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Category Archives for "Networking"

Can Video Game Systems Like PS5 Be Used for Workplace Team Collaboration?

Team collaboration has been an issue in the workplace for too long. Countless solutions have been proposed and tried. And here is a new idea. Can video game systems like PS5 be used for workplace team collaboration? The simple answer is yes. But how?

Video game systems have long had the option for multiplayer games. These also allow numerous people around the world to connect, create teams, and play against other teams. If you’re a true gamer, you would know how this works. However, what does this mean for offices? Video game systems like the PS5 have many features that can enable workplace team collaboration. Here are some of the ways this is encouraged.

3 Ways PS5 Will be Used for Workplace Team Collaboration

Delegation of Tasks

The option to play as teams helps develop skills in employees that contribute to the workplace. The more you work in a team, the better you adapt to it. In video game systems like PS5, you can choose your own game, which means having a story you like. This can engage the employees in multiple ways, but most importantly divide the tasks.

Playing as a team in a video game would not only Continue reading

Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors

Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors
Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors

Every day, all across the Internet, something bad but entirely normal happens: thousands of origin servers go down, resulting in connection errors and frustrated users. Cloudflare’s users collectively spend over four and a half years each day waiting for unreachable origin servers to respond with error messages. But visitors don’t want to see error pages, they want to see content!

Today is exciting for all those who want the Internet to be stronger, more resilient, and have important redundancies: Cloudflare is pleased to announce a partnership with the Internet Archive to bring new functionality to our Always Online service.

Always Online serves as insurance for our customers’ websites. Should a customer’s origin go offline, timeout, or otherwise break, Always Online is there to step in and serve archived copies of webpages to visitors. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine, a service which saves snapshots of billions of websites across the Internet. By partnering with the Internet Archive, Cloudflare is able to seamlessly deliver responses for unreachable websites from the Internet Archive, while the Internet Archive can continue their mission of archiving the web to provide access to all knowledge.

Enabling Always Online in the Continue reading

Are Business Needs Just Excuses for Vendor Shenanigans?

Every now and then I call someone’s baby ugly (or maybe it was their third cousin’s baby and they nonetheless feel offended). In such cases a common resort is to cite business or market needs to prove how ignorant and clueless I am. Here’s a sample LinkedIn comment talking about my ignorance about the need for smart NICs:

The rise of custom silicon by Presando [sic], Mellanox, Amazon, Intel and others confirms there is a real market need.

Now let’s get something straight: while there are good reasons to use tons of different things that might look inappropriate, irrelevant or plain stupid to an outsider, I don’t believe in real market need argument being used to justify anything without supporting technical facts (tell me why you need that stuff and prove to me that using it is the best way of solving a problem).

Use Python to translate TCP/UDP port numbers to names

This short post shows how you can use Python to convert TCP/UDP port number to port name and vice versa.

Most of us know names of common TCP and UDP ports like 22/ssh, 23/telnet, 80/http or 443/https. We learn these early in our networking careers and many of them are so common that even when woken up middle of the night you'd know 53 is domain aka dns!

But there are also many not-so commonly used ports that have been given names. These ones sometimes show up in firewall logs or are mentioned in literature. Some vendors also try to replace numeric value with a human readable name in the configs and outputs of different commands.

One way or the other, I'd be good to have an easy method of getting port number given its name, and on occasion we might want to get name of particular port number.

There are many ways one could achieve that. We might search web, drop into documentation, or even check /etc/services if we have access to Linux box.

I decided to check if we can do some programmatic translation with Python, seeing as sometimes we could have hundreds of entries to process and Continue reading

Palo Alto beefs-up its SD-WAN menu with machine learning, analytics

With an eye toward adding intelligence and growing deployment options, Palo Alto Networks has rolled out analytics, machine learning, and  new hardware appliances for its recently acquired SD-WAN package.The company bought cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix earlier this year for $420 million and promised to integrate and augment CloudGenix's intelligent cloud-managed SD-WAN products and technology as well as integrate it with Palo Alto’s cloud-based security package Prisma.To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme unveils universal networking gear to simplify infrastructure decisions

Extreme Networks is unveiling a family of hardware and software that promises to let enterprise customers deploy wired or wireless platforms and manage security and other key resources from a cloud-based console.On the hardware side, the company is rolling out new core switches: the wired 5520 Series universal edge and aggregation switches, and the wireless, WiFi 6-based AP300C and AP400C Series universal access points.Upon linking to the company's flagship ExtremeCloud IQ cloud-based management platform (or manually through customized on-premises deployment), users of the new systems can pick and choose the Extreme operating system they need to support their particular infrastructure needs. Those options include ExtremeXOS and VSP Operating System (VOSS) with future support expected for the SLX Operating System under the 5520 switch and Aerohive IQ Engine and the Motorola WiNG for the wireless APs. To read this article in full, please click here

What Will the Internet Look Like in 2030? New Grants Program for Researchers Studying the Future of the Internet

From the environment to the economy, the Internet is reshaping and disrupting several sectors of our society. What might future patterns of disruption look like? How will these changes affect all of us, particularly those on the margins of society? What new solutions can we generate today, to address the challenges of tomorrow?

