The Week in Internet News: Pandemic Puts Spotlight on Access Problems

No working from home: Working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic is tougher in some places than in others. Business Insider finds 17 U.S. cities where Internet access is lower than in much of the rest of the country. Many of the cities listed are across the South and in New Mexico.

Students need access: Alabama’s state schools superintendent is worried about a lack of access for some students while schools are shut down during the pandemic, AL.com reports. There are several “gaps” in access for students, but some school districts are using buses to deliver WiFi.

100,000 laptops: Meanwhile, in Arizona, more than 100,000 students need laptops in order to do school work from home, AZcentral.com reports. The Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation has been running a laptop drive to reduce that number. Access is also a problem in some rural areas, with some areas having only 25 percent of households with Internet access.

Fundraising for access: In Maine, the Bangor School Department has turned to fundraising to provide 350 families with Internet access so students can participate in distance learning, the Bangor Daily News reports. The school department raised about $28,000 in a week on the Continue reading

Getting started with Ansible and Check Point

The scale and complexity of modern infrastructures require not only that you be able to define a security policy for your systems, but also be able to apply that security policy programmatically or make changes as a response to external events.  As such, the proper automation tooling is a necessary building block to allow you to apply the appropriate actions in a fast, simple and consistent manner.

Check Point has a certified Ansible Content Collection of modules to help enable organizations to automate their response and remediation practices, and to embrace the DevOps model to accelerate application deployment with operational efficiency. The modules, based on Check Point security management APIs* are also available on Ansible Galaxy, in the upstream version of Check Point Collection for the Management Server. 

The operational flow is exactly the same for the API as it is for the Check Point security management GUI SmartConsole, i.e. Login > Get Session > Do changes > Publish > Logout. 

Security professionals can leverage these modules to automate various tasks for the identification, search, and response to security events.  Additionally, in combination with other modules that are part of Ansible security automation, existing Continue reading

Helping sites get back online: the origin monitoring intern project

The most impactful internship experiences involve building something meaningful from scratch and learning along the way. Those can be tough goals to accomplish during a short summer internship, but our experience with Cloudflare’s 2019 intern program met both of them and more! Over the course of ten weeks, our team of three interns (two engineering, one product management) went from a problem statement to a new feature, which is still working in production for all Cloudflare customers.

The project

Cloudflare sits between customers’ origin servers and end users. This means that all traffic to the origin server runs through Cloudflare, so we know when something goes wrong with a server and sometimes reflect that status back to users. For example, if an origin is refusing connections and there’s no cached version of the site available, Cloudflare will display a 521 error. If customers don’t have monitoring systems configured to detect and notify them when failures like this occur, their websites may go down silently, and they may hear about the issue for the first time from angry users.

This problem became the starting Continue reading

HS. Part 2. Automatic generation and visualisation of the network topology.

Hello my friend,

Surprisingly for myself in the previous post about networking I’ve started completely new topic. It was about the Microsoft Azure SONIC running inside the Docker container and network between those containers. Why is that new? Why does it matter? What is in it for you?

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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Network automation training – boost your career

To be able to understand and, more important, to create such a solutions, you need to have a holistic knowledge about the network automation. Come to our network automation training to get this knowledge and skills.

At this training we teach you all the necessary concepts such as YANG data modelling, working with JSON/YAML/XML data formats, Linux administration basics, programming in Bash/Ansible/Python for multiple network operation systems including Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS, Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux. All the most useful things such as NETCONF, REST API, OpenConfig and many others are there. Don’t miss the opportunity to improve Continue reading

COVID-19 Profiteers?

Numerous online companies are using the COVID-19 crisis to make their products better known (PacketPushers collected some of them). Nothing wrong with that - they’re investing into providing free- or at-cost resources, and hope to get increased traction in the market. Pretty fair and useful.

Then there are others… Here’s a recent email I got:

Using Paw to Launch an EC2 Instance via API Calls

Last week I wrote a post on using Postman to launch an EC2 instance via API calls. Postman is a cross-platform application, so while my post was centered around Postman on Linux (Ubuntu, specifically) the steps should be very similar—if not exactly the same—when using Postman on other platforms. Users of macOS, however, have another option: a macOS-specific peer to Postman named Paw. In this post, I’ll walk through using Paw to issue API requests to AWS to launch an EC2 instance.

