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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes
The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

Back in 2010, Cloudflare was introduced at TechCrunch Disrupt as a security and performance solution that took the tools of the biggest service providers and made them available to anyone online. But simply replicating these tools wasn’t enough — we needed to make them ridiculously easy to use.

When we launched Cloudflare for Teams almost ten years later, the vision was very much the same — build a secure and powerful Zero Trust solution that is ridiculously easy to use. However, while we talk about what we’re building with a regular cadence, we often gloss over how we are designing Cloudflare for Teams to make it simple and easy to use.

In this blog post we’ll do just that — if that sounds like your jam, keep scrolling.

Building a house

First, let's back up a bit and introduce Cloudflare for Teams.

We launched Cloudflare for Teams in January, 2020. With Teams, we wanted to alleviate the burden Cloudflare customers were feeling when trying to protect themselves and their infrastructure from threats online. We knew that continuing to rely on expensive hardware would be difficult to maintain and impractical to scale.

At its core, Teams joins two products together — Continue reading

IBM brings Red Hat to Power systems

IBM has introduced Red Hat Linux on its RISC-based Power systems, further expanding IBM's private- and hybrid-cloud offerings on the traditionally Unix-based hardware.IBM already has what it calls Enterprise Linux on Power, but this is bringing Red Hat, which IBM paid $34 billion to acquire, to its big iron. IBM Power systems now feature Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift's bare metal installer, Red Hat Runtimes, and newly certified Red Hat Ansible Content Collections.Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server is a move to bring the OpenShift container platform to IBM Power Virtual Server. The IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise infrastructure-as-a-service offering built around IBM POWER9 and offering access to more than 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Creating and merging PDFs on Linux

There are a number of ways that you can create PDFs on a Linux system. You can use an application like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, or you can take advantage of any of a number of commands that can generate PDFs from text files or from a group of other file formats. There are also a number of ways that you can merge a group of PDFs into a single PDF file.Why PDFs? PDF is often the preferred format for files that you need to share with others or archive. This is because PDF is an open file format, which makes sharing these files between diverse systems and devices possible.Using LibreOffice or OpenOffice Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice can export files as PDFs. You can open an existing document or create a new document and export it as a PDF. OpenOffice's Export as PDF… and LibreOffice's Export As => Export as PDF… will do what is required to convert your file.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM brings Red Hat to Power Systems

IBM has introduced Red Hat Linux on its RISC-based Power Systems servers, further expanding IBM's private- and hybrid-cloud offerings on the traditionally Unix-based hardware.IBM already has what it calls Enterprise Linux on Power, but this is bringing Red Hat, which IBM paid $34 billion to acquire, to its big iron. IBM Power Systems now feature Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift's bare metal installer, Red Hat Runtimes, and newly certified Red Hat Ansible Content Collections.Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server is a move to bring the OpenShift container platform to IBM Power Virtual Server. The IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise infrastructure-as-a-service offering built around IBM POWER9 and offering access to more than 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Creating and merging PDFs on Linux

There are a number of ways that you can create PDFs on a Linux system. You can use an application like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, or you can take advantage of any of a number of commands that can generate PDFs from text files or from a group of other file formats. There are also a number of ways that you can merge a group of PDFs into a single PDF file.Why PDFs? PDF is often the preferred format for files that you need to share with others or archive. This is because PDF is an open file format, which makes sharing these files between diverse systems and devices possible.Using LibreOffice or OpenOffice Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice can export files as PDFs. You can open an existing document or create a new document and export it as a PDF. OpenOffice's Export as PDF… and LibreOffice's Export As => Export as PDF… will do what is required to convert your file.To read this article in full, please click here

Rant: Cisco ACI Complexity

A while ago Antti Leimio wrote a long twitter thread describing his frustrations with Cisco ACI object model. I asked him for permission to repost the whole thread as those things tend to get lost, and he graciously allowed me to do it, so here we go.


I took a 5 days Cisco DCACI course. This is all new to me. I’m confused. Who is ACI for? Capabilities and completeness of features is fantastic but how to manage this complex system?

Rant: Cisco ACI Complexity

A while ago Antti Leimio wrote a long twitter thread describing his frustrations with Cisco ACI object model. I asked him for permission to repost the whole thread as those things tend to get lost, and he graciously allowed me to do it, so here we go.


I took a 5 days Cisco DCACI course. This is all new to me. I’m confused. Who is ACI for? Capabilities and completeness of features is fantastic but how to manage this complex system?

Flow-based monitoring for Magic Transit

Flow-based monitoring for Magic Transit
Flow-based monitoring for Magic Transit

Network-layer DDoS attacks are on the rise, prompting security teams to rethink their L3 DDoS mitigation strategies to prevent business impact. Magic Transit protects customers’ entire networks from DDoS attacks by placing our network in front of theirs, either always on or on demand. Today, we’re announcing new functionality to improve the experience for on-demand Magic Transit customers: flow-based monitoring. Flow-based monitoring allows us to detect threats and notify customers when they’re under attack so they can activate Magic Transit for protection.

Magic Transit is Cloudflare’s solution to secure and accelerate your network at the IP layer. With Magic Transit, you get DDoS protection, traffic acceleration, and other network functions delivered as a service from every Cloudflare data center. With Cloudflare’s global network (59 Tbps capacity across 200+ cities) and <3sec time to mitigate at the edge, you’re covered from even the largest and most sophisticated attacks without compromising performance. Learn more about Magic Transit here.

Using Magic Transit on demand

With Magic Transit, Cloudflare advertises customers’ IP prefixes to the Internet with BGP in order to attract traffic to our network for DDoS protection. Customers can choose to use Magic Transit always on or on demand. With always Continue reading

Juniper Rebuilds Its Enterprise SD-WAN Strategy With The Session-Smart Router

Juniper Networks is rebuilding its enterprise SD-WAN strategy around the Session-Smart Router (SSR) from 128 Technology, which Juniper acquired in October 2020. The Session-Smart Router integrates with Juniper's Mist AI platform and will replace Contrail Service Orchestration as its enterprise SD-WAN play.

The post Juniper Rebuilds Its Enterprise SD-WAN Strategy With The Session-Smart Router appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Building Snowflakes On Purpose

We all know that building snowflake networks is bad, right? If it’s not a repeatable process it’s going to end up being a problem down the road. If we can’t refer back to documentation to shows why we did something we’re going to end up causing issues and reducing reliability. But what happens when a snowflake process is required to fix a bigger problem? It’s a fun story that highlights where process can break down sometimes.

Reloaded

I’ve mentioned before that I spent about six months doing telephone tech support for Gateway computers. This was back in 2003 so Windows XP was the hottest operating system out there. The nature of support means that you’re going to be spending more time working on older things. In my case this was Windows 95 and 98. Windows 98 was a pain but it was easy to work on.

One of the most common processes we had for Windows 98 was a system reload. It was the last line of defense to fix massive issues or remove viruses. It was something that was second nature to any of the technicians on the help desk:

  1. Boot from the Gateway tools CD and use GWSCAN Continue reading