Major Updates to Cisco Certifications

As you most likely will have seen, Cisco is “rebooting” their certifications to better align with what is expected of the future work force. As I’ve been busy with Cisco Live, I’m only now starting to write these posts. I’m expecting to write a couple of them rather than writing one LONG one.

As a member of the CCIE Advisory Council, I’ve been in the loop for a while and I truly believe these changes are for the better. We’ve tried to do what is best for people that are certified or looking to get certified. There will certainly be corner cases or questions that need answers, but we have done our best to leave noone behind.

This first post will look at what is changing at a high level and then we can dive deeper into the different certifications in the coming posts.

DevNet certifications – There has been some training on automation and even some exams, but no real certifications. This is all changing now. There will be corresponding DevNet certifications for CCNA, CCNP and in the future, CCIE. This offers more career paths within the Cisco world. I will cover the DevNet certifications in a future post.

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Tech Bytes: Security Policy Orchestration And Automation With Tufin (Sponsored)

In this Tech Byte episode we delve into security policy orchestration and automation with sponsor Tufin. Tufin integrates with firewalls, next-gen firewalls, routers, switches and more to help you understand and automate controls and policies on premises and in the cloud.

The post Tech Bytes: Security Policy Orchestration And Automation With Tufin (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

History Of ATM (Part 1) – Daniel Grossman

In this episode we talk with Daniel Grossman about his role in the development of Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM. This is part 1 of a 2 part series so stay tuned for the second part releasing later this week.
Daniel Grossman
Guest
Russ White
Host
Donald Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of ATM (Part 1) – Daniel Grossman appeared first on Network Collective.

It’s not a CLOS, it’s a Clos

Way back in the day, when telephone lines were first being installed, running the physical infrastructure was quite expensive. The first attempt to maximize the infrastructure was the party line. In modern terms, the party line is just an Ethernet segment for the telephone. Anyone can pick up and talk to anyone else who happens to be listening. In order to schedule things, a user could contact an operator, who could then “ring” the appropriate phone to signal another user to “pick up.” CSMA/CA, in essence, with a human scheduler.

This proved to be somewhat unacceptable to everyone other than various intelligence agencies, so the operator’s position was “upgraded.” A line was run to each structure (house or business) and terminated at a switchboard. Each line terminated into a jack, and patch cables were supplied to the operator, who could then connect two telephone lines by inserting a jumper cable between the appropriate jacks.

An important concept: this kind of operator driven system is nonblocking. If Joe calls Susan, then Joe and Susan cannot also talk to someone other than one another for the duration of their call. If Joe’s line is tied up, when someone tries to Continue reading

BrandPost: How to Win at Customer Support in the Age of Digital Transformation

The era of digital transformation has injected new life into the old wisdom, “the only constant in life is change.” In our plugged-in world, change is happening at a breakneck pace and it’s pretty much impacting everything, including support. How users want to be supported and what defines a good support experience seems to be constantly evolving as the devices, connections, and channels users choose changes.So when it comes to providing fast and easy support for internal employees or external customers, what worked yesterday probably won’t carry you through tomorrow. Companies must strategize on how to keep up in this new support landscape or be left behind by your customers and the competition.To read this article in full, please click here

Exploring /run on Linux

If you haven’t been paying close attention, you might not have noticed a small but significant change in how Linux systems work with respect to runtime data. A re-arrangement of how and where it’s accessible in the file system started taking hold about eight years ago. And while this change might not have been big enough of a splash to wet your socks, it provides some additional consistency in the Linux file system and is worthy of some exploration.To get started, cd your way over to /run. If you use df to check it out, you’ll see something like this:$ df -k . Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on tmpfs 609984 2604 607380 1% /run Identified as a “tmpfs” (temporary file system), we know that the files and directories in /run are not stored on disk but only in volatile memory. They represent data kept in memory (or disk-based swap) that takes on the appearance of a mounted file system to allow it to be more accessible and easier to manage.To read this article in full, please click here

Uruguay Joins Others Taking Action to Strengthen IoT Security

The use of Internet of Things devices has substantially increased in recent years and the trends indicate that the number will continue to grow significantly. In this environment of rapid technological adoption, the inclusive and collaborative approach is essential to face the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities that arise.

Specifically, to overcome the privacy and security challenges associated with the growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems, the Internet Society signed an agreement with the Agency of Electronic Government and the Information and Knowledge Society of Uruguay (Agesic). The agreement will encourage us to strengthen our collaborative ties to develop a multistakeholder process that will seek to issue recommendations on IoT security in the country.

The recommendations issued will be useful to guide the processes of development of national and regulatory policies in Uruguay. In addition, the agreement focuses on two broad areas: the exchange of information and the development of training materials on consumer protection and network resilience.

