I spent a few days in a beautiful place with suboptimal Internet connectivity. The only thing I could do whenever I got bored (without waiting for the Internet gnomes to hand-carry the packets across the mountain passes) was to fix the BGP labs on a Ubuntu VM running on my MacBook Air (hint: it all works).
Big things first. I added validation to these labs:
If you rely heavily on Palo Alto App-IDs, you know the challenge of managing new and modified App-IDs. Palo Alto regularly updates its App-ID database, introducing new App-IDs every month (typically on the third Tuesday) and modifying existing ones more often.
Each release can include hundreds of new and updated App-IDs. It's almost impossible to understand each of them and decide whether or not we are affected by the change. In this blog post, we will look at using Threat Signature Indicators (TSID) to help you get an advanced indication of any impact on your traffic as a result of upcoming App-ID changes.
Let’s imagine for a moment that currently, Palo Alto doesn’t have a specific App-ID for ‘chatgpt’ (although they do, let’s assume they don’t for this example). If there isn’t an App-ID, the traffic would be identified as ‘ssl’. If Palo Alto decides to introduce a new App-ID for ‘chatgpt’, they will announce this in the new App-ID release notes. However, the challenge is that hundreds of other new App-IDs could be introduced at the same time that we might never have heard of.
So, when I go to Continue reading
Over the past two years, enterprises have tried to keep up with the staggering pace of the innovation with generative AI, mapping out ways to implement the emerging technology into their operations in hopes of saving time and money, increasing productivity, improving customer service and support, and driving efficiencies. …
Accenture Melds Smarts And Wares With Nvidia For Agentic AI Push was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
RADIUS is one of those protocols we tend to forget about because it is ubiquitous–but authentication protocols are very large attack surfaces network engineers should pay more attention to. Alan DeKok joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the RADIUS protocol.
Waferscale compute engine and AI system maker Cerebras Systems has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to sell a chunk of itself to the public, giving we outsiders a view of the past two and a half years of its internal financials. …
Cerebras Needs Wall Street To Expand Beyond One Core Customer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Back in February, we celebrated our victory at trial in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against patent trolls Sable IP and Sable Networks. This was the culmination of nearly three years of litigation against Sable, but it wasn’t the end of the story.
Today we’re pleased to announce that the litigation against Sable has finally concluded on terms that we believe send a strong message to patent trolls everywhere — if you bring meritless patent claims against Cloudflare, we will fight back and we will win.
We’re also pleased to announce additional prizes in Project Jengo, and to make a final call for submissions before we determine the winners of the Final Awards. As a reminder, Project Jengo is Cloudflare’s effort to fight back against patent trolls by flipping the incentive structure that has encouraged the growth of patent trolls who extract settlements out of companies using frivolous lawsuits. We do this by asking the public to help identify prior art that can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds, not just the ones that are asserted against Cloudflare. We’ve already given out over $125,000 to individuals since the launch Continue reading
Since early September, Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems have been combating a month-long campaign of hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks. Cloudflare’s defenses mitigated over one hundred hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks throughout the month, with many exceeding 2 billion packets per second (Bpps) and 3 terabits per second (Tbps). The largest attack peaked 3.8 Tbps — the largest ever disclosed publicly by any organization. Detection and mitigation was fully autonomous. The graphs below represent two separate attack events that targeted the same Cloudflare customer and were mitigated autonomously.
A mitigated 3.8 Terabits per second DDoS attack that lasted 65 seconds
A mitigated 2.14 billion packet per second DDoS attack that lasted 60 seconds
Cloudflare customers using Cloudflare’s HTTP reverse proxy services (e.g. Cloudflare WAF and Cloudflare CDN) are automatically protected.
Cloudflare customers using Spectrum and Magic Transit are also automatically protected. Magic Transit customers can further optimize their protection by deploying Magic Firewall rules to enforce a strict positive and negative security model at the packet layer.
The scale and frequency of these attacks are unprecedented. Due to their sheer size and bits/packets per second rates, these Continue reading
XtendISE is a simple web application connected to your Cisco ISE, which helps with everyday routine tasks and common challenges related to 802.1X without the need to train everyone in Cisco ISE. XtendISE can help you manage MAC addresses and troubleshoot 802.1X authentications. It also helps with managing the switch's 802.1x configuration or validating the configurations to make sure that they are configured as intended.
All the mentioned features save time for us Network Engineers and help us to do our job efficiently as we do not waste our time on routine tasks. It also increases network security because it makes sure that our network is configured correctly and thus is safe and secured.
XtendISE is suitable for a company of any size with Cisco ISE and Cisco network devices. However medium or large companies will better use XtendISE features because they are more likely affected by the mentioned problems.
XtendISE helps the Helpdesk or IT Support with
No one like the R word, but we don’t shy away from data and calling it like we see it. …
Even As Bandwidth Needs Explode, Ethernet Spending Is In Recession was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
SPONSORED POST: The 2024 edition of Lenovo Tech World promises an in-depth discussion on the future of innovation centered on AI and computing. …
How hybrid IT is a reality for everyone was written by Martin Courtney at The Next Platform.
The Dell OptiPlex 7050 SFF is a capable machine for virtualization thanks to its Intel […]
The post Dell Optiplex 7050 SFF Upgrade for Proxmox first appeared on Brezular's Blog.
After publishing the EVPN L3VPN lab-building instructions, I published a deep dive into EVPN and data-plane data structures. You might have missed it, as it was published in mid-August.
On Monday, September 30, customers on Verizon’s mobile network in multiple cities across the United States reported experiencing a loss of connectivity. Impacted phones showed “SOS” instead of the usual bar-based signal strength indicator, and customers complained of an inability to make or receive calls on their mobile devices.
AS6167 (CELLCO) is the autonomous system used by Verizon for its mobile network. To better understand how the outage impacted Internet traffic on Verizon’s network, we took a look at HTTP request volume from AS6167 independent of geography, as well as traffic from AS6167 in various cities that were reported to be the most significantly impacted.
Although initial reports of connectivity problems started around 09:00 ET (13:00 UTC), we didn’t see a noticeable change in request volume at an ASN level until about two hours later. Just before 12:00 ET (16:00 UTC), Verizon published a social media post acknowledging the problem, stating “We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
As the Cloudflare Radar graph below shows, a slight decline (-5%) in HTTP traffic as compared to traffic at the Continue reading
Connection coalescing is the dumbest idea to ever reach RFC status. I can’t believe nobody stopped it before it got this far.
It breaks everything.
Thus starts my latest opinion post.
It’s specified in the RFC for HTTP/2 as connection reuse, but tl;dr: If the IP address of host A and B overlap, and host A presents a TLS cert that also includes B (via explicit CN/SAN or wildcard cert), then the client is allowed to send HTTP requests directed to B on the connection that was established to A.
To save roundtrips and TLS handshakes. It seems like a good idea if you don’t think about it too much.
I’ll resist just yelling “layering violation”, because that’s not helpful. Instead I’ll be more concrete.
Performing connection coalescing is a client side (e.g. browser) decision. But it implicitly mandates a very strict server architecture. It assumes that ALL affected hostnames are configured exactly the same in many regards, and indeed that the HTTP server even has the config for all hostnames.
Concrete things that this breaks:
