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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Internet Society’s African Chapters Join the African Union and Other Partners to Discuss IoT Security, Privacy, and Digital ID in Africa

In collaboration with the Africa Union Commission (AUC), the Africa Telecommunication Union (ATU), and Omidyar Network, from 8-11 April 2019 the Africa Regional Bureau successfully gathered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 103 participants comprising Internet Society Chapter leaders, African Regional economic bodies, privacy experts, regulators, and data protection agencies to a two-day workshop on IoT Security, Privacy, and Digital ID followed by the 2019 African Chapters Advocacy Meeting.

The first day of the workshop focused on IoT opportunities and security considerations. It explored the IoT landscape in Africa and shared active deployments and chapter-led projects. The day also discussed IoT security and privacy considerations with emphasis on frameworks that could be implemented to ensure the security and safety of IoT devices. A dedicated session on aligning policy and IoT security needs shared the experience of the Senegal multistakeholder IoT security process and motivated member states to initiate a similar process in their countries.

The second day focused on localizing the AUC and Internet Society Personal Data Protection Guidelines. Our partners AUC, Omidyar Network, Mozilla Foundation, and UNECA unpacked issues related to digital identity, personal data protection and privacy in the region. The meeting explored the nature of policies in place to Continue reading

Girls in ICT Day: Attend the Global Marathon in Digital Skills Development

There’s a lack of gender diversity at all levels in the technology sector. This is partly because the number of female students in mathematics, engineering, computer science, and science is disproportionately low around the world. So how do we close this gap?

Support for the education of women and girls in the ICT sector is consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – in particular SDG 5, aimed at achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls through, among other things, information and communication technologies.

The Women’s Special Interest Group (Women SIG) of the Internet Society is committed to promoting the participation of women in the Internet ecosystem, especially considering the importance to increase the participation of girls and adolescents in Information Technology and Communication.

This April 25, International Day of Girls in ICT, promoted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), aims to reduce the digital gender gap and to encourage and motivate girls to participate in technology careers. With the support of the Internet Society Chapters and local civil society organizations, we’re planning to celebrate the day with a global marathon of training in digital skills development. We want to motivate girls and teenagers to study and Continue reading

The Climate and Cloudflare

The Climate and Cloudflare
The Climate and Cloudflare

Power is the precursor to all modern technology. James Watt’s steam engine energized the factory, Edison and Tesla’s inventions powered street lamps, and now both fossil fuels and renewable resources power the trillions of transistors in computers and phones. In the words of anthropologist Leslie White: “Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work.”

Unfortunately, most of the traditional ways to generate power are simply not sustainable. Burning coal or natural gas releases carbon dioxide which directly leads to global warming, and threatens the habitats of global ecosystems, and by extension humans. If we can’t minimize the impact, our world will be dangerously destabilized -- mass extinctions will grow more likely, and mass famines, draughts, migration, and conflict will only be possible to triage rather than avoid.

Is the Internet the primary source of this grave threat? No: all data centers globally accounted for 2-3% of total global power use in recent years, and power consumption isn’t the only contributor to human carbon emissions. Transportation (mostly oil use in cars, trucks, ships, trains, and airplanes) and industrial processing (steel, chemicals, heavy manufacturing, Continue reading

BrandPost: Edge computing is in most industries’ future

The growth of edge computing is about to take a huge leap. Right now, companies are generating about 10% of their data outside a traditional data center or cloud. But within the next six years, that will increase to 75%, according to Gartner.That’s largely down to the need to process data emanating from devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. Early adopters include: Manufacturers: Devices and sensors seem endemic to this industry, so it’s no surprise to see the need to find faster processing methods for the data produced. A recent Automation World survey found that 43% of manufacturers have deployed edge projects. Most popular use cases have included production/manufacturing data analysis and equipment data analytics. Retailers: Like most industries deeply affected by the need to digitize operations, retailers are being forced to innovate their customer experiences. To that end, these organizations are “investing aggressively in compute power located closer to the buyer,” writes Dave Johnson, executive vice president of the IT division at Schneider Electric. He cites examples such as augmented-reality mirrors in fitting rooms that offer different clothing options without the consumer having to try on the items, and beacon-based heat maps that show Continue reading

Prometheus exporter

Prometheus is an open source time series database optimized to collect large numbers of metrics from cloud infrastructure. This article will explore how industry standard sFlow telemetry streaming supported by network devices (Arista, Aruba, Cisco, Dell, Huawei, Juniper, etc.) and Host sFlow agents (Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, Docker, Systemd, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix AHV, Xen) can be integrated with Prometheus to extend visibility into the network.

