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Procrastination Party

“I’ll get to that later.”

“I’m not feeling it right now.”

“I have to find an angle.”

“It will be there tomorrow.”

Any of those sound familiar? I know they do for me. That’s because procrastination is the beast that lives inside all of us. Slumbering until a time when it awakes and persuades us to just put things off until later. Can’t hurt, right?

Brain Games

The human brain is an amazing thing. It is the single largest consumer of nutrients and oxygen in the human body. It’s the reason why human babies are born practically helpless due to the size in relation to the rest of an infant. It’s the reason why we can make tools, ponder the existence of life in the universe, and write kick-ass rock and roll music.

But the human brain is lazy. It doesn’t like thinking. It prefers simple patterns and easy work. Given a choice, the human brain would rather do some kind of mindless repetitive task ad naseum instead of creating. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense from a biological perspective. Tasks that are easy don’t engage many resources. Which means the Continue reading

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Master data analytics and deep learning with this $35 Python certification bundle

Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, but mastering it allows you to build apps and games or even take advantage of neural networks for deep learning. But first, you’ll need to learn the basics of Python, and this $34.99 bundle has exactly what you need to do so.The Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle contains 12 courses on the different ways that Python is employed. If you’re new to Python and coding in general, the first course you should take is From 0 to 1: Learn Python Programming - Easy As Pie. This course will teach you how to write Python code, auto-generate spreadsheets with xlsxwriter, scrape websites with Beautiful Soup, and more. You can hone your skills even further with The Python Mega Course, which will teach you how to build real-world applications such as an interactive web-based financial chart.To read this article in full, please click here

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Member News: Helping Schools Get Access to Internet, Educational Materials

News from Internet Society Chapters and Special Interest Groups across the world:

Library in a box: This month, the Kyrgyzstan Chapter installed an electronic library called the Ilim Box in secondary schools in the southern part of Issyk-Kul region. The device allows the schools to access educational resources when they don’t have an Internet connection. All the data is stored in the device itself, with only a power supply needed.

Refresher course: Earlier this year, the Paraguay Chapter helped set up improved Internet access and an electronics lab at Colegio Técnico Nacional, a secondary school in Asunción. The equipment at the 1,500-student technical school had become obsolete, and many classrooms lacked an Internet connection and modern computers.

Student governance: Sticking with our focus on education, the Benin Chapter hosted students from the National Institute of Technical and Industrial Sciences of Lokossa earlier this year to talk about Internet Governance issues. Chapter members talked to the students about ways to take care of the Internet and how to pay attention to its development.

Internet for everyone: The Israel Chapter is focused on ways to bring access to more Arab residents. “The Israeli Internet Association sees a narrowing of the digital Continue reading

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Automation Solution: Network Health State Report

How nice would it be to have a fabric health dashboard displaying a summary of numerous parameters you’re interested in (number of operational uplinks, number of BGP sessions…) for every switch in your fabric.

I’m positive you could hack something together using the customization capabilities of your favorite network management system… or you could write a simple data gathering solution like Stephen Harding did while attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course.

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SUSE Dumps OpenStack for Cloud Native, Containers

The company will cease production of new versions of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and to discontinue sales...

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SD-WAN – What it means for enterprise networking, security, cloud computing

There have been significant changes in wide-area networks over the past few years, none more important than software-defined WAN or SD-WAN, which is changing how network pros think about optimizing the use of connectivity that is as varied as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), frame relay and even DSL.What is SD-WAN? As the name states, software-defined wide-area networks use software to control the connectivity, management and services between data centers and remote branches or cloud instances. Like its bigger technology brother, software-defined networking, SD-WAN decouples the control plane from the data plane.To read this article in full, please click here

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SD-WAN: What is it and why you’ll use it one day

There have been significant changes in wide-area networks over the past few years, none more important than software-defined WAN or SD-WAN, which is changing how network pros think about optimizing the use of connectivity that is as varied as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), frame relay and even DSL.What is SD-WAN? As the name states, software-defined wide-area networks use software to control the connectivity, management and services between data centers and remote branches or cloud instances. Like its bigger technology brother, software-defined networking, SD-WAN decouples the control plane from the data plane.To read this article in full, please click here