This is undoubtedly great news for the region, since Uruguay joins a group of countries that have opted for the multistakeholder processes to strengthen the security of IoT devices. The most recent example is Canada, whose Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Hackers Eye Security Cameras

Big targets: Internet-connected security cameras make up nearly half of all the Internet of Things devices compromised by hackers, ZDNet reports. Smart hubs and network-attached storage devices are next on the hit list. The average U.S. household contains 17 Internet-connected devices, while the average European household has 14.

New rules for the IoT? A U.S. House of Representatives committee has approved an IoT security bill that would create security standards that vendors would have to apply before government agencies could buy IoT devices from them, Nextgov says. The legislation aims to leverage the government’s substantial purchasing power to drive security in the IoT market.

Cleaning house: The Chinese government has blocked several foreign media sites in the name of cleaning up the Internet, Reuters reports. China’s campaign will punish and expose websites for “illegal and criminal actions” and for failing to “fulfil their obligation” to take safety measures or prevent the theft of personal information, the government says.

Exposing anti-encryption: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups are going to court in an attempt to expose the U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to break Facebook’s Messenger encryption, ZDNet reports. The groups are asking a court to unseal Continue reading

League of Entropy: Not All Heroes Wear Capes

League of Entropy: Not All Heroes Wear Capes
League of Entropy: Not All Heroes Wear Capes

To kick-off Crypto Week 2019, we are really excited to announce a new solution to a long-standing problem in cryptography. To get a better understanding of the technical side behind this problem, please refer to the next post for a deeper dive.

Everything from cryptography to big money lottery to quantum mechanics requires some form of randomness. But what exactly does it mean for a number to be randomly generated and where does the randomness come from?

Generating randomness dates back three thousand years, when the ancients rolled “the bones” to determine their fate. Think of lotteries-- seems simple, right? Everyone buys their tickets, chooses six numbers, and waits for an official to draw them randomly from a basket. Sounds like a foolproof solution. And then in 1980, the host of the Pennsylvania lottery drawing was busted for using weighted balls to choose the winning number. This lesson, along with the need of other complex systems for generating random numbers spurred the creation of random number generators.

Just like a lottery game selects random numbers unpredictably, a random number generator is a device or software responsible for generating sequences of numbers in an unpredictable manner. As the need for Continue reading

Inside the Entropy

Inside the Entropy
Inside the Entropy

Randomness, randomness everywhere;
Nor any verifiable entropy.

Generating random outcomes is an essential part of everyday life; from lottery drawings and constructing competitions, to performing deep cryptographic computations. To use randomness, we must have some way to 'sample' it. This requires interpreting some natural phenomenon (such as a fair dice roll) as an event that generates some random output. From a computing perspective, we interpret random outputs as bytes that we can then use in algorithms (such as drawing a lottery) to achieve the functionality that we want.

The sampling of randomness securely and efficiently is a critical component of all modern computing systems. For example, nearly all public-key cryptography relies on the fact that algorithms can be seeded with bytes generated from genuinely random outcomes.

In scientific experiments, a random sampling of results is necessary to ensure that data collection measurements are not skewed. Until now, generating random outputs in a way that we can verify that they are indeed random has been very difficult; typically involving taking a variety of statistical measurements.

Inside the Entropy

During Crypto week, Cloudflare is releasing a new public randomness beacon as part of the launch of the League of Entropy. The League of Entropy is Continue reading

Survey: Data-center staffing shortage remains challenging

It’s getting harder to find people to design, build and manage data centers.The sector is facing a staffing crisis, said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, which just released its annual data-center survey. “We all know that that the data-center skills shortage is real. I think what we’re seeing in this data is that it’s getting a little worse,” Lawrence said. Learn more about network jobs What’s hot in network certifications How to boost collaboration between network and security teams SDN, programmable networks change the role of network engineers Top storage skills to boost your salary This year, 61 percent of respondents said they've had significant difficulty retaining or recruiting staff, up from 55 percent last year.To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: Data-center staffing shortage remains challenging

It’s getting harder to find people to design, build and manage data centers.The sector is facing a staffing crisis, says Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, which just released its annual data-center survey. “We all know that that the data-center skills shortage is real. I think what we’re seeing in this data is that it’s getting a little worse,” Lawrence says. Learn more about network jobs What’s hot in network certifications How to boost collaboration between network and security teams SDN, programmable networks change the role of network engineers Top storage skills to boost your salary This year, 61 percent of respondents said they've had significant difficulty retaining or recruiting staff, up from 55 percent last year.To read this article in full, please click here

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