Today's Tech Bytes dives into Pluribus Networks’ Linux-based Netvisor ONE OS for white box switches. We also discuss Pluribus’ Adaptive Cloud Fabric, a distributed, controllerless SDN solution for deploying and automating data center fabrics that promises simpler operations and a lower TCO. Our guest is Alessandro Barbieri, VP of Product Management.
The post Tech Bytes: Pluribus Rethinks Open Networking For Better Programmability, TCO (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
First things first: Go watch this great video on lock-in from Ethan Banks (@ECBanks). We’ll reference it.
Welcome back. Still carrying that pitchfork around screaming about how you want to avoid vendor lock-in? Ready to build the most perfect automation system in history that does multi-cloud, multi-vendor, multi-protocol networking in a seamless manner with full documentation? Nice. How hard was is to build that unicorn farm?
I get it. No one wants to be beholden to a specific vendor. No one likes being forced into buying things. Everyone hates the life of the engineer forced to work on something they don’t like or had to use because someone needed a new boat. Or do they?
What kind of car do you drive? Odds are good you’re either ready to get a new one or you’re proud of what you’re driving. I find that the more flashy a car is the more likely people are to talk about how amazing it is. And when there are two dominant manufacturers in a market for cars, you tend to see people dividing into camps to sing the praises of their favorite brands. Ford people love their Continue reading
Maintaining a server fleet the size of Cloudflare’s is an operational challenge, to say the least. Anything we can do to lower complexity and improve efficiency has effects for our SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) and Data Center teams that can be felt throughout a server’s 4+ year lifespan.
At the Cloudflare Core, we process logs to analyze attacks and compute analytics. In 2020, our Core servers were in need of a refresh, so we decided to redesign the hardware to be more in line with our Gen X edge servers. We designed two major server variants for the core. The first is Core Compute 2020, an AMD-based server for analytics and general-purpose compute paired with solid-state storage drives. The second is Core Storage 2020, an Intel-based server with twelve spinning disks to run database workloads.
Earlier this year, we blogged about our 10th generation edge servers or Gen X and the improvements they delivered to our edge in both performance and security. The new Core Compute 2020 server leverages many of our learnings from the edge server. The Core Compute servers run a variety of workloads including Kubernetes, Kafka, and various smaller services.
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After explaining why you should focus on defining the problem before searching for a magic technology that will solve it, I continued the Focus on Business Challenges First presentation with another set of seemingly simple questions:
Making things fast is one of the things we do at Cloudflare. More responsive websites, apps, APIs, and networks directly translate into improved conversion and user experience. On November 10th, Google announced that Google Search will directly take web performance and page experience data into account when ranking results on their search engine results pages (SERPs), beginning in May 2021.
Specifically, Google Search will prioritize results based on how pages score on Core Web Vitals, a measurement methodology Cloudflare has worked closely with Google to establish, and we have implemented support for in our analytics tools.
The Core Web Vitals metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, a loading measurement), First Input Delay (FID, a measure of interactivity), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS, a measure of visual stability). Each one is directly associated with user perceptible page experience milestones. All three can be improved using our performance products, and all three can be measured with our Cloudflare Browser Insights product, and soon, with our free privacy-aware Cloudflare Web Analytics.
SEO experts have always suspected faster pages lead to better search ranking. With the recent announcement from Continue reading
multipass launch --name=mininet bionic
multipass exec mininet -- sudo apt update
multipass exec mininet -- sudo apt -y install mininet python-ryu
multipass exec mininet -- sudo apt -y install default-jre python-requests hping3
multipass exec mininet -- wget https://inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/sflow-rt.tar.gz
multipass exec mininet -- tar -xzf sflow-rt.tar.gz
multipass exec mininet -- ./sflow-rt/get-app.sh sflow-rt mininet-dashboard
Run the above commands in a terminal to create the virtual machine. Multipass commands can easily be scripted to automate the creation and configuration of virtual machines.
multipass listList the virtual machines.
Name State IPv4 Image
test Running 192.168.64.2 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Office documents, such as Word and Excel files, can be password-protected using a symmetric key encryption mechanism involving one password which is the key to both encrypt and decrypt a file. Malware writers use this key as an additional evasion technique to hide malicious code from anti-virus (AV) scanning engines. The problem is that encrypting a file introduces the disadvantage of requiring a potential victim to enter a password (which is normally included in the phishing or spam email containing the encrypted attachment). This makes the email and the attachment very suspicious, thus greatly reducing the chance that the intended victim will open the encrypted malicious attachment.
The good news (for the attackers) is that Microsoft Excel can automatically decrypt a given encrypted spreadsheet without asking for a password if the password for encryption happens to be VelvetSweatshop. This is a default key stored in Microsoft Excel program code for decryption. It’s a neat trick that attackers can leverage to encrypt malicious Excel files in order to evade static-analysis-based detection systems, while eliminating the need for a potential victim to enter a password.
The embedded VelvetSweatshop key in Excel is not a secret. It has been widely reported for many Continue reading