. Any Ukrainian organizations that are facing Continue reading

Automation 12. Automated EVPN Customer Deployment with Ansible, NETCONF, and NetBox. 6WIND version.

Hello my friend,

We’ve been preparing this blogpost for quite a while, but for various reasons it was put on the back burner. Now we finally are bringing this back to light. We’ll go over a practical use case of automation of 6WIND configuration with Ansible and NetBox relying NETCONF.


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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.

Do I Need to Automate Everything?

The answer is, as usual: it depends. With our passion to automation, we would say: yes, definitely you should automate everything. But this is possible, only if you have unlimited resources (time, money, people). In reality, all the resources are limited and, moreover, may be even scarce. In such a case you would need to choose, where would you obtain the biggest leverage from automation. For example, some tasks are more frequent or time consuming than others. Clearly they are to be automated.

How to find them? Join our automation training and you will find that out!

We offer the Continue reading

Worth Reading: AI Makes Animists of Us All

Erik Hoel published a wonderful article describing how he’s fighting the algorithm that is deciding whether to approve a charge on his credit card.

My credit card now has a kami. Such new technological kamis are, just like the ancient ones, fickle; sometimes blessing us, sometimes hindering us, and all we as unwilling animists can do is a modern ritual to the inarticulate fey creatures that control our inboxes and our mortgages and our insurance rates.

There are networking vendors unleashing similar “spirits” on our networks. Welcome to the brave new world ;)

Worth Reading: AI Makes Animists of Us All

Erik Hoel published a wonderful article describing how he’s fighting the algorithm that is deciding whether to approve a charge on his credit card.

My credit card now has a kami. Such new technological kamis are, just like the ancient ones, fickle; sometimes blessing us, sometimes hindering us, and all we as unwilling animists can do is a modern ritual to the inarticulate fey creatures that control our inboxes and our mortgages and our insurance rates.

There are networking vendors unleashing similar “spirits” on our networks. Welcome to the brave new world ;)

AI is a Promotion

When I worked at IBM as an intern, part of my job was writing a deployment script to help make our lives easier when installing new ThinkPads. In order to change an MTU setting on the token ring PCMCIA cards (long story), I had to write a script that iterated through all the possible combinations of adapters in the registry to find the one I was looking for and change the value.

Now, I was 22 at the time and green behind the ears, especially when it came to programming. I finally figured out that the most efficient way to do this in the language that I was using was a very deep nested if statement. It wasn’t my best work but it operated properly. I mentioned this to my mentors on my team with a remark of how hard it was to understand the logic at first. My comment was “You know, if it’s hard to read for anyone else then I never have to worry about gettin fired.”

To which the response was, “Yes, but you can never be promoted either.”

That sage wisdom brings me to the modern world and how AI can fix that Continue reading

Ukraine internet battered but not out

While the physical war in Ukraine is already a humanitarian disaster, the virtual war over the internet and the tech companies that run it and use it will likely get a lot worse.That’s because for the most part the actual internet network has withstood the onslaught since Russia invaded Ukraine. There have been outages and extreme slowness in parts of the country and malware or other threats have proliferated but in general—to the surprise of many—the network has been pretty resiliant considering the extreme circumstances, experts say.To read this article in full, please click here

Hermetic Malware: Multi-component Threat Targeting Ukraine Organizations

Contributors: Giovanni Vigna, Oleg Boyarchuk, Stefano Ortolani

Introduction

The continued assault on Ukraine will go down in history as the first one that was truly carried out both kinetically on the battlefield and virtually using cyberattacks against the computer infrastructure of the invaded nation.

As the invasion started and escalated, new malware threats were introduced by malicious actors to harm Ukrainian organizations. Early in the assault, security researchers have observed the emergence of new threats that appears to be developed ad hoc to be key tools in cyber-war efforts.

In addition to well-known attacks and threats, such as network DDoS and ransomware, these threats included “wipers,” whose sole purpose is the disabling of the targeted hosts, often combined with other tools that allow the attackers to infect the largest number of hosts possible.

While these attacks targeted specific organizations, there is a substantial risk that in the highly connected, distributed environments used to exchange and share information in multi-national organizations these attacks might spill beyond their intended targets.

It is therefore of paramount importance to understand these threats in order to help protect both Ukrainian organizations and the rest of the world. To this end, CISA has published a series Continue reading

Heavy Networking 620: High Frequency Trading And Big Data Network Design

Network design for high frequency trading and big data networks is the topic of today’s Heavy Networking. If you’re interested in what it’s like to carefully manage data center latency and maintain your sanity in a zero downtime environment, this is your show. Our guests are are Jeremy Filliben and Marc Washco of Jump Trading.

The post Heavy Networking 620: High Frequency Trading And Big Data Network Design appeared first on Packet Pushers.