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Templating Device Configurations

One of the core functions of network automation is the ability to generate network device configurations from a template. This is a discrete, intentional process which unfortunately is often conflated with the totally separate act of applying a rendered configuration to a device. In this article we'll look at how to establish a template from existing configurations, define and organize variable data, and ultimately render a series of configurations automatically using a simple Python script.

What is a Template?

The term template describes any sort of mold or pattern from which new, identical objects can be created. For instance, a cookie cutter is a sort of template that can be used to create an arbitrary number of identically-shaped cookies from a sheet of dough. But in our case, we're inexplicably more interested in creating network device configuration files than baking cookies, and creating wholly identical copies of a file isn't terribly useful, since each network device typically has a handful of unique characteristics such as hostname, authentication credentials, IP addresses, and so on.

To address this need to define changing pieces of data within an otherwise unchanging document, we employ variables. A variable serves as a placeholder within the template, Continue reading

Announcing the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign Audit

Today, the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance released a new report, the “2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign Audit,” analyzing the 23 top current presidential campaigns and their commitment to email/domain protection, website security, and responsible privacy practices. OTA evaluated the campaigns using the same methodology we used to assess nearly 1,200 organizations in the main Online Trust Audit released in April.

An alarming 70% of the campaign websites reviewed in the audit failed to meet OTA’s privacy and security standards, potentially exposing visitors to unnecessary risks. Only seven (30%) of the analyzed campaigns made the Honor Roll, a designation recognizing campaigns that displayed a commitment to using best practices to safeguard visitor information. The 2020 campaigns, taken together as a sector, lagged behind the Honor Roll average of all other sectors (70%) in the 2018 Online Trust Audit, and were far short of the Honor Roll achievement of 91% by U.S. federal government organizations.

To qualify for the Honor Roll, campaigns must have an overall score of 80% or higher, with no failure in any of the three categories examined. The campaigns who made the Honor Roll are:

IBM Security, McAfee Spearhead Open Cybersecurity Alliance

The new group targets interoperable security technologies. IBM Security and McAfee contributed the...

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Talk Transcript: How Cloudflare Thinks About Security

Talk Transcript: How Cloudflare Thinks About Security
Image courtesy of Unbabel
Talk Transcript: How Cloudflare Thinks About Security

This is the text I used for a talk at artificial intelligence powered translation platform, Unbabel, in Lisbon on September 25, 2019.

Bom dia. Eu sou John Graham-Cumming o CTO do Cloudflare. E agora eu vou falar em inglês.

Thanks for inviting me to talk about Cloudflare and how we think about security. I’m about to move to Portugal permanently so I hope I’ll be able to do this talk in Portuguese in a few months.

I know that most of you don’t have English as a first language so I’m going to speak a little more deliberately than usual. And I’ll make the text of this talk available for you to read.

But there are no slides today.

I’m going to talk about how Cloudflare thinks about internal security, how we protect ourselves and how we secure our day to day work. This isn’t a talk about Cloudflare’s products.

Culture

Let’s begin with culture.

Many companies have culture statements. I think almost 100% of these are pure nonsense. Culture is how you act every day, not words written in the wall.

One significant piece of company culture is the internal Security Incident mailing list Continue reading

The Cost of Disruptiveness and Guerrilla Marketing

A Docker networking rant coming from my good friend Marko Milivojević triggered a severe case of Deja-Moo, resulting in a flood of unpleasant memories caused by too-successful “disruptive” IT vendors.

Before moving on, please note that the following observations were made from my outsider perspective. If I got something badly wrong, please correct me in a comment.

Imagine you’re working for a startup creating a cool new product in the IT infrastructure space (if you have an oversized ego you would call yourself “disruptive thought leader” on your LinkedIn profile) but nobody is taking you seriously. How about some guerrilla warfare: advertising your product to people who hate the IT operations (today we’d call that Shadow IT).

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MACsec over WAN

MACsec is an interesting alternative to existing tunneling solutions, that protects Layer 2 by performing integrity, origin authentication and, optionally, encryption. Normal use-case is to use MACsec between hosts and access switches, between two hosts or between two switches. This article is a leftover from MACsec on Linux that I first tested in 2016 when support for MACsec was just included in the kernel. I will describe how MACsec is used together with a Layer 2 GRE tunnel to protect the traffic between two remote sites, over WAN or Internet, like a site-to-site VPN at Layer 2.

