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Category Archives for "Networking"

Ransomware: How to make sure backups are ready for a real attack

The best way to avoid paying ransom to attackers who have infected your systems with ransomware is to have those systems adequately backed up so you can wipe them and restore them from safe backups. Here are several options for making sure those backups are up to the task.In this article, backup refers to any system that you're going to use to respond to a ransomware attack, including old-school backup systems, replication systems, and modern hybrid systems that support backup and disaster recover. For simplicity’s sake, they’ll all be referred to as backup here. More about backup and recovery:To read this article in full, please click here

Ransomware: How to make sure backups are ready for a real attack

The best way to avoid paying ransom to attackers who have infected your systems with ransomware is to have those systems adequately backed up so you can wipe them and restore them from safe backups. Here are several options for making sure those backups are up to the task.In this article, backup refers to any system that you're going to use to respond to a ransomware attack, including old-school backup systems, replication systems, and modern hybrid systems that support backup and disaster recover. For simplicity’s sake, they’ll all be referred to as backup here. More about backup and recovery:To read this article in full, please click here

Using YAML Instead of Excel in Network Automation Solutions

One of the attendees of our network automation course asked a question along these lines:

In a previous Ansible-based project I used Excel sheet to contain all relevant customer data. I converted this spreadsheet using python (xls_to_fact) and pushed the configurations to network devices accordingly. I know some people use YAML to define the variables in Git. What would be the advantages of doing that over Excel/xsl_to_fact?

Whenever you’re choosing a data store for your network automation solution you have to consider a number of aspects including:

Read more …

Using YAML Instead of Excel in Network Automation Solutions

One of the attendees of our network automation course asked a question along these lines:

In a previous Ansible-based project I used Excel sheet to contain all relevant customer data. I converted this spreadsheet using python (xls_to_fact) and pushed the configurations to network devices accordingly. I know some people use YAML to define the variables in Git. What would be the advantages of doing that over Excel/xsl_to_fact?

Whenever you’re choosing a data store for your network automation solution you have to consider a number of aspects including:

Read more …

Network Validation

What does Network Validation mean practically? Of course, there’s no official description of what it means, but we can talk about what we would like it to mean so that it can be useful. What we are trying to get to is a network that is trustworthy. If the business...

Cisco SD-WAN: vManage, vBond, and vMSmart On-Prem Installation Process.

 



Introduction

This section explains the process how to build an on-prem Cisco Viptela based SD-WAN control plane system. It starts by setting up an enterprise Certificate Server using the Cisco CSR1000V cloud router. Next, it goes through the process of root certificate generation. The rest of the chapter explains the initial configuration and certification installation processes from vManage, vBond, and vSmart viewpoints.

Figure 1-1: Control-Plane Components Topology.

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Cisco grows UCS server family with high-powered AMD processor

Cisco has bulked-up its rack server offering with new models that promise to deliver low latency and high-speed computing needed for hybrid-cloud and financial workloads.The new servers are part of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) family and are built with AMD’s new EPYC 7003 processors, which feature up to 64 Zen 3 cores per processor and a variety of performance and security features.Still not dead: The mainframe hangs on sustained by Linux and hybrid cloud Cisco and AMD have worked together on server offerings since 2018 when Cisco first  partnered with AMD to better contend with competitors such as Dell and HP. To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco grows UCS server family with high-powered AMD processor

Cisco has bulked-up its rack server offering with new models that promise to deliver low latency and high-speed computing needed for hybrid-cloud and financial workloads.The new servers are part of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) family and are built with AMD’s new EPYC 7003 processors, which feature up to 64 Zen 3 cores per processor and a variety of performance and security features.Still not dead: The mainframe hangs on sustained by Linux and hybrid cloud Cisco and AMD have worked together on server offerings since 2018 when Cisco first  partnered with AMD to better contend with competitors such as Dell and HP. To read this article in full, please click here

Complexity Bites Back

What percentage of business-impacting application outages are caused by networks? According to a recent survey by the Uptime Institute, about 30% of the 300 operators they surveyed, 29% have experienced network related outages in the last three years—the highest percentage of causes for IT failures across the period.

A secondary question on the survey attempted to “dig a little deeper” to understand the reasons for network failure; the chart below shows the result.

We can be almost certain the third-party failures, if the providers were queried, would break down along the same lines. Is there a pattern among the reasons for failure?

Configuration change—while this could be somewhat managed through automation, these kinds of failures are more generally the result of complexity. Firmware and software failures? The more complex the pieces of software, the more likely it is to have mission-impacting errors of some kind—so again, complexity related. Corrupted policies and routing tables are also complexity related. The only item among the top preventable causes that does not seem, at first, to relate directly to complexity is network overload and/or congestion problems. Many of these cases, however, might also be complexity related.

The Uptime Institute draws this same lesson, though Continue reading

Tech Bytes: How Palo Alto Networks Differentiates Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Palo Alto Networks sponsors today's Tech Bytes. We drill into key differentiators of the Prisma SD-WAN platform including its use of machine learning, the unique CloudBlades offering, and its app-defined approach to path selection and policy enforcement. Our guest from Palo Alto Networks is Rohan Grover, Senior Director of Product Management.

The post Tech Bytes: How Palo Alto Networks Differentiates Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 324: Cisco ASIC Hits 25.6Tbps; AWS Extends VPC Flow Logs For Better Visibility

This week's Network Break discusses new ASICs from Cisco, new metadata fields in AWS VPC flow logs, a cloud visibility fabric from packet broker specialist Gigamon, lessons from a data center fire, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 324: Cisco ASIC Hits 25.6Tbps; AWS Extends VPC Flow Logs For Better Visibility appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Berners-Lee Warns of Growing Digital Divide

A big divide: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says the digital divide has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic, the BBC reports. He called on governments to provide universal broadband by 2030 in his annual letter marking the anniversary of the Web. About one-third of young people do not have Internet access and many more people lack connections that are good enough to allow them to work or learn from home.

Spy vs. spy: Hackers have breached surveillance camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada and gained access to live feeds of 150,000 security cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons, and schools, Bloomberg reports. Live cameras inside Tesla factories, women’s health clinics, and psychiatric hospitals were also breached. The breach exposed the reach of surveillance, the Washington Post suggested, with one expert saying that “our desire for some fake sense of security is its own security threat.”

Drones to the rescue: A Wisconsin company is working on a way to use drones to provide reliable cellular service and Internet access to a rural area of the state, Wisconsin Public Radio reports. About 15 percent of the Northland Pine School District’s 1,340 students have no Continue reading

Liz Rice: Following the ‘Superpower’ Promise of eBPF

Liz Rice Liz Rice, chair of the CNCF’s technical oversight committee For lots of folks in software engineering, every now and again a technology comes along that really sparks the imagination. I’m sure that many readers of The New Stack will recall their first encounters with containers, very possibly through Docker, and the realization that this was a technology that could change everything. Containerization is arguably the lynchpin of the move to cloud native. But every step forward creates new challenges, and new boundaries to push. For me, eBPF is another transformational technology and one that I’m excited to get more deeply involved in, as I join the leadership team at eBPF pioneers, Brendan Greggs from Netflix coined the phrase “superpowers for Linux,” and that’s no exaggeration. In my role as chair of the Continue reading

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