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Category Archives for "Networking"

pygnmi 7. Integration of pygnmi with Nornir

Hello my friend,

With this blogpost we continue the series of pygnmi tutorials covering various use cases of our Python library created to help you with managing your network devices via GNMI. And today we show you, how easily you can use it with Nornir, if you like this automation framework.


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Can it be enough automation?

Yes, it can be. But how to understand, what you should automate and what shouldn’t? What are the success strategies to start the automation projects and what are the receipts of disaster? What is the most efficient ways and technologies depending on context, and how to identify? Should you still stick to CLI? Is the model-driven automation all the time suitable? There are gazillions of questions about the network automation, which you may have in your mind, but don’t know whom to ask. We are here to help you.

At our trainings, advanced network automation and automation with Nornir (2nd Continue reading

Worth Reading: AI/ML/Space Predictions Scorecard, 2021 Edition

In January 2018 Rodney Brooks made a series of long-term predictions about self-driving cars, robotics, AI, ML, and space travel. Not surprisingly, his predictions were curmudgeonly and pessimistic when compared to the daily hype (or I wouldn’t be blogging about it)… but guess who was right ;)

He’s also the only predictor I’m aware of who is not afraid to compare what he wrote with how reality turned out years down the line. On January 1st he published the 2021 edition of the predictions scorecard and so far he hasn’t been too pessimistic yet. Keep that in mind the next time you’ll be listening to your favorite $vendor droning about the wonders of AI/ML.

Worth Reading: AI/ML/Space Predictions Scorecard, 2021 Edition

In January 2018 Rodney Brooks made a series of long-term predictions about self-driving cars, robotics, AI, ML, and space travel. Not surprisingly, his predictions were curmudgeonly and pessimistic when compared to the daily hype (or I wouldn’t be blogging about it)… but guess who was right ;)

He’s also the only predictor I’m aware of who is not afraid to compare what he wrote with how reality turned out years down the line. On January 1st he published the 2021 edition of the predictions scorecard and so far he hasn’t been too pessimistic yet. Keep that in mind the next time you’ll be listening to your favorite $vendor droning about the wonders of AI/ML.

Meet The Workers Team Over Discord

Meet The Workers Team Over Discord
Meet The Workers Team Over Discord

The Cloudflare Workers team is excited to announce the opening of our Discord channel! You can join right away by going here.

Through our Discord channel, you can now connect with the team to ask questions, show off what you’re building, and discuss the platform with other developers.

Sometimes you just need to talk to another human being. Our developer docs will always be the source of truth on the mechanics of Workers, but we want to provide quicker help if you need it.

Growing The Workers Community

Over the past three years, Cloudflare Workers evolved from an initial sandbox for enterprise customers writing edge code to a developer platform for creating new applications and systems.

“We bet our whole business on Workers and it paid off big time,” said Hamlet Batista, CEO of RankSense, a SEO automation platform. “We've been saving a lot of money on infrastructure costs and DevOps resources we no longer need.”

Our team is constantly surprised by the palette of use cases from those developing on Workers. For example, a developer in Belgium created a static Workers site that teaches an online tutorial in three different languages on how to make your own face Continue reading

Building Backdoors and Fixing Malfeasance

You might have seen the recent news this week that there is an exploitable backdoor in Zyxel hardware that has been discovered and is being exploited. The backdoor admin account with the clever name ‘zyfwp’ is not something that has been present in the devices forever. The account was put in during firmware version 4.60, which was released in Q4 2020.

Zyxel is rushing to patch the devices and remove the backdoor account. Users are being advised to disable remote administration until the accounts can be deactivated and proven to be removed. However, the bigger question in my mind relates to the addition of the user account in the first place. Why would you knowingly install a backdoor?

Hello, Joshua

Backdoors are nothing new in the computer world. I’d argue the most famous backdoor account in the history of computer hacking belongs to Joshua, the dormant login for the War Operations Programmed Response (WOPR) computer system in the 1983 movie Wargames. Joshua was an old login for the creator to access the system outside of the military chain of command. When the developer was removed from the project the account was forgotten about until a kid discovered it and Continue reading

Heavy Networking 556: The State Of GNS3 For Network Labs

GNS3 is a tool for building virtual networks for labbing. Heavy Networking welcomes GNS3 co-founder and developer Jeremy Grossman and networking instructor David Bombal. We cover the state of GNS3 in 2021, including what GNS3 can do that maybe you didn’t know, and what’s on the roadmap.

