Technology Short Take 111

Welcome to Technology Short Take #111! I’m a couple weeks late on this one; wanted to publish it earlier but work has been keeping me busy (lots and lots of interest in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies out there!). In any event, here you are—I hope you find something useful for you!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

New Firewall Tab and Analytics

New Firewall Tab and Analytics

At Cloudflare, one of our top priorities is to make our products and services intuitive so that we can enable customers to accelerate and protect their Internet properties. We're excited to launch two improvements designed to make our Firewall easier to use and more accessible, and helping our customers better manage and visualize their threat-related data.

New Firewall Tabs for ease of access

We have re-organised our features into meaningful pages: Events, Firewall Rules, Managed Rules, Tools, and Settings. Our customers will see an Overview tab, which contains our new Firewall Analytics, detailed below.

New Firewall Tab and Analytics

All the features you know and love are still available, and can be found in one of the four new tabs. Here is a breakdown of their new locations.

Feature New Location
Firewall Event Log Events (Overview for Enterprise only)
Firewall Rules Firewall Rules
Web Application Firewall Managed Ruleset
IP Access Rules (IP Firewall Tools
Rate Limiting Tools
User Agent Blocking Tools
Zone Lockdown Tools
Browser Integrity Check Settings
Challenge Passage Settings
Privacy Pass Settings
Security Level Settings

If the new sub navigation has not appeared, you may need to re-login to the dashboard or clear your browser’s cookies.

New Firewall Analytics for analysing events and Continue reading

Smart NICs and Related Linux Kernel Infrastructure

A while ago we did a podcast with Luke Gorrie in which he explained why he’d love to have simple, dumb, and easy-to-work-with Ethernet NICs. What about the other side of the coin – smart NICs with their own CPU, RAM and operating system? Do they make sense, when and why would you use them, and how would you integrate them with Linux kernel?

We discussed these challenges with Or Gerlitz (Mellanox), Andy Gospodarek (Broadcom) and Jiri Pirko (Mellanox) in Episode 99 of Software Gone Wild.

Read more ...

Large scale GAN training for high fidelity natural image synthesis

Large scale GAN training for high fidelity natural image synthesis Brock et al., ICLR’19

Ian Goodfellow’s tweets showing x years of progress on GAN image generation really bring home how fast things are improving. For example, here’s 4.5 years worth of progress on face generation:

And here we have just two years of progress on class-conditional image generation:

In the case of the faces, that’s a GAN trained just to generate images of faces. The class-conditional GANs are a single network trained to generate images of lots of different object classes. In addition to feeding it some noise (random input), you also feed the generator network the class of image you’d like it to generate (condition it).

I was drawn to this paper to try and find out what’s behind the stunning rate of progress. The large-scale GANs (can I say LS-GAN?) trained here set a new state-of-the-art in class-conditional image synthesis. Here are some images generated at 512×512 resolution.

The class-conditional problem is of course much harder than the single image class problem, so we should expect the images to be not quite so stunning as the pictures of faces. In fact, using a measure called Continue reading

Introducing IPv6 in NSX-T Data Center 2.4

With the latest release for VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.4, we announced the support for IPv6. Since the advent of IPv4 address space exhaustion, IPv6 adoption has continued to increase around the world. A quick look at the Google IPv6 adoption statistics proves the fact that IPv6 adoption is ramping up. With the advances in IoT space and explosion in number of endpoints (mobile devices), this adoption will continue to grow. IPv6 increases the number of network address bits from its predecessor IPv4 from 32 to 128 bits, providing more than enough globally unique IP addresses for global end-to-end reachability. Several government agencies mandate use of IPv6. In addition to that, IPv6 also provides operational simplification.

