Introducing our Open Standards Everywhere project – securing web servers in 2020!

How do you make your web server as secure as possible – while using the latest open security standards? How do you ensure your web site is available to everyone  across all the global network of networks that is the Internet? 

For the Internet to remain open, globally-connected, trustworthy, and secure, we believe the networks and servers that make up the Internet need to be based on the latest and most secure standards coming out of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). 

Many web server administrators may want to support the latest standards and protocols, but they don’t know how, and don’t necessarily have the time to figure it out. It may be item #393 in a long list of to-dos. Web site administrators may not be aware of the latest open standards, or may not know why they should support these standards. 

As part of our Action Plan 2020, we are launching the Open Standards Everywhere project, with a focus in 2020 on the security and availability of web servers.

The project has four main components: 

1. Build four reference servers – Using apache and nginx, with and without a CDN, and using Continue reading

WireGuard VPN Protocol Coming to a Linux Kernel Near You

The coming to the Linux kernel, much to the delight of Linux creator “Can I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn’t perfect, but I’ve skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it’s a work of art,” Torvalds enthused, on the OpenVPN). Another reason WireGuard is special is how it functions. Unlike the more complex competition, WireGuard functions in a similar fashion to SSH — by exchanging public keys. Once the keys have been exchanged and the connection made, there’s no need to manage connections or daemons, or be concerned about state or what’s going on under the hood. For those that are interested in what’s going on under the hood, WireGuard makes use of the Curve25519, Poly1305, SipHash24, Jason Donenfeld’s prettysleepy1 from 

Heavy Networking 500: The State Of SD-WAN In 2020 And Future Forecasts

Heavy Networking 500: The State Of SD-WAN In 2020 And Future Forecasts

Where will SD-WAN go in the coming years? Will it swallow up branch security? How about end point and mobile device management? Could it extend its reach from the branch to become the way you manage your campus network? The Packet Pushers examine those and other questions in today's Heavy Networking episode.

The post Heavy Networking 500: The State Of SD-WAN In 2020 And Future Forecasts appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Meraki Is Almost An Enterprise Solution

You may remember a three or so years ago when I famously declared that Meraki is not a good solution for enterprises. I know the folks at Meraki certainly haven’t. The profile for the hardware and services has slowly been rising inside of Cisco. More than just wireless with the requisite networking components, Meraki has now embraced security, SD-WAN, and even security cameras. They’ve moved into a lot of areas that customers have been asking about while also still trying to maintain the simplicity that Meraki is known for.

Having just finished up a Meraki presentation during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the progress that Meraki has been making toward embracing their enterprise customer base. I’m not entirely convinced that they’ve made it yet, but the progress is starting to look good.

Playing for Scale

The first area where Meraki is starting to really make strides is in the scalability department. This video from Tech Field Day Extra is all about new security features in the platform, specifically with firewalls. Take a quick look:

Toward the end of the video is one of Continue reading

Arcadia makes supporting clean energy easier

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to power your home with clean energy, and yet, many Americans don’t know how to make the switch. Luckily, you don’t have to install expensive solar panels or switch utility companies to support a cleaner, sustainable future. If you’re interested in supporting clean energy and saving money on your power bill, consider Arcadia.Arcadia is a platform that makes it easy for homeowners and renters to choose clean, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. You can visit Arcadia’s website and input your ZIP code to see how clean energy compares to traditional sources in your area. To power your home with clean energy, all you have to do is connect your utility bill, and you can choose between wind and community solar farms in your area, or you can use Arcadia’s Smart Rate to find the lowest price available. In fact, you’ll even save money on your power bill if clean energy is cheaper in your area. To read this article in full, please click here

Intro to the Linux command line

If you’re new to Linux or have simply never bothered to explore the command line, you may not understand why so many Linux enthusiasts get excited typing commands when they’re sitting at a comfortable desktop with plenty of tools and apps available to them. In this post, we’ll take a quick dive to explore the wonders of the command line and see if maybe we can get you hooked.First, to use the command line, you have to open up a command tool (also referred to as a “command prompt”). How to do this will depend on which version of Linux you’re running. On RedHat, for example, you might see an Activities tab at the top of your screen which will open a list of options and a small window for entering a command (like “cmd” which will open the window for you). On Ubuntu and some others, you might see a small terminal icon along the left-hand side of your screen. On many systems, you can open a command window by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+t keys at the same time.To read this article in full, please click here

Could FPGAs Outweigh CPUs In Compute Share?

Over a decade ago we would not have expected accelerators to have be commonplace in the datacenter. …

Could FPGAs Outweigh CPUs In Compute Share? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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How bacteria could run the Internet of Things

Biologically created computing devices could one day be as commonplace as today’s microprocessors and microchips, some scientists believe. Consider DNA, the carrier of genetic information and the principal component of chromosomes; it's showing promise as a data storage medium.A recent study (PDF) suggests taking matters further and using microbes to network and communicate at nanoscale. The potential is highly attractive for the Internet of Things (IoT), where concealability and unobtrusiveness may be needed for the technology to become completely ubiquitous.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: Wi-Fi vs 5G, AI/ML for network management, more

IDC analyst and networking expert Brandon Butler joins Computerworld Executive Editor Ken Mingis and IDG Video Content Producer Juliet Beauchamp to discuss networking trends.They hit upof Wi-Fi versus 5G and how artificial intelligence and machine learning can simplify network management. They also discuss how enterprises are beginning to deploy more advanced networks to enable newer tech innovations like IoT and successfully analyze huge amounts of data.Watch here: To read this article in full, please click here

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Downgrade all Debian packages to a specific date

Unlike NixOS, Debian doesn’t have a builtin mechanism to rollback an installation to a specific point in time. However, thanks to snapshot.debian.org, a wayback machine for Debian packages, it is possible to downgrade all packages to the versions from a chosen date.

Let’s suppose we want to go back to January, 20^th 2020. In /etc/apt/sources.list.d/snapshot.list, we add a date-specific snapshot as a source:

deb [check-valid-until=no] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z/ unstable main contrib non-free

In /etc/apt/preferences.d/snapshot.pref, we set the priority of all packages from this source to 1001. This is above the default priority of 500 and over 1000 to allow downgrade. See apt_preferences(5) manual page for more details.

Package: *
Pin: origin snapshot.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 1001

After running apt update, we can check the result with apt policy:

$ apt policy
Package files:
 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     release a=now
1001 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z unstable/non-free amd64 Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=non-free,b=amd64
     origin snapshot.debian.org
1001 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z unstable/contrib amd64 Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=contrib,b=amd64
     origin snapshot.debian.org
1001 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20200120T111800Z unstable/main amd64 Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=main,b=amd64
     origin snapshot.debian.org
[…]

When requesting an upgrade, we Continue reading

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Academia Gets The First Production Cray “Shasta” Supercomputer

Indiana University is the proud owner of the first operational Cray “Shasta” supercomputer on the planet. …

Academia Gets The First Production Cray “Shasta” Supercomputer was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

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