The diagram above shows the elements of the solution: sFlow telemetry streams from hosts and switches to an instance of sFlow-RT. The sFlow-RT analytics software converts the raw measurements into metrics that are accessible through a REST API. The sflow-rt/prometheus application extends the REST API to include native Prometheus exporter functionality allowing Prometheus to retrieve metrics. Prometheus stores metrics in a time series database that can be queries by Grafana to build dashboards.

Update 19 October 2019, native support for Prometheus export added to sFlow-RT, Prometheus application no longer needed to run this example, use URL: /prometheus/metrics/ALL/ALL/txt. The Prometheus application is needed for exporting traffic flows, see Flow metrics with Prometheus and Grafana.

The Docker sflow/prometheus image provides a simple way to run the application:
docker run --name sflow-rt -p 8008:8008 -p  Continue reading

How to identify same-content files on Linux

In a recent post, we looked at how to identify and locate files that are hard links (i.e., that point to the same disk content and share inodes). In this post, we'll check out commands for finding files that have the same content, but are not otherwise connected.Hard links are helpful because they allow files to exist in multiple places in the file system while not taking up any additional disk space. Copies of files, on the other hand, sometimes represent a big waste of disk space and run some risk of causing some confusion if you want to make updates. In this post, we're going to look at multiple ways to identify these files.To read this article in full, please click here

Amazon CloudFront with WordPress as Infrastructure as Code

There are roughly a GAJILLION articles, blogs, and documents out there that explain how to setup Amazon CloudFront to work with WordPress.

Most of them are wrong in one or more ways.

  • They advise a type of cache behavior that is incorrect for one or more WordPress assets.
  • They fail to provide any advice for WordPress assets that need specific cache behavior.
  • The article/blog/document is stale and hasn’t been updated to reflect changes in newer versions of WordPress.

Rather than fall into the trap of writing yet another article for whatever the “now current” version of WordPress is that will likely fall victim to one or more of the conditions listed above, I’m going to take a different approach.

I’m going to codify the CloudFront configuration, version it on GitHub, and adopt an “infrastructure-as-code” (IaC) mentality. This blog post will describe the overall architecture and provide some context, but the actual mechanics of setting up CloudFront to work with WordPress will live (and evolve!) in the IaC files themselves which will be under version control.

Let’s do it!

The Architecture

I’ll say this up front: this architecture may not be for everyone (but I have a sneaky Continue reading

Cumulus NetQ Reinvented

When it comes to visibility into the health of your network. telemetry is all the rage these days. Even so, many customers are still plowing through old SNMP and Flow data to try to piece together what went wrong in their network with no easy way to back the clock up to a time before something broke your spine or leaf! Network downtime is usually costly and for many customers, large and small, can be mission critical.

With these and many other reasons in mind, I’m really excited to introduce Cumulus NetQ. With NetQ, Cumulus Networks has reinvented, from the ground up, our original NetQ product to include a long list of very useful features that are sure to make NetQ a Network Operators best friend.

Figure 1: Cumulus NetQ Benefits

NetQ is a highly-scalable, modern network operations toolset that provides visibility into and troubleshooting of your overlay and underlay networks in real-time. NetQ, delivers actionable insights and operational intelligence about the health of your network and your Linux-based data center — from the container, virtual machine, or host, all the way to the switch and port. In short, NetQ provides holistic, real-time intelligence about your modern network.

So, what Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Open architecture and open source – The new wave for SD-WAN?

I recently shared my thoughts about the role of open source in networking. I discussed two significant technological changes that we have witnessed. I call them waves, and these waves will redefine how we think about networking and security.The first wave signifies that networking is moving to the software so that it can run on commodity off-the-shelf hardware. The second wave is the use of open source technologies, thereby removing the barriers to entry for new product innovation and rapid market access. This is especially supported in the SD-WAN market rush.To read this article in full, please click here

Text Files or Relational Database?

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

One of the common questions I get once the networking engineers progress from Ansible 101 to large-scale deployments (example: generating configurations for 1000 devices) is “Can Ansible use a relational database? Text files don’t scale…”

TL&DR answer: Not directly, but there are tons of database Ansible plugins or custom Jinja2 filters out there.

Read more ...

Expanding the DNS Root: Hyperlocal vs NSEC Caching

The root zone of the DNS has been the focal point of many DNS conversations for decades. One set of conversations, which is a major preoccupation of ICANN meetings, concerns what labels are contained in the root zone. A separate set of conversations concern how this root zone is served in the context of the DNS resolution protocol. In this article I'd like to look at the second topic, and, in particular, look at two proposals to augment the way the root zone is served to the DNS.
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