BrandPost: Connecting in a Wi-Fi-Challenged Environment at MIT

It started as a Ph.D. thesis project at one of the world’s premier institutions of technology research and higher education. Now it’s back to benefit a new generation of students and researchers.An advanced yet easy-to-use wireless network from Cisco Meraki – with origins in research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – has solved one of the university’s most intractable problems: providing robust Wi-Fi access in a challenging radio frequency environment.From research to productThe Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT is home to cutting-edge research in the areas of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine vision, networking, and more. In 2006, researchers developed a novel plug-and-play Wi-Fi networking system that they spun out into a company called Meraki.To read this article in full, please click here

Installing Cumulus packages on air-gapped equipment

From time to time I run into situations where someone would like to install the Cumulus Linux operating system as well as additional packages that aren’t part of the default binary install package. This short excerpt is meant to assist in helping get those additional packages into an air-gapped environment for the install where you don’t have a repo or mirror available to pull from.

For instance, let’s say we want to install TACACS+ on an air-gapped switch and we don’t have access to a mirrored repo. There is a very tedious method which I’ll outline first, then there is the more Linux admin like option which is much more streamlined.

One thing that could be done is to run through the install on a switch with outside connectivity, gather the package and dependency info… manually pull the deb’s off of the repo on whatever media you are using to transfer files to the new switch. Then copy all of the packages over and install them. It’s the hard way, but sometimes that’s the road we have to take.

The long way

Pull the package list from a switch connected to the repo:

All of the packages should be in Continue reading

Envisioning the Future in the Middle East

How can the brightest minds help transform the Middle East for the better? The MIT SciTech Conference hoped to find answers. The annual three-day conference, which took place 19-21 April in Boston, Massachusetts, brought together students and professionals from across North America and the MENA Region. This year’s theme was “Envisioning the Future: Cities of MENA,” and included an IDEAthon on Energy, Innovation, and Infrastructure.

Many people from all over the globe attended the conference, mainly Arabs who were also successful tech entrepreneurs, leveraging the Internet to reach communities across the world. They also spoke about their innovations and inspired the young participants, who included MIT students, through panels, keynotes, ideation processes, and SciTech talks.

The first day started with a tour of MIT Labs and the launch of the IDEAthon. After initial sessions and introductions, participants were left for the night to work on their ideas. Those ended up being presented at the end of the third day to judges, with cash prizes awarded to winners so that they could turn them into reality by implementing them throughout the Arab world.

Infrastructure is a challenge in the MENA region, especially with a rapidly growing population, and the conference Continue reading

Becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

Architecting for the cloud is becoming a highly desired skill set. Working as a consultant, I’m often in situations where clients are overwhelmed with questions about the cloud. How do I migrate my applications? How do I secure everything? How does it integrate with LDAP and DNS? What’s the best way to connect to the […]

The post Becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate appeared first on Overlaid.

On the ‘net: EVPN Use Cases

In the final session of this video series, we talk to industry experts and RFC authors about additional challenges for which EVPN-VXLAN is a strong answer: Connecting domains (DCI, Campus to DC connections, Multi-vendor networks), multicasting for use cases like live TV streaming, public cloud connection, and other super powers. Join us to find out why these expanded use cases make your lives easier and why your CTO will want to hear more about it to equip your business for rapid responses to new application needs.

DUG Sets Foundation For Exascale HPC Utility With Xeon Phi

While exascale systems, even at the single precision computational capability commonly used in the oil and gas industry, will cost on the order of $250 million, that cost pales in comparison to the capital outlay of drilling exploratory deep water wells, which can cost $100 million a pop. …

DUG Sets Foundation For Exascale HPC Utility With Xeon Phi was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

BrandPost: Breaking Down the Barriers Between IT and the Network

One of the great challenges with automation in the telecom industry is that the networking and IT domains remain heavily siloed in many service providers today, with hundreds or even thousands of manual processes required to map data from Operation Support Systems (planning, fulfillment, assurance, etc.) to network management and orchestration systems. Not only does this lead to a lot of “swivel-chair” operations to bridge the gap, but fragmented data systems reduce the visibility into real-time service and network state. The quick fix is to over-provision network resources to cope with this lack of visibility, but that leads to unnecessarily high Capex in addition to the Opex overhead associated with highly manual operations.To read this article in full, please click here

Live video just got more live: Introducing Concurrent Streaming Acceleration

Live video just got more live: Introducing Concurrent Streaming Acceleration
Live video just got more live: Introducing Concurrent Streaming Acceleration

Today we’re excited to introduce Concurrent Streaming Acceleration, a new technique for reducing the end-to-end latency of live video on the web when using Stream Delivery.

Let’s dig into live-streaming latency, why it’s important, and what folks have done to improve it.

How “live” is “live” video?

Live streaming makes up an increasing share of video on the web. Whether it’s a TV broadcast, a live game show, or an online classroom, users expect video to arrive quickly and smoothly. And the promise of “live” is that the user is seeing events as they happen. But just how close to “real-time” is “live” Internet video?

Delivering live video on the Internet is still hard and adds lots of latency:

  1. The content source records video and sends it to an encoding server;
  2. The origin server transforms this video into a format like DASH, HLS or CMAF that can be delivered to millions of devices efficiently;
  3. A CDN is typically used to deliver encoded video across the globe
  4. Client players decode the video and render it on the screen

Live video just got more live: Introducing Concurrent Streaming Acceleration

And all of this is under a time constraint — the whole process need to happen in a few seconds, or video experiences Continue reading

Will 5G be the first carbon-neutral network?

If wireless networks transfer 1,000 times more data, does that mean they will use 1,000 times more energy? It probably would with the old 4G LTE wireless technologies— LTE doesn’t have much of a sleep-standby. But with 5G, we might have a more energy-efficient option.More customers want Earth-friendly options, and engineers are now working on how to achieve it — meaning 5G might introduce the first zero-carbon networks. It’s not all certain, though.[ Related: What is 5G wireless? And how it will change networking as we know it ] “When the 4G technology for wireless communication was developed, not many people thought about how much energy is consumed in transmitting bits of information,” says Emil Björnson, associate professor of communication systems at Linkoping University, in an article on the school’s website.To read this article in full, please click here

Build a quick CI system using Red Hat Ansible Tower with GitHub Actions

RH-Ansible-TowerAPI-with-Github-Actions-Blog

Red Hat Ansible Tower can be considered the API (Application Programmatic Interface) for your Ansible Playbooks. Even if you don’t take advantage of the Web UI (User Interface) many Ansible users still benefit from using Ansible Tower because they can fit it in their existing ecosystem of tools. Are you new to using the API on Ansible Tower and want to learn how to get started? This blog post will cover my own journey of getting Github Actions to work with Red Hat Ansible Tower. My goal was to be able to have Github PRs (Pull Requests) to trigger a workflow template to perform some automated testing using an Ansible Tower workflow. The popularity of some Ansible Playbooks I wrote is on the rise, so I thought I’d add some automated testing – just to make sure I didn’t accidentally break something the community was using.

I created a workflow in Red Hat Ansible Tower to provision instances into AWS (Amazon Web Services), run some Ansible Playbooks on the provisioned Red Hat Enterprise Linux control nodes, then perform a teardown and remove the instances, VPCs and any other artifacts from AWS. This provisioning, testing and teardown allows me to help Continue reading

Stop the Low-Level Configuration Manipulation

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Imagine a small bank deciding in their infinite wisdom (in reality: because their CIO attended a conference organized by a database vendor) to implement their banking software by teaching bank tellers how to type SQL transactions by hand.

For example, to transfer money from one account to another account, a bank teller could simply type:

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