I’ll structure this post as a “diff,” if you will, that outlines the differences of using Paw to launch an EC2 instance via API calls versus using Postman to do the same thing. Therefore, if you haven’t already read the Postman post from last week, I strongly recommend reviewing it before proceeding.

Prerequisites

This post assumes you’ve already installed Paw on your macOS system. It also assumes you are somewhat familiar with Paw; refer to the Paw documentation if not. Also, to support AWS authentication, please be sure to install the “AWS Signature 4 Auth Dynamic value” extension (see here or here). This extension is necessary in order to have the API requests sent Continue reading

Money Moves: March 2020

Palo Alto paid $420M for CloudGenix; Microsoft acquired Affirmed; AWS pledged $20 million to...

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#mydockerbday Recap + Community Stories

Although March has come and gone, you can still take part in the awesome activities put together by the community to celebrate Docker’s 7th birthday. 

Birthday Challenge

Denise Rey and Captains Łukasz Lach, Marcos Nils, Elton Stoneman, Nicholas Dille, and Brandon Mitchell put together an amazing birthday challenge for the community to complete and it is still available. If you haven’t checked out the hands-on learning content yet, go to the birthday page and earn your seven badges (and don’t forget to share them on twitter).

Live Show

Captain Bret Fisher hosted a 3-hour live Birthday Show with the Docker team and Captains. You can check out the whole thing on Docker’s Youtube Channel, or skip ahead using the timestamps below:

– 02:00 Pre-show pics and games

– 07:43 Kickoff with Captains

– 29:00 Docker Roadmap

– 1:15:47 Docker Desktop: What’s New

– 1:53:45 Docker Hub with GitHub Actions

– 2:20:15 Using Docker with Kubernetes

– 2:55:00 #myDockerBday Stories

Community Stories

And while many Community Leaders had to cancel in-person meetups due to the evolving COVID 19 situation, they and their communities still showed up and shared their #mydockerbday stories. There Continue reading

Altiostar CEO: Open RAN Will Dominate in 3 Years

“In the next three years economic forces will drive operators to go to open RAN," said Altiostar...

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Remote work, regional lockdowns and migration of Internet usage

The recommendation for social distancing to slow down the spread of COVID-19 has led many companies to adopt a work-from-home policy for their employees in offices around the world, and Cloudflare is no exception.

As a result, a large portion of Internet access shifted from office-focused areas, like city centers and business parks, towards more residential areas like suburbs and outlying towns. We wanted to find out just precisely how broad this geographical traffic migration was, and how different locations were affected by it.

It turns out it is substantial, and the results are quite stunning:

Gathering the Data

So how can we determine if Internet usage patterns have changed from a geographical perspective?

In each Cloudflare Point of Presence (in more than 200 cities worldwide) there's an edge router whose responsibility it is to switch Internet traffic to serve the requests of end users in the region.

These edge routers are the network's entry point and for monitoring and debugging purposes each router samples IP packet information regarding the traffic that traverses them. This data is collected as flow records and contains layer-3 related information, such as the source and destination IP address, port, packet size etc.

These statistical Continue reading

UPDATE 4-10: How enterprise networking is changing with a work-at-home workforce

As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!UPDATE 4.17AT&T reported that Email traffic is down 25% as more people opt for phone and video calls.  Video conferencing is on the rise with more than 470k Webex Meeting Calls on April 9, the highest during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It also stated instant messaging, including text traffic from messaging apps and platforms, has slightly declined since the week prior, but overall is up nearly 60%.To read this article in full, please click here

APRS

Another post in my burst of amateur radio blog posts.

To say that the documentation for APRS is not great is an understatement. What should be the best source of information, aprs.org, is just a collection of angry rants by the inventor of APRS, angrily accusing implementations and operators of using his invention the wrong way. There’s no documentation about what the right way is, just that everyone is wrong.

So here I’ll attempt to write down what it is, in one place, in an effort to both teach others, and for people who know more than me to correct me.

The best source of APRS information for me has actually been Kenwood radio manuals. See resources at the bottom.