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The biggest risk to uptime? Your staff

There was an old joke: "To err is human, but to really foul up you need a computer." Now it seems the reverse is true. The reliability of data center equipment is vastly improved but the humans running them have not kept up and it's a threat to uptime.The Uptime Institute has surveyed thousands of IT professionals throughout the year on outages and said the vast majority of data center failures are caused by human error, from 70 percent to 75 percent.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] And some of them are severe. It found more than 30 percent of IT service and data center operators experienced downtime that they called a “severe degradation of service” over the last year, with 10 percent of the 2019 respondents reporting that their most recent incident cost more than $1 million.To read this article in full, please click here

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The biggest risk to uptime? Your staff

There was an old joke: "To err is human, but to really foul up you need a computer." Now it seems the reverse is true. The reliability of data center equipment is vastly improved but the humans running them have not kept up and it's a threat to uptime.The Uptime Institute has surveyed thousands of IT professionals throughout the year on outages and said the vast majority of data center failures are caused by human error, from 70 percent to 75 percent.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] And some of them are severe. It found more than 30 percent of IT service and data center operators experienced downtime that they called a “severe degradation of service” over the last year, with 10 percent of the 2019 respondents reporting that their most recent incident cost more than $1 million.To read this article in full, please click here

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Viewing files and processes as trees on Linux

Linux provides several handy commands for viewing both files and processes in a branching, tree-like format that makes it easy to view how they are related. In this post, we'll look at the ps, pstree and tree commands along with some options they provide to help focus your view on what you want to see.ps The ps command that we all use to list processes has some interesting options that many of us never take advantage of. While the commonly used ps -ef provides a complete listing of running processes, the ps -ejH command adds a nice effect. It indents related processes to make the relationship between these processes visually more clear  – as in this excerpt:To read this article in full, please click here

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Reimagining-the-Internet project gets funding

The Internet of Things and 5G could be among the benefactors of an upcoming $20 million U.S. government cash injection designed to come up with new architectures to replace existing public internet.FABRIC, as the National Science Foundation-funded umbrella project is called, aims to come up with a proving ground to explore new ways to move, keep and compute data in shared infrastructure such as the public internet. The project “will allow scientists to explore what a new internet could look like at scale,” says the lead institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in a media release. And it “will help determine the internet architecture of the future.”To read this article in full, please click here

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Oracle Ups Ante Against Cloud Giants Amazon, Microsoft

The company plans to hire 2,000 employees worldwide to join its Cloud Infrastructure business as it...

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Versa SD-WAN License Sales Top 200,000

Since last year the SD-WAN vendor has sold 50,000 new licenses, doubled its service provider...

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Spend less time fumbling and more time landing sales with PipelineDeals

Common sense dictates that if your business wants to scale upwards, it needs to secure more sales. However, building a solid base of satisfied customers who will recommend your services is impossible if your sales team struggles with an overly complicated CRM platform. Rather than spending thousands of hours fumbling with complex CRM tools, you can optimize your sales efforts with PipelineDeals’ easy-to-use platform, and your business can sign up for a 14-day free trial or customized demo now. To read this article in full, please click here

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AT&T Abandons Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands

“This is one of the first transactions driven by climate change,” said industry analyst Roger...

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The case for open standards: an M&A perspective

Very few organizations use IT equipment supplied by a single vendor. Where heterogeneous IT environments exist, interoperability is key to achieving maximum value from existing investments. Open networking is the most cost effective way to ensure interoperability between devices on a network.

Unless your organization was formed very recently, chances are that your organization’s IT has evolved over time. Even small hardware upgrades are disruptive to an organization’s operations, making network-wide “lift and shift” upgrades nearly unheard of.

While loyalty to a single vendor can persist through regular organic growth and upgrade cycles, organizations regularly undergo mergers and acquisitions (M&As). M&As almost always introduce some level of heterogeneity into a network, meaning that any organization of modest size is almost guaranteed to have to integrate IT from multiple vendors.

