If You Haven’t Checked Your Backups, They Probably Aren’t Working
This is a pleasant reminder to check your backups. I don’t mean, “Hey, did the backup run last night? Yes? Then all is well.” That’s slightly better than nothing, but not really what you’re checking for. Instead, you’re determining your ability to return a system to a known state by verifying your backups regularly.
Backups are a key part of disaster recovery, where modern disasters include ransomware, catastrophic public cloud failures, and asset exposure by accidental secrets posting.
For folks in IT operations such as network engineers, systems to be concerned about include network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and VPN concentrators. Public cloud network artifacts also matter. Automation systems matter, too. And don’t forget about special systems like policy engines, SDN controllers, wifi controllers, network monitoring, AAA, and…you get the idea.
Don’t confuse resiliency for backup.
When I talk about backups, I’m talking about having known good copies of crucial data that exist independently of the systems they normally live on.
- Distributed storage is not backup.
- A cluster is not backup.
- An active/active application delivery system spread over geographically diverse data centers is not backup.
The points above are examples of distributed computing. Distributed computing Continue reading
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and [this post (EvE)](https://blog.b
Response: Is Switching Latency Relevant?
Minh Ha left another extensive comment on my Is Switching Latency Relevant blog post. As is usual the case, it’s well worth reading, so I’m making sure it doesn’t stay in the small print (this time interspersed with a few comments of mine in gray boxes)
I found Cisco apparently manages to scale port-to-port latency down to 250ns for L3 switching, which is astonishing, and way less (sub 100ns) for L1 and L2.
I don’t know where FPGA fits into this ultra low-latency picture, because FPGA, compared to ASIC, is bigger, and a few times slower, due to the use of Lookup Table in place of gate arrays, and programmable interconnects.
More FT8 propagation
Last month I graphed the distance to remote stations as a function of time of day.
Today I plotted the gridsquare locations on a world map:
Ignore the top right one. That’s “RR73”, and not a real grid square. The rest should be accurate.
More that can be done (more interesting with more data than I can get, though):
- also take into account the received signal strength
- …and number of unique callsigns per grid square
- create animations over time
If I had access to the data from pskreporter I could even, instead of using just a callsign as input data, use a grid square as input.
So for example I could create an animation to show what the propagation was over the last week from any given gridsquare, and generate them on-demand.
Like last time the scripts are pretty hacky proof of concepts. But they work.
Exploratory Network Analysis (XNA)
In data science there is a concept called Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). When I have a big bunch of data, what’s in it? How do I make sense of it? Where do I even start? Just simple statistics about the dataset are not enough. In data analysis, this led to...3 IT Monitoring Trends for 2021
By being aware of – and anticipating – these three trends in IT monitoring, DevOps and SREs can be better prepared to effectively troubleshoot performance issues and improve business outcomes.Full Stack Journey 053: Exploring Developer Advocacy And Developer Relations
Today's Full Stack Journey delves into developer advocacy: what is it, why do organizations have this role, and what makes a good developer advocate? Host Scott Lowe has invited four practitioners to tackle these questions. He speaks with Jacquie Grindrod, Jeremy Meiss, Josh Wulf, and Ted Neward.
The post Full Stack Journey 053: Exploring Developer Advocacy And Developer Relations appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Full Stack Journey 053: Exploring Developer Advocacy And Developer Relations
Today's Full Stack Journey delves into developer advocacy: what is it, why do organizations have this role, and what makes a good developer advocate? Host Scott Lowe has invited four practitioners to tackle these questions. He speaks with Jacquie Grindrod, Jeremy Meiss, Josh Wulf, and Ted Neward.
Announcing Cloudflare Images beta to simplify your image pipeline
Today, we are announcing the beta of Cloudflare Images: a simple service to store, resize, optimize, and deliver images at scale.
In 2018, we launched Stream to provide a single product that could be used to store, encode, and deliver videos. With Cloudflare Images, we are doing for images what Stream did for videos. Just like Stream, Cloudflare Images eliminates the need to think about storage buckets, egress costs, and many other common problems that are solved for you out of the box. Whether you are building an ecommerce platform with millions of high-res product pictures and videos or a new app for creators, you can build your entire media pipeline by combining Cloudflare Images and Stream.
Fundamental questions for storing and serving images
Any time you are building infrastructure for image storage and processing, there are four fundamental questions you must answer:
- “Where do we store images?”
- “How do we secure, resize, and optimize the images for different use cases?”
- “How do we serve the images to our users reliably?”
- “How do we do all of these things at scale while having predictable and affordable pricing, especially during spikes?”
Cloudflare Images has a straightforward set Continue reading
Feedback Requested: Chartering the MANRS Community
While MANRS has gone from strength to strength since its beginning in 2014, gaining attention, interest, and credibility from network operators worldwide, for the initiative to be sustainable and impactful in the long run there should be a stronger sense of ownership by the community. MANRS is an industry-led initiative whose participants set and develop […]
The post Feedback Requested: Chartering the MANRS Community appeared first on Internet Society.
Start building your own private network on Cloudflare today
Starting today, your team can create a private network on Cloudflare’s network. Team members click a single button to connect to private IPs in environments that you control. Cloudflare’s network routes their connection through a data center in one of over 200 cities around the world. On the other side, administrators deploy a lightweight software connector that replaces traditional VPN appliances.
Cloudflare’s private network combines IP level connectivity and Zero Trust controls. Thick clients like RDP software, SMB file viewers, or other programs can connect to the private IPs already in use in your deployment without any additional configuration. Coming soon, you’ll be able to layer additional identity-based network-level rules to control which users, from which devices, can reach specific IPs.
We are launching this feature as a follow-up to Cloudflare’s Developer Week because we are excited to give your development team, and your entire organization, a seamless platform for building and connecting your internal resources. We built this solution based on feedback from customers who want to move to a Zero Trust model without sacrificing some of the convenience of a private network.
We’re excited to give any team the ability to run their internal network on Cloudflare’s global Continue reading
Using Unequal-Cost Multipath to Cope with Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Failures
Scott submitted an interesting the comment to my Does Unequal-Cost Multipath (UCMP) Make Sense blog post:
How about even Large CLOS networks with the same interface capacity, but accounting for things to fail; fabric cards, links or nodes in disaggregated units. You can either UCMP or drain large parts of your network to get the most out of ECMP.
Before I managed to write a reply (sometimes it takes months while an idea is simmering somewhere in my subconscious) Jeff Tantsura pointed me to an excellent article by Erico Vanini that describes the types of asymmetries you might encounter in a leaf-and-spine fabric: an ideal starting point for this discussion.