What is a firewall? How they work and all about next-generation firewalls

A firewall is a network device that monitors packets going in and out of networks and blocks or allows them according to rules that have been set up to define what traffic is permissible and what traffic isn’t.There are several types of firewalls that have developed over the years, becoming progressively more complex over time and taking more parameters into consideration when determining whether traffic should or should not be allowed to pass. The most modern are commonly known as next-generation firewalls (NGF) and incorporate many other technologies beyond packet filtering.[ Also see What to consider when deploying a next generation firewall. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Initially placed at the boundaries between trusted and untrusted networks, firewalls are now also deployed to protect internal segments of networks, such as data centers, from other segments of organizations’ networks.To read this article in full, please click here

How Telemedicine Is Impacting Healthcare in Rural Nepal

Lack of an affordable and accessible community healthcare is a challenge in rural communities across the globe, and an obstacle in ensuring a healthy population in remote indigenous communities across rural Nepal. Broadband connectivity is opening the door to more accessible and cost-effective patient care by speeding up electronic health records and digital images and increasing mobility with wireless monitoring devices.

This story takes place in Dullu, a place extremely difficult to reach, located in the Dailekh District in mid-western Nepal. In order to reach the area, you need to fly from Kathmandu to Surkhet via a domestic flight and then take an off-road, four-wheel drive across approximately 80 kilometers, many of which are through a mountainous dirt road that remains challenging for both visitors and locals. Despite being fertile land filled with culture and history, Dullu is far behind in the development process and it is still struggling in terms of infrastructure development, including road access, robust communication, and proper health and education services.

The town’s solitary hospital is perpetually understaffed. Budget cuts, inhospitable winters, and lack of medical resources have perennially plagued medical service deliveries to the approximately 45,000 residents who depend on a distant health center.

The Continue reading

Berkeley Lab First In Line for Cray “Shasta” Supercomputers

For the past five years, supercomputer maker Cray has been diligently at work not only creating a new system architecture that allows for a mix of different interconnects and compute for its future “Shasta” systems, but has also brought long-time Cray chief technology officer, Steve Scott, back into the company after two stints spent at Nvidia and Google to create a new interconnect, called “Slingshot,” that is the beating heart of the Shasta system and that signals a return of the Cray that we know and love.

Berkeley Lab First In Line for Cray “Shasta” Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

The Benefits of Flexible Multi-Cloud and Multi-Region Networking

A report recently published by 451 Research shows that almost 70% of all enterprises will be using a multi-cloud or hybrid IT infrastructure in a year’s time. As more and more enterprises are swayed into the cloud, companies who have already adopted the cloud are now choosing to go with multi-cloud infrastructure or hybrid architecture for their IT requirements.

The report also showcased that about 60% of all workloads are expected to run using a form of hosted cloud service by 2019. This is an increase of about 45% from 2017. This marks an impressive change from DIY owned and operated services to a cloud or third-party hosted IT services. Therefore, the future of IT services is clearly hybrid and multi-cloud.

Here we explore some of the reasons multi-cloud is a fantastic idea for enterprises when they consider security, flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.

Reduce Security Risks Like a DDoS Attack

A Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attack is when a number of different computer systems attack a server, website, network resource or a cloud hosting unit. A DDoS attack can be executed by an individual as well as a federal government.

In a scenario that your company’s website is Continue reading

BrandPost: Extending Network Capacity in Enterprise WLANs with 802.11ax

When building networks in the ‘real world’ like city centers, stadiums, apartment buildings, and even office buildings, we frequently come across situations where many access points, installed independently or managed as one network, create overlapping coverage areas. When these access points choose to use the same channel, the performance of all users in such an area is reduced, as the Wi-Fi algorithm used to avoid collisions on the air is quite conservative.One focus of the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax is to improve the performance of ‘real-world’ networks. To this end, the new standard includes a feature enabling more simultaneous transmissions. This feature is known as ‘spatial reuse’ or ‘BSS coloring.’To read this article in full, please click here

Right-to-repair smartphone ruling loosens restrictions on industrial, farm IoT

Last week, the tech press made a big deal out of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office to allow consumers to break vendors’ digital rights management (DRM) schemes in order to fix their own smartphones and digital voice assistants. According to The Washington Post, for example, the ruling — which goes into effect Oct. 28 — was a big win for consumer right-to-repair advocates. To read this article in full, please click here

Right-to-repair smartphone ruling loosens restrictions on industrial, farm IoT

Last week, the tech press made a big deal out of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office to allow consumers to break vendors’ digital rights management (DRM) schemes in order to fix their own smartphones and digital voice assistants. According to The Washington Post, for example, the ruling — which goes into effect Oct. 28 — was a big win for consumer right-to-repair advocates. To read this article in full, please click here

The recent right-to-repair smartphone ruling will also affect farm and industrial equipment

Last week, the tech press made a big deal out of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office to allow consumers to break vendors’ digital rights management (DRM) schemes in order to fix their own smartphones and digital voice assistants. According to The Washington Post, for example, the ruling — which goes into effect Oct. 28 — was a big win for consumer right-to-repair advocates. To read this article in full, please click here

Interview with Juniper Networks Ambassador Pierre-Yves Maunier

In our next Juniper Ambassador interview, I spend time with fellow Juniper Ambassador and French compatriot Pierre-Yves Maunier at the Juniper NXTWORK 2018 conference in Las Vegas. We discuss his life as an Ambassador, his architecture role at Dailymotion, his thoughts on the conference around DevOps and automation, and his family life back home. Pierre’s …

AWS ABCs – Network Building Blocks

Given that my technical background is largely in the networking space (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C(CIE)), one of the first things I tried to wrap my head around when being introduced to AWS is how networking works in the AWS cloud.

What I attempted to do was build a mental model by relating cloud networking constructs such as Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and routing tables to on-prem, physical networking constructs. This worked pretty well but I did get tripped up at times because some of these constructs don’t map exactly one-for-one.

This post will explain the mental model I used while also calling attention to the elements or behaviors that don’t map exactly between on-prem and AWS.

The basis for building the model will be a single VM on-prem and a single compute instance in AWS. I’m going to build all the networking constructs around both of these elements, starting from the outer-most layers and working closer and closer to the VM/instance.

Our VM and compute instance need them some networking!

A Note on Layer 2

On the AWS platform there is no explicit building blocks for Layer 2 connectivity. There’s no “elastic virtual Continue reading

Practical OTV

Practical OTV
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This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v.
I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved.

A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI.
Instead, I wanted to have full multicast running in the SP core in order to gain a full understanding of the packet forwarding and encapsulation.

First off, lets talk about the topology I will be using:

Datacenters:
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We have 2 Datacenters, one represented by Site 1 and the other by Site 2.
In the middle, we have what is in all respects a SP provider network. In your environment, this may or may not be your own transport network.

In site 1, CSR-1 is our “server”, basically all thats configured on it is an IP address (192.168.100.1/24) on its G1 interface.
SW-9 is our L2 switch, which is configured with 2 VLAN’s (Vlan 100 (SERVER-VLAN) and Vlan 900 (SITE-VLAN)). The port (e0/0) going to CSR-1 is configured as an access-port in Vlan 100.

The ports Continue reading