Hedge 201: Roundtable

It’s time to gather round the hedge and discuss whatever Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ find interesting! In this episode we discuss business logic vulnerabilities, and how we often forget to think outside the box to understand the attack surfaces that matter. We also discuss upcoming network speed increases like Wi-Fi 7 and 800G Ethernet. Do we really need these speeds, or are we just getting caught up in a hype cycle?

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2024 network plans dogged by uncertainty, diverging strategies

It’s barely fall of 2023, but it’s already clear that CIOs aren’t particularly positive about their network plans for 2024. Of 83 I have input from, in fact, 59 say they expect “significant issues” in their network planning for next year, and 71 say that they’ll be “under more pressure” in 2024 than they were this year. Sure, CIOs have a high-pressure job, but their expectations for 2024 are worse than for any year in the past 20 years, other than during Covid. Nobody is saying it’s a “the sky is falling” crisis like the proverbial Chicken Little, but some might be hunching their shoulders just a little.It seems that in 2023, all the certainties CIOs had identified in their network planning up to now are being called into question. That isn’t limited to networking, either. In fact, 82 of 83 said their cloud spending is under review, and 78 said that their data center and software plans are also in flux. In fact, CIOs said their network pressures are due more to new issues relating to the cloud, the data center, and software overall than to any network-specific challenges. Given all of this, it’s probably not surprising Continue reading

Survey: Observability tools can create more resilient, secure networks

IT leaders are investing in observability technologies that can help them gain greater visibility beyond internal networks and build more resilient environments, according to recent research from Splunk.Splunk, which Cisco announced it would acquire for $28 billion, surveyed 1,750 observability practitioners to gauge investment and deployment of observability products as well as commitment to observability projects within their IT environments. According to the vendor’s State of Observability 2023 report, 87% of respondents now employ specialists who work exclusively on observability projects.To read this article in full, please click here

How to determine RTOs and RPOs for backup and recovery

When evaluating the design of your backup systems or developing a design of a new backup and recovery system, there are arguably only two metrics that matter: how fast you can recover, and how much data you will lose when you recover. If you build your design around the agreed-upon numbers for these two metrics, and then repeatedly test that you are able to meet those metrics in a recovery, you’ll be in good shape.The problem is that few people know what these metrics are for their organization. This isn’t a matter of ignorance, though. They don’t know what they are because no one ever created the metrics in the first place. And if you don’t have agreed upon metrics (also known as service levels), every recovery will be a failure because it will be judged against the unrealistic metrics in everyone’s heads. With the exception of those who are intimately familiar with the backup and disaster recovery system, most people have no idea how long recoveries actually take.To read this article in full, please click here

How to determine RTOs and RPOs for backup and recovery

When evaluating the design of your backup systems or developing a design of a new backup and recovery system, there are arguably only two metrics that matter: how fast you can recover, and how much data you will lose when you recover. If you build your design around the agreed-upon numbers for these two metrics, and then repeatedly test that you are able to meet those metrics in a recovery, you’ll be in good shape.The problem is that few people know what these metrics are for their organization. This isn’t a matter of ignorance, though. They don’t know what they are because no one ever created the metrics in the first place. And if you don’t have agreed upon metrics (also known as service levels), every recovery will be a failure because it will be judged against the unrealistic metrics in everyone’s heads. With the exception of those who are intimately familiar with the backup and disaster recovery system, most people have no idea how long recoveries actually take.To read this article in full, please click here

UK to house three new supercomputers by 2025

The UK government has revealed technical and funding details for what will be one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers, to be housed at the University of Bristol — and one of three new supercomputers slated to go online in the country over the next few years.Dubbed Isambard-AI, the new machine, first announced in September, will be built with HPE’s Cray EX supercomputers and powered by 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. The chips, which were launched by Nivida earlier this year, provide three times as much memory as the chipmaker’s current edge AI GPU, the H100, and 21 exaflops of AI performance.  To read this article in full, please click here

UK to house three new supercomputers by 2025

The UK government has revealed technical and funding details for what will be one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers, to be housed at the University of Bristol — and one of three new supercomputers slated to go online in the country over the next few years.Dubbed Isambard-AI, the new machine, first announced in September, will be built with HPE’s Cray EX supercomputers and powered by 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. The chips, which were launched by Nivida earlier this year, provide three times as much memory as the chipmaker’s current edge AI GPU, the H100, and 21 exaflops of AI performance.  To read this article in full, please click here

How to calculate factorials in Linux

In this video transcript, Sandra Henry-Stocker discusses how to calculate factorials on a Linux system. She explains that factorials are the multiplication of numbers starting with a specified number and decreasing incrementally until reaching 1. To calculate factorials on Linux, you can use commands like "seq" and "bc." The "seq" command is used to generate a list of sequential numbers, and the "bc" command is used to perform the factorial calculations.

IPv6 Buzz 138: Making Sense Of DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation (DHCPv6-PD)

DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation (DHCPv6-PD) is an IETF RFC that lets a router delegate a long-lived prefix, using DHCP, to a requesting router. The hosts discuss how this is used today both by service providers and in the enterprise, and potential impacts on address allocation and planning.

