The Wistar network emulator

Wistar is an open-source network emulator originally developed by Juniper Networks and released under the Apache license. It simplifies the presentation of Juniper products on its graphical user interface by making the multiple VMs that make up each JunOS virtual router appear as one node in the network topology.

Wistar also supports Linux virtual machines and, interestingly, uses cloud-init to configure Linux routers from the Wistar user interface. Wistar also supports generic virtual appliances, in a basic way. In this post, I will install Wistar and use it to work through two examples using open source routers.

Wistar Documentation

The Wistar installation procedure is documented in the Wistar GitHib page. The Wistar user guide is available at the Read the Docs website and some unpublished chapters are available on GitHub. Juniper published a presentation about using Wistar. In addition, there are a few other other blog posts available about using Wistar and comparing Wistar to other network emulators.

Wistar documentation is good enough to get started, but seems to be incomplete.

Install Wistar

I installed Wistar on my laptop computer running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I modified the Wistar Continue reading

Install Packer on Linux

Packer is another fantastic tool in the infrastructure as code tool belt from Hashicorp. Packer allows you to build base or golden images for Hypervisors such as KVM, Virtualbox and VMware based on configuration files. But that is not all, it can even build images for cloud providers such...

Can’t Attend DockerCon 2019? Here are your Top 5 “To Dos”

If you’re not one of the thousands of expected attendees at DockerCon 2019 in San Francisco, don’t worry! There are still many ways you can stay connected to the announcements, awesome demos and all of the amazing content coming out of this year’s event. Although we will miss you this year, we’ve put together a few suggestions to stay current on all things DockerCon.

If you’re not one of the thousands of expected attendees at DockerCon 2019 in San Francisco, don’t worry! There are still many ways you can stay connected to the announcements, cool demos and all of the amazing content coming out of this year’s event. Although we will miss you this year, we’ve put together a few suggestions to stay current on all things DockerCon.

1.  Watch the Livestream of the DockerCon keynotes

Register now to see the DockerCon keynote sessions live – on Tuesday, April 30 at 9 AM PT and on Wednesday, May 1 at 9:30 AM PT. Hear the latest Docker announcements from Steve Singh (CEO), Kal De (CTO) and  Scott Johnston (GM, Enterprise Solutions), learn how a range of companies are using Docker to power their business and find out what Docker Continue reading

Dell EMC and Cisco renew converged infrastructure alliance

Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed a collaboration on converged infrastructure (CI) products that has run for more than a decade, even as the momentum shifts elsewhere. The news was announced via a blog post by Pete Manca, senior vice president for solutions engineering at Dell EMC.The deal is centered around Dell EMC’s VxBlock product line, which originally started out in 2009 as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco called VCE (Virtual Computing Environment). EMC bought out Cisco’s stake in the venture before Dell bought EMC.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC and Cisco renew converged infrastructure alliance

Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed a collaboration on converged infrastructure (CI) products that has run for more than a decade, even as the momentum shifts elsewhere. The news was announced via a blog post by Pete Manca, senior vice president for solutions engineering at Dell EMC.The deal is centered around Dell EMC’s VxBlock product line, which originally started out in 2009 as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco called VCE (Virtual Computing Environment). EMC bought out Cisco’s stake in the venture before Dell bought EMC.To read this article in full, please click here

EQUALS in Tech Awards: Nominations Now Open

Are you working to building a better Internet for women? Do you know initiatives that are promoting the development of digital skills for girls? Is your organization contributing to defend the Internet by helping women get equal access to leadership opportunities?

If the answers are yes, we have something for you.

The EQUALS Global Partnership has announced that the nominations for the 2019 EQUALS in Tech Awards are now open.

The Awards recognize groundbreaking initiatives from around the world aimed at bridging the gender digital divide.

The nomination period will run until June 11, 2019. You can nominate your own initiatives or those of others for an award in one of the following categories:

  • Access: Initiatives related to improving women’s and girls’ digital technology access, connectivity, and security
  • Skills: Initiatives that support development of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills of women and girls
  • Leadership (two subcategories):
    • Initiatives focused on promoting women in decision-making roles within the ICT field
    • Initiatives promoted by tech sector companies to bridge the digital gender divide
  • Research: Initiatives prioritizing research on gender digital divides and producing reliable evidence to tackle diversity issues within STEM and computing fields

The annual EQUALS in Tech Awards are Continue reading

Rapid Development of Serverless Chatbots with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

Rapid Development of Serverless Chatbots with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

Rapid Development of Serverless Chatbots with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

I'm the Product Manager for the Internal Tools team here at Cloudflare. We recently identified a need for a new tool around service ownership. As a fast growing engineering organization, ownership of services changes fairly frequently. Many cycles get burned in chat with questions like "Who owns service x now?

Whilst it's easy to see how a tool like this saves a few seconds per day for the asker and askee, and saves on some mental context switches, the time saved is unlikely to add up to the cost of development and maintenance.

= 5 minutes per day
x 260 work days 
= 1300 mins 
/ 60 mins 
= 20 person hours per year

So a 20 hour investment in that tool would pay itself back in a year valuing everyone's time the same. While we've made great strides in improving the efficiency of building tools at Cloudflare, 20 hours is a stretch for an end-to-end build, deploy and operation of a new tool.

Enter Cloudflare Workers + Workers KV

The more I use Serverless and Workers, the more I'm struck with the benefits of:

1. Reduced operational overhead

When I upload a Worker, it's automatically distributed to 175+ data Continue reading

We want to host your technical meetup at Cloudflare London

We want to host your technical meetup at Cloudflare London

Cloudflare recently moved to County Hall, the building just behind the London Eye. We have a very large event space which we would love to open up to the developer community. If you organize a technical meetup, we'd love to host you. If you attend technical meetups, please share this post with the meetup organizers.

We want to host your technical meetup at Cloudflare London
We're on the upper floor of County Hall

About the space

Our event space is large enough to hold up to 280 attendees, but can also be used for a small group as well. There is a large entry way for people coming into our 6th floor lobby where check-in may be managed. Once inside the event space, you will see a large, open kitchen area which can be used to set up event food and beverages. Beyond that is Cloudflare's all-hands space, which may be used for your events.

We have several gender-neutral toilets for your guests' use as well.

Lobby

You may welcome your guests here. The event space is just to the left of this spot.

We want to host your technical meetup at Cloudflare London

Event space

This space may be used for talks, workshops, or large panels. We can rearrange seating, based on the format of your meetup.

We want to host your technical meetup at Cloudflare London

Food & Continue reading

Automation Solution: Create Switch Stack Reports

Have you ever wondered how many free ports you have on your stackable campus switches? I’m sure there must be a wonderful network management tool that creates that reports with a click of a button… but what if the tool your PHB purchased based on awesome PowerPoint and glitzy demo can’t do that?

Nadeem Lughmani decided to solve this challenge as a hands-on assignment in the Building Network Automation Solutions online course and created an Ansible playbook and a Python plugin that counts the total number of ports and number of free ports for each switch stack specified in the device inventory.

Wonder what else course attendees created in the past? Here’s a small sample.

Coding Packets the Rails Edition

One of my 2019 goals was to migrate codingpackets.com from the python web framework Django to the ruby web framework Rails. Well it's done and this is the story of how and why I did it. Ruby on Rails Rails is a really nice to work with web framework which is "Optimizing for programmer...
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