At the Internet Society Foundation, we believe the answers to these questions and many others lies in research. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce a new grants program supporting researchers worldwide who are studying the future and sustainability of the Internet. Grants of up to US$200,000 are available for research lasting up to two years and focused in one of two categories:

  • Greening the Internet: How the Internet affects and is affected by the environment
  • The Internet Economy: How digital technologies are transforming our economic landscape

Learn more about the program

Established in 2019 to support the positive difference the Internet can make to people everywhere, the Internet Society Foundation awards grants to Internet Society Chapters/Special Interest Groups (SIGs) as well as nonprofit organizations and individuals dedicated to providing meaningful access to an open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet for everyone.

Learn more about future calls for Continue reading

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

On July 3, Cloudflare’s global DDoS protection system, Gatebot, automatically detected and mitigated a UDP-based DDoS attack that peaked at 654 Gbps. The attack was part of a ten-day multi-vector DDoS campaign targeting a Magic Transit customer and was mitigated without any human intervention. The DDoS campaign is believed to have been generated by Moobot, a Mirai-based botnet. No downtime, service degradation, or false positives were reported by the customer.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Moobot Targets 654 Gbps towards a Magic Transit Customer

Over those ten days, our systems automatically detected and mitigated over 5,000 DDoS attacks against this one customer, mainly UDP floods, SYN floods, ACK floods, and GRE floods. The largest DDoS attack was a UDP flood and lasted a mere 2 minutes. This attack targeted only one IP address but hit multiple ports. The attack originated from 18,705 unique IP addresses, each believed to be a Moobot-infected IoT device.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Attack Distribution by Country - From 100 countries

The attack was observed in Cloudflare’s data centers in 100 countries around the world. Approximately 89% of the attack traffic originated from just 10 countries with the US leading at 41%, followed by South Korea and Japan in second place (12% each), Continue reading

Restoring data to Netbox Docker

Having just shot myself in the foot by deleting docker and losing a container I had been working on, here is the command to restore data to netbox-docker’s Postgres database:

sudo docker exec -i netbox-docker_postgres_1 psql --username netbox netbox < /path/to/backup/file.sql

Phew…

IDC reports jump in server sales, decline in storage revenue

IDC released two surveys last week with seemingly contradictory results, but there is an underlying pattern: For now, on-premises hardware sales are dipping, while cloud sales are booming.In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8% year over year in the second calendar quarter of 2020 to $24.0 billion, while worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% to nearly 3.2 million units in the same time period. READ MORE: IT employment takes a hit but overall remains healthyTo read this article in full, please click here

IDC reports jump in server sales, decline in storage revenue

IDC released two surveys last week with seemingly contradictory results, but there is an underlying pattern: For now, on-premises hardware sales are dipping, while cloud sales are booming.In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8% year over year in the second calendar quarter of 2020 to $24.0 billion, while worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% to nearly 3.2 million units in the same time period. READ MORE: IT employment takes a hit but overall remains healthyTo read this article in full, please click here

How to consolidate network management tools

Network executives are making strides in their ongoing efforts to reduce network management tool sprawl, but there's still plenty of room for improvement on the road to a consolidated, platform-based toolset.Nearly two-thirds of enterprises (64%) in EMA's Network Management Megatrends 2020 report indicated they use between four and 10 tools, and another 17% use more than 10 tools. And that's just the tools that companies will admit to.To read this article in full, please click here

Why Don’t We Have Dynamic Firewall Policies

One of the readers of the Considerations for Host-Based Firewalls blog post wrote this interesting comment:

Perhaps a paradigm shift is due for firewalls in general? I’m thinking quickly here but wondering if we perhaps just had a protocol by which a host could request upstream firewall(s) to open access inbound on their behalf dynamically, the hosts themselves would then automatically inform the security device what ports they need/want opened upstream.

Well, we have at least two protocols that could fit the bill: Universal Plug and Play and Port Control Protocol (RFC 6887).

Huawei ban could complicate 5G deployment

As carriers race to build out their 5G networks, options for buying the gear they need are fewer in the U.S. than in other countries thanks to federal pressure, which could be slowing deployments. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises China-based Huawei and ZTE were both banned from providing equipment to the government itself in the Defense Authorization Act of 2018, and a general import ban followed shortly thereafter. That has changed the competitive landscape considerably, and raises questions about how the shape of 5G in America could change as a consequence.To read this article in full, please click here

Q&A: Building on 40 Years of Experience with Distributed Systems at Nokia

On the cloud native journey, there are both general lessons and best practices that apply to nearly all companies as well as industry-specific challenges. Cloud native journeys aren’t one-size-fits-all; the best way to handle storage, networking, security and even back-ups depends on the specifics of both the industry and the individual company.  We spoke with Nokia, about the specific challenges faced by telecom companies as they adopt containers and Kubernetes and how the industry is addressing them. Here’s what he had to say about best practices both for other telecoms as well as everyone making the move to cloud native.  Can you give an overview of Nokia’s cloud native journey? When did it start, how far are you in maturity? What have been major turning points/landmarks on the journey?  Nokia, as with many other telecom infrastructure vendors, has a long history in implementing and utilizing massively distributed systems. We started to build our own cluster management system back in the 1970s, which was based on proprietary hardware and software. As network function virtualization (NFV) technology gained momentum in 2016, we began offering infrastructure solutions and virtual network functions (VNFs) for the ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) standard, leveraging OpenStack. Today, Nokia’s CloudBand MANO solution is Continue reading