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Category Archives for "Networking"

Network Break 320: Juniper Rebrands Service Provider Automation Offerings; Fortinet Gets SASE With Latest OS

This week's Network Break dives into Juniper reorganizing and rebranding automation products as the Paragon portfolio, new SASE and ZTNA capabilities from Fortinet, the rise of cyber-insurance premiums, an HPE server getting launched into space, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 320: Juniper Rebrands Service Provider Automation Offerings; Fortinet Gets SASE With Latest OS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Availability Zones and Regions in AWS, Azure and GCP

My friend Daniel Dib sent me this interesting question:

As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?

I’m positive I don’t have to tell you what networks, subnets, and VRFs are, but you might not have worked with public cloud availability zones before. Before going into the details of Daniel’s question (and it will take us three blog posts to get to the end), let’s introduce regions and availability zones (you’ll find more details in AWS Networking and Azure Networking webinars).

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Availability Zones and Regions in AWS, Azure and GCP

My friend Daniel Dib sent me this interesting question:

As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?

I’m positive I don’t have to tell you what networks, subnets, and VRFs are, but you might not have worked with public cloud availability zones before. Before going into the details of Daniel’s question (and it will take us three blog posts to get to the end), let’s introduce regions and availability zones (you’ll find more details in AWS Networking and Azure Networking webinars).

Read more …

Farewell to Northbound Networks

Digging through my office looking for some other technology which I had misplaced, I stumbled across a small box containing a Northbound Networks Zodiac-FX, a small 4-port FastEthernet OpenFlow SDN switch which I had picked up after backing a 2015 kickstarter campaign.

Northbound Networks Zodiac FX SDN Switch

These were a pretty cool idea, and at the time OpenFlow (OF) was the hottest thing around, everything was being SDN-washed, and the idea that a regular user like myself could afford actual hardware with OF capabilities to toy with in the home lab was beyond belief. Of course, it was possible to virtualize OF with Mininet, but there’s something about using a real switch that goes beyond that. Even though, as you’ll in a future post, I ended up wasting that opportunity, I am still honored to have backed it, and my hat is off to Northbound Networks’ founder Paul Zanna for what he has accomplished.

Paying My Respects

With that in mind, I’m sad to note that when I went to the Northbound Networks website, I discovered that some time around August 2020 the company stopped manufacturing SDN hardware.

Northbound Networks home page, January 2021

Since the original Zodiac FX campaign, Paul had expanded the available products to include an 802. Continue reading

Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric (part 3)

The fist post on this topic considered some basic definitions and the reasons why I am writing this series of posts. The second considered the convergence speed of BGP on a dense topology such as a DC fabric, and what mechanisms we normally use to improve BGP’s convergence speed. This post considers some of the objections to slow convergence speed—convergence speed is not important, and ECMP with high fanouts will take care of any convergence speed issues. The network below will be used for this discussion.

Two servers are connected to this five-stage butterfly: S1 and S2 Assume, for a moment, that some service is running on both S1 and S2. This service is configured in active-active mode, with all data synchronized between the servers. If some fabric device, such as C7, fails, traffic destined to either S1 or S2 across that device will be very quickly (within tens of milliseconds) rerouted through some other device, probably C6, to reach the same destination. This will happen no matter what routing protocol is being used in the underlay control plane—so why does BGP’s convergence speed matter? Further, if these services are running in the overlay, or they are designed to discover Continue reading

Negotiating your maximum salary

If you are not negotiating your salary, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table.  Negotiation is an important career skill and activity because it provides a very nice upside in overall career earnings. Preparation is important because the person you are negotiating with probably has a lot more experience in salary negotiations than […]

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The Week in Internet News: No Internet, No Vaccine

Unhealthy access: People lacking Internet access in the U.S., including some racial minorities, may be missing out on COVID-19 vaccines, The Conversation suggests. Signing up for the vaccine in the U.S. has largely happened online, meaning fewer seniors from underserved minority communities have been able to make appointments. In addition, people without Internet access have missed out on other health resources during the pandemic, as the use of telehealth services has skyrocketed during the pandemic.

Permission to be social: Mexican Senator Ricardo Monreal has proposed regulations for social media companies that would require them to “request authorization” from the country’s telecom regulator in order to continue operating in the country, Reuters reports. The Latin American Internet Association is protesting against the proposal, saying it would violate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and create unjustified trade barriers.

No sale: U.S. President Joe Biden has paused the proposed sale of TikTok from Chinese owner ByteDance to Oracle and Walmart after former President Donald Trump raised security concerns about the app, NPR reports. Trump had threated to ban the video sharing app unless it was sold, but the Biden administration will undertake “a wide-ranging probe into how Chinese-owned technology companies could Continue reading

Tech Bytes: MSSP Partners With Fortinet To Deliver Secure SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast from the Packet Pushers is a conversation with Node4, a managed security service provider that's deploying and operating Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN for its customers. Fortinet is our sponsor. Our guest from Node4 is Glenn Akester, Lead Network Services Architect.

The post Tech Bytes: MSSP Partners With Fortinet To Deliver Secure SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How to protect backups from ransomware

Ransomware is becoming the number one threat to data, which makes it essential to ensure that bad actors don’t encrypt your backup data along with your primary data when they execute ransomware attacks. If they succeed at that, you will have no choice but to pay the ransom, and that will encourage them to try it again.The key to not having to pay ransom is having the backups to restore systems that ransomware has encrypted. And the key to protecting those backups from ransomware is to put as many barriers as you can between production systems and backup systems. Whatever you do, make sure that the only copy of your backups is not simply sitting in a directory on a Windows server in the same data center you are trying to protect. Let’s take a closer look at a few key elements of that sentence: “Windows”, “same data center”, and “sitting in a directory”.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM launches AIX-to-cloud app migration program

IBM has launched the Power Private Cloud (PPC) Rack solution, a converged infrastructure product that migrates on-premises apps running on its POWER9/AIX systems to the cloud.The solution consists of three POWER System S922 servers with 20 CPU cores, 256GB of RAM, and 3.2TB of NVMe local storage, plus a new storage enclosure, the FlashSystem 5200, with a minimum of 9.6TB and a pair of SAN24B-6 switches with 24 Fibre Channel ports.To read this article in full, please click here

Rant: Don’t Ever Compare Enterprise IT Shenanigans with Apollo 13

Here’s a recent tweet by my friend Joe Onisick that triggered this blog post:

My favorite people are the ones that start with “how could we make that work?” Before jumping into all of their preconceived bs on why it won’t work.

I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. The number of people who would invent all sorts of excuses just to avoid turning on their brains and keep to their cozy old methods is staggering. Unfortunately, someone immediately had the urge to switch into what I understood to be a heroic MacGyver mode (or maybe it was just my lack of caffeine, in which case I apologize for the misquote… but you might still like the rest of the rant):

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Rant: Don’t Ever Compare Enterprise IT Shenanigans with Apollo 13

Here’s a recent tweet by my friend Joe Onisick that triggered this blog post:

My favorite people are the ones that start with “how could we make that work?” Before jumping into all of their preconceived bs on why it won’t work.

I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. The number of people who would invent all sorts of excuses just to avoid turning on their brains and keep to their cozy old methods is staggering. Unfortunately, someone immediately had the urge to switch into what I understood to be a heroic MacGyver mode (or maybe it was just my lack of caffeine, in which case I apologize for the misquote… but you might still like the rest of the rant):

Read more …

Install azruntime as a CLI program using pipx

azruntime, the Python program I wrote to manage virtual machines in my Azure subscriptions, is more convenient to use when run as a command from the Linux prompt instead of as a Python program in its virtual environment. You can install Python packages as command-line-programs using pipx.

To make azruntime work after using pipx to install it, I had to organize the project into a proper Python package folder structure, add an entry point in the setup.py file, and change the authentication class used by azruntime.

This post describes what I learned about pipx and Python packaging to enable me to install azruntime as a CLI application.

Changing the package directory structure

I originally structured the azruntime package so all its files were in one folder. I know this is not the standard way that packages are organized but I thought it was simpler and it worked with pip. However, pipx requires the correct package folder structure.

Below, I show the new folder structure I created.

azruntime/
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── azruntime
│   ├── __init.py__
│   ├── __main__.py
│   └── azruntime.py
├── requirements.txt
└── setup.py

At the top level, I have Continue reading

Worth Reading: Internet of Trash

I love the recent Internet of Trash article by Geoff Huston, in particular this bit:

“Move fast and break things” is not a tenable paradigm for this industry today, if it ever was. In the light of our experience with the outcomes of an industry that became fixated on pumping out minimally viable product, it’s a paradigm that heads towards what we would conventionally label as criminal negligence.

Of course it’s not just the Internet-of-Trash. Whole IT is filled with examples of startups and “venerable” companies doing the same thing and boasting about their disruptiveness. Now go and read the whole article ;)

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