How updating an outdated industrial control system can work with fog computing

It’s the classic Industrial IoT problem – a 40-plant network of old-school manufacturing and production lines, run digitally by 9,000 outdated programmable logic controllers running on legacy Windows industrial PCs, was having difficulty in minimizing downtime.According to fog computing and automation startup Nebbiolo Technologies – which declined to name the client directly, saying only that it’s a “global” company – the failure of one of those Windows IPCs could result in up to 6 hours of downtime for said client. They wanted that time cut down to minutes. More on IoT: What is the IoT? How the internet of things works What edge computing is and how it’s changing the network 10 hot IoT startups to watch The 6 ways to make money in IoT What is digital twin technology and why does it matter? Getting grounded in IoT networking and security Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority What is the Industrial IoT? Why are the stakes so high? It’s a tricky issue. If those 9,000 machines were all in a data center, you could simply virtualize the whole thing and call it a day, according to Nebbiolo’s vice president of product management, Hugo Vliegen. But it's a Continue reading

Useful links for Observium + Rancid

I recently decided that i would like to utilize Observium as well as rancid for configuration backups on my home network. To that effect, the following links really helped me out getting it all setup correctly:

https://docs.observium.org/rancid/

http://packetsandpings.blogspot.com/2013/05/installing-and-configuring-rancid.html

https://layer77.net/2016/08/10/upgrading-from-rancid-2-3-8-to-3-4-1/

Let me know if you run into anything i might help out with.

/Kim

Custom Load Balancing With Cloudflare Workers

The following is a guest post by Jayaprabhakar Kadarkarai, Developer of Codiva.io, an Online IDE used by computer science students across the world. He works full stack to deliver low latency and scalable web applications.

Have you launched your website? Getting a lot of traffic? And you are planning to add more servers? You’ll need load balancing to maintain the scalability and reliability of your website. Cloudflare offers powerful Load Balancing, but there are situations where off-the-shelf options can’t satisfy your specific needs. For those situations, you can write your own Cloudflare Worker.

In this post, we’ll learn about load balancers and how to set them up at a low cost with Cloudflare Service Workers.

This post assumes you have a basic understanding of JavaScript, as that’s the language used to write a Cloudflare Worker.

The Basic Pattern

The basic pattern starts with adding ‘fetch’ event listener to intercept the requests. You can configure which requests to intercept on the Cloudflare dashboard or using the Cloudflare API.

Then, modify the hostname of the URL and send the request to the new host.

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  var url = new URL(event.request.url);

  // https://example.com/path/  Continue reading

Network Automation Development Environments

Building the network automation lab environment seems to be one of the early showstoppers on everyone’s network automation journey. These resources might help you get started:

Hint: after setting up your environment, you might want to enroll into the Spring 2019 network automation course ;)

Customized regression model for Airbnb dynamic pricing

Customized regression model for Airbnb dynamic pricing Ye et al., KDD’18

This paper details the methods that Airbnb use to suggest prices to listing hosts (hosts ultimately remain in control of pricing on the Airbnb platform).

The proposed strategy model has been deployed in production for more than 1 year at Airbnb. The launch of the first iteration of the strategy model yielded significant gains on bookings and booking values for hosts who have adopted our suggestions… multiple iterations of the strategy model have been experimented [with] and launched into production to further improve the quality of our price suggestions.

Figuring out the right price for a night in a given Airbnb listing is challenging because no two listings are the same. Even when we constrain to e.g. similar sized properties in the same region, factors such as the number of five star reviews can influence price. Furthermore demand is time-varying due to seasonality and regional events (with different seasonality patterns for different countries). And then of course, how far in advance a booking is being made also factors into the price (“as lead time reduces, there are less opportunities for this night to be booked, which Continue reading

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Whenever you get into a conversation about exotic travel or ponder visiting the four corners of the globe, inevitably you end up discussing Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. Travelers want to experience the rich culture and vivid blue skies of Mongolia; a feature which gives the country its nickname of “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky”.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar (or Ulan Bator; but shortened to UB by many) is the capital of Mongolia and located nearly a mile above sea level just outside the Gobi Desert - a desert that spans a good percentage of Central Asia’s Mongolia. (The rest of the Gobi Desert extends into China). The country is nestled squarely between Russia to the north and China to the south. It’s also home to some of the richest and ancient customs and festivals around. It’s those festivals that successfully draw in the tourists who want to experience something quite unique. Luckily, even with all the tourists, Mongolia has managed to keep its local customs; both in the cities and within its nomadic tribes.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

via Wikipedia

History also has drawn explorers and conquerors to and from the region; but more on that later.

Cloudflare is also drawn into Mongolia

Any avid reader of Continue reading

Technology often thought of as SDN !!!

What is SDN ? SDN Definition varies  from Vendor to vendor ,commonly  the architecture of SDN defined by each vendor includes use of different technology to make  network automate, flexible, agile, dynamic ,scalable and most importantly cost effective.

I was going through Network automation article and found the different technology/trends which are some or other way often thought of  a SDN, or are important  part of SDN discussion .It’s good to go through it  :-

OpenFlow : Its low level protocol used to decouple the control plane from the data plane.

NFV Network function Virtualization: It refers to taking functions that have traditionally have been deployed as hardware ,instead deploy them as software.

Virtual Switching :They are software based  switches VDS(VMware Distributed switch ) ,AVS(cisco application virtual switch ),VSS(VMware Std. switch) etc.  that resides in hypervisor kernel providing local network connectivity b/w virtual  machines.

Network Virtualization: It refers to software-only overlay-based solution. A key characteristic of these solutions is that an overlay-based protocol such as Virtual eXtensible LAN (VxLAN) is used to build connectivity between hypervisor-based virtual switches.  This connectivity and tunneling approach provides Layer 2 adjacency between virtual machines that exist on different physical hosts independent of Continue reading

Cloudflare Access: Sharing our single-sign on plugin for Atlassian

Here at Cloudflare, we rely on a set of productivity tools built by Atlassian, including Jira and Confluence. We secure them with Cloudflare Access. In the past, when our team members wanted to reach those applications, they first logged in with our identity provider credentials to pass Access. They then broke out a second set of credentials, specific to Atlassian tools, to reach Jira. The flow is inconvenient on a desktop and downright painful on a mobile device.

While Access can determine who should be able to reach an application, the product alone cannot decide what the user should be able to do once they arrive at the destination. The application sets those specific permissions, typically by requiring another set of user credentials. The extra step slows down and frustrates end users. Access saves time by replacing a cumbersome VPN login. However, we wanted to also solve the SSO problem for our team.

We created a plugin, specific to Atlassian, that could take identity data from the token generated by Access and map it to a user account. Our team members log in with our identity provider to pass Access, and then Access could set their user permissions in Jira Continue reading

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