NSX-T Data Center 2.4 release introduces the dual stack support for the interfaces on a logical router (now referred as Gateway). You can now leverage all the goodness of distributed routing or distributed firewall in a single tier topology or multi-tiered topology. If you are wondering what dual stack is; it is the capability of a device that can simultaneously originate and understand both IPv4 and IPv6 packets. In this blog, I will discuss the IPv6 features that are made generally available Continue reading

Cisco warns a critical patch is needed for a remote access firewall, VPN and router

Cisco is warning organizations with remote users that have deployed a particular Cisco wireless firewall, VPN and router to patch a critical vulnerability in each that could let attackers break into the network.The vulnerability, which has an impact rating of 9.8 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System lets a potential attacker send malicious HTTP requests to a targeted device. A successful exploit could let the attacker execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system of the affected device as a high-privilege user, Cisco stated. More about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The vulnerability is in the web-based management interface of three products: Cisco’s RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router and RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router. All three products are positioned as remote-access communications and security devices.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco warns a critical patch is needed for a remote access firewall, VPN and router

Cisco is warning organizations with remote users that have deployed a particular Cisco wireless firewall, VPN and router to patch a critical vulnerability in each that could let attackers break into the network.The vulnerability, which has an impact rating of 9.8 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System lets a potential attacker send malicious HTTP requests to a targeted device. A successful exploit could let the attacker execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system of the affected device as a high-privilege user, Cisco stated. More about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The vulnerability is in the web-based management interface of three products: Cisco’s RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router and RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router. All three products are positioned as remote-access communications and security devices.To read this article in full, please click here

New chemistry-based data storage would blow Moore’s Law out of the water

Molecular electronics, where charges move through tiny, sole molecules, could be the future of computing and, in particular, storage, some scientists say.Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) point out that a molecule-level computing technique, if its development succeeds, would slam Gordon Moore’s 1965 prophesy — Moore's Law — that the number of transistors on a chip will double every year, and thus allow electronics to get proportionally smaller. In this case, hardware, including transistors, will conceivably fit on individual molecules, reducing chip sizes much more significantly than Moore ever envisaged.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] “The intersection of physical and chemical properties occurring at the molecular scale” is now being explored, and shows promise, an ASU article says. The researchers think Moore’s miniaturization projections will be blown out of the water.To read this article in full, please click here

New chemistry-based data storage would blow Moore’s Law out of the water

Molecular electronics, where charges move through tiny, sole molecules, could be the future of computing and, in particular, storage, some scientists say.Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) point out that a molecule-level computing technique, if its development succeeds, would slam Gordon Moore’s 1965 prophesy — Moore's Law — that the number of transistors on a chip will double every year, and thus allow electronics to get proportionally smaller. In this case, hardware, including transistors, will conceivably fit on individual molecules, reducing chip sizes much more significantly than Moore ever envisaged.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] “The intersection of physical and chemical properties occurring at the molecular scale” is now being explored, and shows promise, an ASU article says. The researchers think Moore’s miniaturization projections will be blown out of the water.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Why Data Center Management Responsibilities Must Include Edge Data Centers

Now that edge computing has emerged as a major trend, the question for enterprises becomes how to migrate the data center management expertise acquired over many years to these new, remote environments.Enterprise data centers have long provided a strong foundation for growth.  They enable businesses to respond more quickly to market demands. However, this agility is heavily dependent on the reliability and manageability of the data center.  As data center operational complexity increases, maintaining uptime while minimizing costs becomes a bigger challenge.To read this article in full, please click here

containerd Graduates Within the CNCF

We are happy to announce that as of today, containerd, an industry-standard runtime for building container solutions, graduates within the CNCF. The successful graduation demonstrates containerd has achieved the maturity, stability and community acceptance required for broad ecosystem adoption. containerd has already been deployed in tens of millions of production systems today, making it the most widely adopted runtime and an essential upstream component of the Docker platform. containerd was donated to the CNCF as a top-level project because of its strong alignment with Kubernetes, gRPC and Prometheus and is the fifth project to make it to this tier. Built to address the needs of modern container platforms like Docker Enterprise and orchestration systems like Kubernetes, containerd ensures users have a consistent dev to ops experience.