Money Moves: September 2019

Datadog Barks Back to Cisco’s $7B Offer, Fetches $648M in IPO: GitLab Inhales $268M Series E,...

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The Journey to Security Automation

Ansible-Blog_Journey-to-Security-Automation

 

Whether you’re a security professional looking at automation for the first time, or an ITops veteran tasked to support corporate secops teams, the following blog provides an overview of how Red Hat Ansible Automation can support your security automation program throughout all the different stages of its evolution.

 

Security Automation: A maturity model

Automation is becoming more and more pervasive across the entire IT stack. 

Initially introduced to support ITOps, automation has been a well-established practice for years.

Today, thanks to modern automation platforms like Red Hat Ansible Automation, IT organizations are more capable of coping with the unprecedented scale, and complexity of modern infrastructures and finally have access to a level of flexibility that allows for extending automation practices to entirely new areas.

As an example, Ansible Network Automation enabled network operators to be the next group approaching automation in a structured fashion, to help simplify both maintenance and operations of their ever-growing, multi-vendor, brownfield infrastructures.

The security space started looking at automation in relatively recent times to support the already overwhelmed security teams against modern cyberattacks that are reaching an unparalleled level of speed and intricacy.

In fact, if we factor in the aforementioned scale Continue reading

Top Questions Answered: Docker and Kubernetes? I Thought You Were Competitors!

Last week, we covered some of the questions about container infrastructure from our recent webinar “Demystifying VMs, Containers, and Kubernetes in the Hybrid Cloud Era.” This week, we’ll tackle the questions about Kubernetes, Docker and the software supply chain. One common misperception that we heard in the webinar — that Docker and Kubernetes are competitors. In fact, Kubernetes is better with Docker. And Docker is better with Kubernetes.

Docker And Kubernetes? I thought you were competitors?

We hear questions along this line all the time. Here are some quick answers:

Can I use Kubernetes with Docker?

  • Yes, they go together. You need a container runtime like Docker Engine (based on open source containerd) to start and stop containers on a host.
  • When you have a bunch of containers running across a bunch of hosts, you need an orchestrator to manage things like: Where will the next container start? How do you make a container highly available? How do you control which containers can communicate with other containers? That’s where an orchestrator such as Kubernetes comes in.
Comparing traditional, virtualized, containerized and Kubernetes deployment architectures.
  • The container runtime and the orchestrator are the two core atomic units that Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Governments Pressure Facebook to Halt Encryption Plans

Anti-encryption demands: Government officials from the U.S., U.K., and Australia have asked Facebook to put a hold on its plans to expand encryption on services like Messenger, CNet reports. “We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications to protect our citizens,” says a letter signed by U.S. Attorney General William Barr and other officials.

This law is not fake: A new fake news law in Singapore has taken effect, SPDP Radio says. The law includes penalties of up to US $60,000 and 10 years in prison for people found guilty of spreading what the government considers to be fake news. Web sites could face fines of more than $720,000 for not taking down so-called fake news after being ordered to do so. Free speech advocates have major problems with the law, as you might expect.

The lines are cut: Internet access in most of Iraq was shut down after violent protest in the country, CNet says. Some people were Continue reading

ONUG, MEF Want to Clarify SD-WAN Decisions

The partnership is focused on ensuring that SD-WAN vendors are developing products that meet the...

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Tech Bytes: MidSouth Bank Invests In Network Performance, Visibility With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored)

On today's sponsored Tech Bytes episode we talk with MidSouth Bank CIO Daniel Hereford about how he's using SD-WAN from Silver Peak to support the bank's transformation to a hybrid cloud model, while also improving network visibility and performance for mission-critical applications.

The post Tech Bytes: MidSouth Bank Invests In Network Performance, Visibility With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Vodafone Embraces OpenRAN on Home Turf

Vodafone, an early proponent of the Telecom Infra Project’s OpenRAN initiative, says it started...

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Transform Your Career: Attend Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe

Register now for Attend Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe held October 28 - 30,...

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Verizon and NEC Infuse AI Into Deployed Fiber

The technology cocktail can support smart city initiatives without having to rip up streets to...

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