APRS in short

APRS is a way to send short pieces of digital information as packets of data. The messages are:

• Status about you
  • Your position (optionally not exact)
  • Your heading
  • Your QSY (frequency you’re tuned to if someone wants to call)
• Weather reports
• Status about “items” and “objects”. This is objects that are not you, and aren’t a radio. For example where the meeting point is, or a hurricane.
• Short messages

The protocol

As an operator you Continue reading

Using Postman to Launch an EC2 Instance via API Calls

As I mentioned in this post on region and endpoint match in AWS API requests, exploring the AWS APIs is something I’ve been doing off and on for several months. There’s a couple reasons for this; I’ll go into those in a bit more detail shortly. In any case, I’ve been exploring the APIs using Postman (when on Linux) and Paw (when on macOS), and in this post I’ll share how to use Postman to launch an EC2 instance via API calls.

Before I get into the technical details, let me lay out a couple reasons for spending some time on this. I’m pretty familiar with tools like Terraform and Pulumi (my current favorite), and I’m reasonably familiar with AWS CLI itself. In looking at working directly with the APIs, I see this as adding a new perspective on how these other tools work. (I’ve found, in fact, that exploring the APIs has improved my usage of the AWS CLI.) Finally, as I try to deepen my knowledge of programming languages, I wanted to have a reasonable knowledge of the APIs before trying to program around the APIs (hopefully this will make the learning curve a bit less Continue reading

Daily Roundup: Cisco Vows No Job Cuts

Cisco pledged to preserve jobs; AWS added direct storage to ECS, Fargate; and SAP prepped for...

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Graphing The Coronavirus Pandemic

Since late February and early March, when the coronavirus outbreak began to spill out of China in earnest and spread its sickness and death across Europe, throughout the United States, and into other parts of the globe, IT companies have stepped up to lend their technologies to fight the pandemic. …

Graphing The Coronavirus Pandemic was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Deploy Stateful Docker Containers with Amazon ECS and Amazon EFS

At Docker, we are always looking for ways to make developers’ lives easier either directly or by working with our partners. Improving developer productivity is a core benefit of using Docker products and recently one of our partners made an announcement that makes developing cloud-native apps easier.

AWS announced that its customers can now configure their Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) applications deployed in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) mode to access Amazon Elastic File Storage (EFS) file systems. This is good news for Docker developers who use Amazon ECS. It means that Amazon ECS now natively integrates with Amazon EFS to automatically mount shared file systems into Docker containers. This allows you to deploy workloads that require access to shared storage such as machine learning workloads, containerizing legacy apps, or internal DevOps workloads such as GitLab, Jenkins, or Elasticsearch. 

The beauty of containerizing your applications is to provide a better way to create, package, and deploy software across different computing environments in a predictable and easy-to-manage way. Containers were originally designed to be stateless and ephemeral (temporary). A stateless application is one that neither reads nor stores information about its state from one time that it is run Continue reading

Zscaler Buys Cloud Security Startup Cloudneeti

Gartner recommends all security vendors invest in cloud security posture management and forecasts...

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Scientists Create a Long-Distance Cryogenic Microwave Quantum Network

There’s been quite a bit of fanfare around quantum computing during the last few years, with experts predicting that quantum computers will help fuel the growing computational demands of artificial intelligence, as well as forming the backbone of an unhackable internet. But beyond the hype is the reality that quantum computers are still some ways from being commercially viable, as researchers continue to resolve issues like accuracy, size and how to build a superconducting electrical oscillators that are used in some quantum chips need to be cooled down to near-absolute zero temperatures, otherwise the problem of Quantum Device Lab at study co-author quantum entanglement, two particles become linked in a way so that whatever happens to one particle, it also immediately occurs to the other, no matter the distance. Having proven that a cryogenically based, long-distance quantum network is indeed possible, the team is now working to construct a 30-meter (98.4-foot) quantum link. See more over at ETH Zurich’s

AI Surges In Response to Pandemic

Spending on AI is poised to jump, particularly among enterprises that are deploying the technology...

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Cisco, Other Tech Firms Vow No Job Cuts

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said his company has the wherewithal to survive the pandemic without laying...

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