The post IPv6 Buzz 138: Making Sense Of DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation (DHCPv6-PD) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Fact-Gathering with Event-Driven Ansible for Microsoft Windows ITSM

The use of Event-Driven Ansible to enable fact gathering from events is considered a “Getting Started” type of use case, but it can be extremely powerful. This use case is simple and it is what we consider a “Read Only” type of action, meaning that we are not making any changes, but we are using the event to trigger a fact gathering process which we can later publish to the IT Service Management system. 

The benefit with this is we are able to provide consistent automated troubleshooting and fact gathering which is used to enrich the ticketing systems, so when our engineers have a look at the incident, they have all the information they need to decide on the next steps to resolve the issue or situation. This can potentially save many hours of toil and ultimately save an organization money from reduced down time and faster resolutions. But, we are assuming that our technical teams will know what to do with this event data.

What if we could assist with filling the gap when an incident takes place, and we could receive information or even options on how to resolve the issues? This is where we could use Continue reading

Using the Linux compgen bash builtin

Linux’s compgen command is not actually a Linux command. In other words, it’s not implemented as an executable file, but is instead a bash builtin. That means that it’s part of the bash executable. So, if you were to type “which compgen”, your shell would run through all of the locations included in your $PATH variable, but it just wouldn’t find it.$ which compgen /usr/bin/which: no compgen in (.:/home/shs/.local/bin:/home/shs/bin:/usr/local/bin: /usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin) Obviously, the which command had no luck in finding it.If, on the other hand, you type “man compgen”, you’ll end up looking at the man page for the bash shell. From that man page, you can scroll down to this explanation if you’re patient enough to look for it.To read this article in full, please click here

Using the Linux compgen bash builtin

Linux’s compgen command is not actually a Linux command. In other words, it’s not implemented as an executable file, but is instead a bash builtin. That means that it’s part of the bash executable. So, if you were to type “which compgen”, your shell would run through all of the locations included in your $PATH variable, but it just wouldn’t find it.$ which compgen /usr/bin/which: no compgen in (.:/home/shs/.local/bin:/home/shs/bin:/usr/local/bin: /usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin) Obviously, the which command had no luck in finding it.If, on the other hand, you type “man compgen”, you’ll end up looking at the man page for the bash shell. From that man page, you can scroll down to this explanation if you’re patient enough to look for it.To read this article in full, please click here

Splunk cuts 7% of workforce ahead of Cisco acquisition

Network management and visualization vendor Splunk, which is set to be acquired by Cisco in a $28 billion deal, will cut about 560 jobs in a global restructuring, the company announced Wednesday in an SEC filing.Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele said in the filing that employees in the Americas set to lose their jobs will be notified throughout today, and that the company plans to offer severance packages to laid-off employees, as well as healthcare coverage and job placement assistance for an undisclosed length of time.To read this article in full, please click here

Splunk cuts 7% of workforce ahead of Cisco acquisition

Network management and visualization vendor Splunk, which is set to be acquired by Cisco in a $28 billion deal, will cut about 560 jobs in a global restructuring, the company announced Wednesday in an SEC filing.Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele said in the filing that employees in the Americas set to lose their jobs will be notified throughout today, and that the company plans to offer severance packages to laid-off employees, as well as healthcare coverage and job placement assistance for an undisclosed length of time.To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare incident on October 30, 2023

Multiple Cloudflare services were unavailable for 37 minutes on October 30, 2023. This was due to the misconfiguration of a deployment tool used by Workers KV. This was a frustrating incident, made more difficult by Cloudflare’s reliance on our own suite of products. We are deeply sorry for the impact it had on customers. What follows is a discussion of what went wrong, how the incident was resolved, and the work we are undertaking to ensure it does not happen again.

Workers KV is our globally distributed key-value store. It is used by both customers and Cloudflare teams alike to manage configuration data, routing lookups, static asset bundles, authentication tokens, and other data that needs low-latency access.

During this incident, KV returned what it believed was a valid HTTP 401 (Unauthorized) status code instead of the requested key-value pair(s) due to a bug in a new deployment tool used by KV.

These errors manifested differently for each product depending on how KV is used by each service, with their impact detailed below.

What was impacted

A number of Cloudflare services depend on Workers KV for distributing configuration, routing information, static asset serving, and authentication state globally. These services instead received Continue reading

AMD’s Instinct GPU Business Is Coiled To Spring

Timing is a funny thing. The summer of 2006 when AMD bought GPU maker ATI Technologies for $5.6 billion and took on both Intel in CPUs and Nvidia in GPUs was the same summer when researchers first started figuring out how to offload single-precision floating point math operations from CPUs to Nvidia GPUs to try to accelerate HPC simulation and modeling workloads.

The post AMD’s Instinct GPU Business Is Coiled To Spring first appeared on The Next Platform.

AMD’s Instinct GPU Business Is Coiled To Spring was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.