While every new type of device from every different vendor imposes operational management overhead, the impact of heterogeneous IT isn’t universal across device types. The level of automation within an organization for different device classes, as well as the ubiquity and ease of use of management abstraction layers, both play a role in determining the impact of heterogeneity.

The Impact of Standards

Consider, for a moment, the average x86 server. Each Continue reading

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Cato and the Secure Access Service Edge: Where Your Digital Business Network Starts

In this blog explore how the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) converges enterprise security and...

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Terraforming Cloudflare: in quest of the optimal setup

This is a guest post by Dimitris Koutsourelis and Alexis Dimitriadis, working for the Security Team at Workable, a company that makes software to help companies find and hire great people.

This post is about our introductive journey to the infrastructure-as-code practice; managing Cloudflare configuration in a declarative and version-controlled way. We’d like to share the experience we’ve gained during this process; our pain points, limitations we faced, different approaches we took and provide parts of our solution and experimentations.

Terraform world

Terraform is a great tool that fulfills our requirements, and fortunately, Cloudflare maintains its own provider that allows us to manage its service configuration hasslefree.

On top of that, Terragrunt, is a thin wrapper that provides extra commands and functionality for keeping Terraform configurations DRY, and managing remote state.

The combination of both leads to a more modular and re-usable structure for Cloudflare resources (configuration), by utilizing terraform and terragrunt modules.
We’ve chosen to use the latest version of both tools (Terraform-v0.12 & Terragrunt-v0.19 respectively) and constantly upgrade to take advantage of the valuable new features and functionality, which at this point in time, remove important limitations.

Workable context

Our set up includes Continue reading

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InfluxDB 2.0

Introducing the Next-Generation InfluxDB 2.0 Platform mentions that InfluxDB 2.0 will be able to scrape Prometheus exporters. Get started with InfluxDB provides instructions for running an alpha version of the new software using Docker:

docker run --name influxdb -p 9999:9999 quay.io/influxdb/influxdb:2.0.0-alpha

Prometheus exporter describes an application that runs on the sFlow-RT analytics platform that converts real-time streaming telemetry from industry standard sFlow agents. Host, Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes monitoring describes how to deploy agents on popular container orchestration platforms.
The screen capture above shows three scrapers configured in InfluxDB 2.0:

1. sflow-rt-analyzer,
   URL: http://10.0.0.70:8008/prometheus/analyzer/txt
2. sflow-rt-dump,
   URL: http://10.0.0.70:8008/prometheus/metrics/ALL/ALL/txt
3. sflow-rt-flow-src-dst,
   URL: http://10.0.0.70:8008/app/prometheus/scripts/export.js/flows/ALL/txt?metric=flow_src_dst_bps&key=ipsource,ipdestination&value=bytes&aggMode=max&maxFlows=100&minValue=1000&scale=8

InfluxDB 2.0 now includes the data exploration and dashboard building capabilities that were previously in the separate Chronograf application. The screen Continue reading

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Islamabad Chapter Brings First Internet Governance Event to Quetta, Pakistan

The 5th Pakistan School on Internet Governance (pkSIG 2019) was successfully held last month in Quetta, Pakistan. This represents a significant achievement for the Internet Society Pakistan Islamabad Chapter as it played an instrumental role in bringing the first-ever Internet Governance event to the provincial capital of Balochistan.

For those who may not know, Balochistan has the largest land area among the four provinces of Pakistan, yet it is the least populated and least developed. Only 27% of its population lives in urban areas and Internet penetration is low. Finding adequate sponsors, and more importantly, diversity among the students to participate was a critical concern. But, pkSIG 2019 in Quetta proved to be one of the best editions of this school.

Over 60 people (one-third of them female) registered for the event, including students, professionals, startup founders, speakers, and some guests who showed keen interest in the program. Following a four-week long process of registration and shortlisting, 35 students were selected for pkSIG 2019 and five were awarded fellowships. Since all the sessions were livestreamed, a sizeable audience participated online as well. (The sessions and presentations are available online.)

“It’s our fifth consecutive year conducting pkSIG – Continue reading