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Category Archives for "Networking"

Winning in 2021

I’d jump in here and say something about 2020 being a crazy year but we all know it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. I’d also say that we’re going to look back at my big plans for the year however we also know that those got scrapped right after the end of February. I like looking back at a couple of things and then looking forward to what the next year will accomplish. Why? Because retrospectives are boring and putting your planning out there for the world to see is a much more interesting use of your time. The journey you’re taking changes greatly when you change your thinking about the destination.

2020 Good or Bad

2020 wasn’t all bad. I finally justified getting a new office chair! All kidding aside, 2020 was a year that challenged everyone greatly when it came to mental health, professional output, and even personal capability. My biggest focus for 2020 was to start putting blog posts out earlier in the week and focus on continuous improvement. I’d say the first was another miss due to the hectic workload, as a lot of my posts still came out on Fridays.

The second point was a Continue reading

2021 Goals

2020 was a bit of a write off. 2021 is the year that the empire of Brad strikes back. 2021 Goals Health and Fitness Family Certifications Books Automation Mansformation Health and Fitness This year I will continue the healthy lifestyle and I am setting myself some ambitous...

PCNSA 10

My number one certification goal for 2021 is the PCNSA 10 certification. I require it for my new role so I am getting stuck right in. In this post I will document the resources and links to my personal notes for the PCNSA 10 certification. I will update this document as I go up until...

Member News: Connecting Remote Tribes

Connecting the people: The San Francisco Chapter recently received a Beyond the Net Grant from the Internet Society Foundation and will use it to help bring high-quality Internet service to more than 9,000 Native Americans in in a remote area of southern California. The grant will be used to extend wireless service about seven miles further into tribal lands.

Campaign against disinformation: The Netherlands Chapter is working with the artificial intelligence-powered KRINO Project to fight fake news online. KRINO will be able to analyze online content, including political statements, social media posts, and even medical information, but with humans reviewing its recommendations. The AI-based tool is in development, and the chapter’s Make Media Great Again Working Group will help fine tune the tool.

How the Internet works: Recently, two Internet Society chapters have hosted Internet-related training programs for members of the community. The Mali Chapter hosted the first edition of the Mali School of Internet Governance, with 46 people, including lawyers, engineers, law enforcement officers, and students, participating. The goal of the training is to give participants the knowledge and confidence to participate effectively in Internet governance processes and debates at regional, national, and international levels.

Digital literacy: The Panama Chapter Continue reading

Searching Wikipedia on the Linux command line with wikit

Have you ever imagined looking up some topic on Wikipedia while you're working on the Linux command line? What about displaying the results in a different language? Yes, it's possible. In fact, it's quite easy. The tool that provides this service is called wikit (Wikipedia IT).To check if wikit is installed on your system, just type "which wikit". If it is, you will get a response like this:$ which wikit /usr/local/bin/wikit If it's not, you can install it, but you might need to first install nodejs which wikit depends on and maybe npm as well with a command like one of these:To read this article in full, please click here

EVE-NG add Palo Alto PanOS 10 VM

In 2021 I am starting a new role were I will be working with Palo Alto products. In preperation for that I want to get familiar with Palo Alto firewalls again after not using them for about 5 years. In this post I will show you how to add a Palo Alto PanOS 10.0 VM to EVE-NG. Software...

2020 Year In Review

2020. WAS. A. SHIT. SHOW. Thank you global pandemic. /RANT At the start of the year I set myself a few goals outlined in this post. Some went to plan, some did not. Head down below for a recap. 2020 Goals 10% body fat I was committed to continuing the healthy lifestyle and I definitely...

Books 2020

Books 2020

I read at least 41 books in 2020. Here are some highlights.

Intellectual History (?)

This is the category I’m using for my two overall favorites for the year, although it doesn’t quite fit. I love books like this that tell the stories of historic figures in unusual ways.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines - Janna Levin

This is generally described as a “philosophical novel”, a description which is both accurate and suitably vague, as the novel is difficult to describe. Janna Levin is famous for a lot of things: she’s possibly the most influential living black hole physicist, an author of a number of well-known books, and a well-known science communicator. This was her first book (I think), and doesn’t seem to be particularly well-known despite being an amazing work.