From Docker’s initial announcement that it was spinning out its core runtime to its donation to the CNCF in March 2017, the containerd project has experienced significant growth and progress over the last two years. The primary goal of Docker’s donation was to foster further innovation in the container ecosystem by providing a core container runtime that could be leveraged by container system vendors and orchestration projects such as Kubernetes, Swarm, Continue reading

Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 2: The future of the Linux Kernel

Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!

Click here for our previous episode.

This episode, host Brian is joined by two of our in-house Linux Kernel experts David and Roopa. Joining them is Attilla who, like many of you, is curious about what’s coming down the line in regards to the Linux Kernel. Since they’re working ahead of everyone, what can we look forward to in the future? We promise you won’t need a crystal ball to find out, just listen here!

Guest Bios

Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so years he’s held software Product Management positions at Juniper Networks as well as other smaller companies. Once he saw the change that was happening in the networking space, he decided to join Cumulus Networks to be a part of the open networking innovation. When not working, Brian is a voracious reader and has held a variety of jobs, including bartending in three countries and working as an extra in a German soap opera. You can find him on Twitter at @bosullivan00.

David Ahern is a Member of Technical Staff at Cumulus Networks. He traded Continue reading

DevOps is a Silo

Silos are bad. We keep hearing how IT is too tribal and broken up into teams that only care about their swim lanes. The storage team doesn’t care about the network. The server teams don’t care about the storage team. The network team is a bunch of jerks that don’t like anyone. It’s a viscous cycle of mistrust and playground cliques.

Except for DevOps. The savior has finally arrived! DevOps is the silo-busting mentality that will allow us all to get with the program and get everything done right this time. The DevOps mentality doesn’t reinforce teams or silos. It focuses on the only pure thing left in the world – committing code. The way of the CI/CD warrior. But what if I told you that DevOps was just another silo?

Team Players

Before the pitchforks and torches come out, let’s examine why IT has been so tribal for so long. The silo mentality came about when we started getting more specialized with regards to infrastructure. Think about the original compute resources – mainframes. There weren’t any silos with mainframes because everyone pretty much had to know what they were doing with every part of the system. Everything was connected Continue reading

ACI MultiPod and how to build MultiDatacenter with Cisco ACI

What is MultiPod? ACI MultiPod was first designed to enable the spread of ACI Fabric inside a building (into two or more Pods), let’s say in two rooms at different floors, without the need to connect all the Leafs from one room to all the Spines in the other room. It was a way of simplifying the cabling and all that comes with building spread CLOS topology fabric stuff. MultiPod also saves some Leaf ports giving the fact that Pod to Pod connection through Multicast enabled IPN network connects directly to Spines. People soon realized that MultiPod will be a great solution

The post ACI MultiPod and how to build MultiDatacenter with Cisco ACI appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Internet Society Welcomes the Dominica Chapter

A new Internet Society Chapter had been founded within the Regional Bureau in Latin America & Caribbean. The creation of the Internet Society Dominica Chapter was officially launched on January 11, at the Fort Young Hotel in Roseau City. The event was attended by 25 people, several key stakeholders from two major ISPs, as well as government representatives.

We would like to extend a warm welcome to all members and to the new Chapter executives (pictured above from left to right): Craig Nesty (President), Grayson Stedman Jr. (Vice President), Ishmael Joseph (Secretary), and Austin Lazarus (Treasurer).

“The Chapter was founded by staff members of the National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission” says Melisha Toussaint, NTRC Assistant Engineer and Chapter member. “In recent times, the NTRC has updated its mandate not only to regulate the telecommunications industry in Dominica, but also to create an enabling environment for the growth and development of the Internet and ICTs.”

What are the key interests of the new Chapter?

One of the key goals is to support the Dominica government’s idea to create a climate resilient country following the passage of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The disaster helped realize the importance of communication post-disaster. In 2019, Continue reading

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