For many years, I’ve been working with B2B IT vendors who sponsor content with my company to market their offerings. My co-founder and I have learned many lessons–some the hard way–about dealing with these vendors and the content they create with us.
In this article, I’ll focus on handling a specific scenario. You’ve got a niche blog where you write as a deeply technical expert in a IT field such as cloud, networking, storage, development, or security. Your audience is made up of fellow nerds in similar orbits. You’ve been writing for years, and have developed a faithful audience who reads most of your stuff. After all this time, a real-deal vendor appears, wanting to place a sponsored blog post on your hallowed site. Now what?
You might think the sponsored content itself would be the most complicated part, and that once you hit publish, you’re mostly done. Not really. Back end logistics will likely take up more of your time. There are other considerations, too. Consider them carefully before trying to monetize your blogging hobby.
If this is your first sponsored post, you might feel weird about it. The temptation can be to hide Continue reading
docker run --rm -it --privileged --network host --pid="host" \Start Containerlab.
-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
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sflow-rt/containerlab/master/ddos.ymlDownload the Containerlab topology file.
sed -i "s/\\.ip_flood\\.action=filter/\\.ip_flood\\.action=drop/g" ddos.ymlChange mitigation policy for IP Flood attacks from Flowspec filter to RTBH.
containerlab deploy -t ddos.ymlDeploy the topology. Access the DDoS Protect screen at http://localhost:8008/app/ddos-protect/html/
docker exec -it clab-ddos-attacker hping3 \Launch an IP Flood attack. The DDoS Protect dashboard shows that as soon as the ip_flood attack traffic reaches the threshold a control is implemented and the attack traffic is immediately dropped. The entire process between the attack being launched, detected, and mitigated happens within a second, ensuring minimal impact on network capacity and services.
--flood --rawip -H 47 192.0.2.129
docker exec -it clab-ddos-sp-router vtysh -c "show running-config"See Continue reading
Today's Full Stack Journey asks: Are there tools, techniques, or practices common to software development that other IT disciplines should consider adopting? Can these tools and practices help other IT disciplines improve automation, operations, and daily tasks? Guests Adeel Ahmad and Kurt Seifried join host Scott Lowe to discuss.
The post Full Stack Journey 065: Developer Tools And Practices Other IT Disciplines Can Adopt appeared first on Packet Pushers.
This lesson introduces packages, which let you bundle together different Python modules to re-use and share. Course files are in a GitHub repository: https://github.com/ericchou1/pp_practical_lessons_1_route_alerts Additional Resources: Packages Tutorial: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/modules.html#packages Python Modules And Packages: An Introduction: https://realpython.com/python-modules-packages/ Eric Chou is a network engineer with 20 years of experience, including managing networks at Amazon AWS and Microsoft […]
The post Practical Python For Networking: 6.1 Python Packages – Introduction To Packages – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

We built Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform to help companies rely on our network to connect their private networks securely, while improving performance and reducing operational burden. With it, you could build a single virtual private network, where all your connected private networks had to be uniquely identifiable.
Starting today, we are thrilled to announce that you can start building many segregated virtual private networks over Cloudflare Zero Trust, beginning with virtualized connectivity for the connectors Cloudflare WARP and Cloudflare Tunnel.
Consider your team, with various services hosted across distinct private networks, and employees accessing those resources. More than ever, those employees may be roaming, remote, or actually in a company office. Regardless, you need to ensure only they can access your private services. Even then, you want to have granular control over what each user can access within your network.
This is where Cloudflare can help you. We make our global, performant network available to you, acting as a virtual bridge between your employees and private services. With your employees’ devices running Cloudflare WARP, their traffic egresses through Cloudflare’s network. On the other side, your private services are behind Cloudflare Tunnel, accessible Continue reading


Marcelo Affonso (VP of Infrastructure Operations) and Rebecca Weekly (VP of Hardware Systems) recently joined our team. Here they share their journey to Cloudflare, what motivated them to join us, and what they are most excited about.
I am thrilled to join Cloudflare and lead our global infrastructure operations. My focus will be building, expanding, optimizing, and accelerating Cloudflare’s fast-growing infrastructure presence around the world.
Recently, I have found myself reflecting on how central the Internet has become to the lives of people all over the world. We use the Internet to work, to connect with families and friends, and to get essential services. Communities, governments, businesses, and cultural institutions now use the Internet as a primary communication and collaboration layer.
But on its own, the Internet wasn’t architected to support that level of use. It needs better security protections, faster and more reliable connectivity, and more support for various privacy preferences. What’s more, those benefits can’t just be available to large businesses. They need to be accessible to a full range of communities, governments, and individuals who now rely on the Internet. And they need to be accessible in various ways to Continue reading
One of my readers has to deal with a crappy Network Termination Equipment (NTE)1 that does not drop local link carrier2 when the remote link fails. Here’s the original ASCII art describing the topology:
PE---------------NTE--FW---NMS
<--------IP-------->
He’d like to use interface SNMP counters on the firewall to detect the PE-NTE link failure. He’s using static default route toward PE on FW, and tried to detect the link failure with ifOutDiscards counter.
One of my readers has to deal with a crappy Network Termination Equipment (NTE)1 that does not drop local link carrier2 when the remote link fails. Here’s the original ASCII art describing the topology:
PE---------------NTE--FW---NMS
<--------IP-------->
He’d like to use interface SNMP counters on the firewall to detect the PE-NTE link failure. He’s using static default route toward PE on FW, and tried to detect the link failure with ifOutDiscards counter.
Hello my friend,
This is the third and the last (at least for the time being ) blogpost about monitoring of the infrastructure with Prometheus, one of the most powerful and popular open source time series database and metrics collection framework. In today’s talk we’ll cover the build of our own Prometheus exporter, which performs trace route checks.
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5 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.
Many tools nowadays give you possibility not only to collect metrics, but also to act perform a simple )(or complex) analysis and act based on the result of such an analysis. So can Prometheus. With a help of the Alertmanager, it is possible to send a REST API request upon certain condition, which would trigger an automation activity or a workflow to act upon the business logic needed for the condition, such as remediation and/or configuration. This is why you need to know how the network automation works at a good level.
And we Continue reading
Today’s Tech Bytes podcast gets into networking and security. More specifically, despite what you might hear about cloud taking over, the network still matters, and is essential to an organization’s security strategy, especially as cloud adoption and remote work drive the need for hybrid IT. We’re going to address this topic with sponsor Fortinet.
The post Tech Bytes: Why The Network Is Essential For Securing Hybrid IT (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.