It’s a fictionalized account of the lives of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. The writing is alernately strange and beautiful. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The Weil Conjectures - Karen Olsson

I read this back to back with the previous book, and they will always be connected in my mind although they don’t intersect except for a few biographical years.

The book explores the Continue reading

MikroTik – RouterOSv7 first look – Dynamic routing with IPv6 and OSPFv3/BGP

If you missed it, take a look at MikroTik’s video on RouterOS v7 routing performance and changes.



Overview

One of the long awaited benefits of RouterOS version 7 is a new routing protocol stack that enables new capabilities and fixes limitations in RouterOSv6 caused by the use of a very old Linux kernel.

The new routing stack in v7 has created quite a buzz in the MikroTik community as lab tests have shown that it’s significantly more efficient in processing large numbers of BGP routes.

The ability to use MikroTik’s new generation of CCR routers with ARM64 to quickly process BGP routes is a blog post all to itself and we’ll tackle that in the future – however, the information below provides a quick look into the performance comparison between ROS v6 and v7.

The new routing stack also paves the way to add a number of features that have been needed for a long time like RPKI and large community support.

Using a lab based on EVE-NG, we’ll take a look at configuration changes and iBGP using the IPv6 AFI with OSPFv3 as the IGP for loopback/next hop reachability. Prior to 7.1beta2, this has been nonfunctional for years Continue reading

Championing the Internet Way of Networking in Latin America

The Internet has radically transformed our lives for the better, and the year 2020 has shown us it will play an increasingly crucial role in our daily lives. This year, we embarked on a project to analyze what makes the Internet so useful for those with access, and work with partners worldwide to advocate for a strong Internet that will benefit many generations to come.

Among the many collaborations on the Internet Way of Networking (IWN), our work in Latin America was a clear highlight. Thanks to the community’s massive support, we produced meaningful outcomes that will form a strong base for our future work. As we take stock of the year, we would like to celebrate the achievements and look to reaching greater heights in 2021.

Mapping the Regulatory Landscape

Engaging the community in the first half of the year, we asked experts in the region to help us map and monitor the regulatory regimes that applied to Internet intermediaries in their respective countries. Following a survey conducted between March and June, we produced (through the outstanding work of Paula Côrte Real) a map of the regulatory landscape in eight countries in the region. The exercise helped us Continue reading

Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021!!

I don’t know about you but I am eagerly looking forward to the new year erasing all the negativity and losses that 2020 brought to our broader lives, health and the global economy. Today I digress to make some predictions on the post-pandemic era that are likely to change the way we live, learn, work and play, blending the lines between those distinct functions we had once partitioned.

Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021!!

I don’t know about you but I am eagerly looking forward to the new year erasing all the negativity and losses that 2020 brought to our broader lives, health and the global economy. Today I digress to make some predictions on the post-pandemic era that are likely to change the way we live, learn, work and play, blending the lines between those distinct functions we had once partitioned.

Converting From AWS SAM to CloudFormation

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is a framework for building serverless applications on AWS. One of the components of SAM is a template specification. SAM templates would look and feel familiar to anyone who has used AWS CloudFormation to define their infrastructure as code, however they are not completely interchangeable. There are multiple reasons why you might want to convert from SAM to native CloudFormation:

  • You want to deploy the app using CloudFormation StackSets. SAM uses the AWS::Serverless transform in its templates and transforms are not supported by stack sets.
  • You want to deploy the app as part of an AWS Landing Zone (ALZ) account baseline. ALZ uses stack sets as the mechanism to deploy baseline resources and so suffers from the same constraint as the point above.
  • Your operating system of choice isn't documented in the SAM installation instructions and you're uncertain how to install from source or doubtful it will work at all (I'm looking at fellow OpenBSD and FreeBSD users here).

This post will show you how to take an existing SAM application and convert it to a CloudFormation template (CFT). As a CFT, the challenges listed above can be avoided.