The post Heavy Networking 556: The State Of GNS3 For Network Labs appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cisco fights to keep alive its planned $2.6B purchase of optical-tech vendor Acacia

Cisco’s planned acquisition of Acacia Communications took a litigious turn this week as the networking giant has gone to court to keep the optical technologies vendor from terminating the purchase.Cisco filed for a temporary restraining order in Delaware Chancery Court Jan. 8 to prevent Acacia from terminating its acquisition agreement with the company. The move followed an Acacia statement issued earlier on Jan. 8 that stated the company “has elected to terminate its merger agreement with Cisco Systems, Inc., effective immediately.”[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Acacia said the proposed merger was conditioned on the satisfaction or waiver of customary closing conditions, including obtaining necessary regulatory approvals within the timeframe contemplated by the merger agreement. One of those was the approval of China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), and Acacia said that hasn't been obtained within the originally agreed time frame.To read this article in full, please click here

Spotlight on home-office connectivity intensifies in 2021

Now that it's clear remote work is here to stay, what are the technology priorities for IT departments charged with keeping the enterprise workforce productive and secure?In a December report, research firm Gartner said it expects 48% of employees will work from home, even after the pandemic, compared with 30% pre-pandemic.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? Forrester, too, expects the remote worker population to remain elevated. "While there is no clear end point to the pandemic yet, the number of employees working remotely will begin to dwindle, eventually settling in at 300% of pre-pandemic levels at the minimum," wrote Forrester principle analyst David Johnson, in a blog post about 2021 remote work and automation trends.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: Cisco SD-WAN Policies and Centralized Magic

Right after Cisco SD-WAN devices are onboarded, how are the control and data plane tasks started? In this section, David Penaloza covers how Cisco SD-WAN solution makes the most of its SDN nature: single point of policy application and centralized management platform. The types of policies, the plane on which they act, their application and the actions that can performed are the main focus in this part of the series.

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

Video: Cisco SD-WAN Policies and Centralized Magic

Right after Cisco SD-WAN devices are onboarded, how are the control and data plane tasks started? In this section, David Penaloza covers how Cisco SD-WAN solution makes the most of its SDN nature: single point of policy application and centralized management platform. The types of policies, the plane on which they act, their application and the actions that can performed are the main focus in this part of the series.

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

25 years as a Network Engineer!

Cisco-2501

In January 1996, I entered for the first time in the configuration of a Cisco 2501 router. This was the beginning of my career as a network engineer. That was just 25 years ago! Here’s a quick look back and a few tips for junior engineers who are at the beginning of their careers.   25 years as a Network Engineer! In 25 years, I had the opportunity to change several times my working environment and specialty as a network engineer: I went from network engineer and peering-manager for regional…

The post 25 years as a Network Engineer! appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

Ransom DDoS attacks target a Fortune Global 500 company

Ransom DDoS attacks target a Fortune Global 500 company
Ransom DDoS attacks target a Fortune Global 500 company

In late 2020, a major Fortune Global 500 company was targeted by a Ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attack by a group claiming to be the Lazarus Group. Cloudflare quickly onboarded them to the Magic Transit service and protected them against the lingering threat. This extortion attempt was part of wider ransom campaigns that have been unfolding throughout the year, targeting thousands of organizations around the world. Extortionists are threatening organizations with crippling DDoS attacks if they do not pay a ransom.

Throughout 2020, Cloudflare onboarded and protected many organizations with Magic Transit, Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service for critical network infrastructure, the WAF service for HTTP applications, and the Spectrum service for TCP/UDP based applications -- ensuring their business’s availability and continuity.

Unwinding the attack timeline

I spoke with Daniel (a pseudonym) and his team, who work at the Incident Response and Forensics team at the aforementioned company. I wanted to learn about their experience, and share it with our readers so they could learn how to better prepare for such an event. The company has requested to stay anonymous and so some details have been omitted to ensure that. In this blog post, I will refer to them as X.

Initially, Continue reading

Considerations for Host-based Firewalls (Part 2)

This is a guest blog post by Matthias Luft, Principal Platform Security Engineer @ Salesforce, and a regular ipSpace.net guest speaker.

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to publish my first guest post here and, as to be expected from ipspace.net, it triggered some great discussion.

With this input and some open thoughts from the last post, I want to dive into a few more topics.

Application Engineering vs. (?) Network Engineering

One trigger for the initial post was the question whether host-based firewalls (HBFs), potentially combined with solutions to learn rulesets based on flows, are intrinsically better than central firewalls. While we discussed the mileage around that already, comments and questions emphasized how often we have to handle a “software engineering vs. network engineering” mentality – which should not involve any blame in either direction as this mindset is usually enforced by organizational structures.

For whatever it is worth, I can only stress the point that a strong collaboration between software and network engineering will resolve way more issues than any technology. I award myself a “Thanks, Captain Obvious” here, but I still want to make the point to try Continue reading