U.S. Lawmakers Attack Google for Its Huawei Relationship
The lawmakers claim Google is “more willing to support the Chinese Communist Party than the U.S. military.”
DroneDeploy and Cloudflare Workers
Images courtesty of DroneDeploy
When we launched Workers a few months ago, much of the focus was on use cases surrounding websites running on origins that needed extra oomph. With Workers you can easily take a site, introduce a raft of personalization capabilities, A/B test changes or even aggregate a set of API responses around a range of services. In short by layering in Cloudflare Workers we can take origin websites and do transformational things.
One of the joys of a platform, is that you never know where you are going to see the next use case. Enter DroneDeploy
DroneDeploy is a cloud platform that makes it easy to collect and analyze drone imagery and data. Simply install DroneDeploy on your mobile device and connect to a DJI drone. DroneDeploy flies the drone, collects the imagery, then stitches the photos into maps.
The maps can show things like crop conditions & stress, construction project progress, or even thermal temperature ranges across vast solar farms or for search and rescue situations.
Using plant health algorithms applied to drone-generated maps, growers can pinpoint crop stress in their fields and stomp out pests, disease, or irrigation issues.
With Thermal Live Map, it’s possible Continue reading
Forcepoint, McAfee, and Symantec Join Silver Peak SD-WAN Security Alliance
The Silver Peak security alliance ecosystem enables customer to choose from eight different security offerings.
Intel CEO Krzanich Resigns Over Past Relationship With Employee
The company's board of directors named CFO Robert Swan as interim CEO while it searches for a successor.
We’re Going to Visit All 203 Nations
In November 2017, the Internet Society hosted the inaugural Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The event brought together community network operators, Internet service providers, community members, researchers, policy makers, and Indigenous leadership. One of the participants shared her story.
Denise Williams,Coast Salish from Cowichan Tribes on Vancouver Island, began her career as an ESL teacher, with the idea that she would travel the world teaching English. A chance encounter on a bus – “I’m from a small town so I talk to whoever is in my vicinity,” says Williams – served as an entry point to work as a policy analyst for Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, which led to Education Technology work at the First Nations Education Steering Committee. “I learned the way that digital technologies either advance or detract from a community’s ability to nurture curiosity in their youth,” says Williams. “I came from no understanding of networks to it becoming my life’s work. I don’t know if i found it or it found me.”
In 2015, Williams took the reigns of the totally defunded First Nations Technology Council, and through strategic planning and vision, has grown the organization’s programs in talent development, Continue reading
HPE Boots Up Sandbox Of The Machine For Early Users
It has been four years since Kirk Bresniker, HPE Fellow, vice president, and chief architect at Hewlett Packard Labs, stood before a crowd of journalists and analysts at the company’s Discover show and announced plans to create a new computing architecture that puts the focus on memory and will eventually use such technologies as silicon photonics and memristors. …
HPE Boots Up Sandbox Of The Machine For Early Users was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
An Introduction to Windows Security with Ansible
Welcome to another installment of our Windows-centric Getting Started Series! In the prior posts we talked about connecting to Windows machines, gave a brief introduction on using Ansible with Active Directory, and discussed package management options on Windows with Ansible. In this post we’ll talk a little about applying security methodologies and practices in relation to our original topics.
The Triad
In order to discuss security issues in relation to Ansible and Windows, we’ll be applying concepts from the popular CIA Triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.
Confidentiality is pretty self-evident — protecting confidentiality helps restrict private data to only authorized users and helps to prevent non-authorized ones from seeing it. The way this is accomplished involves several techniques such as authentication, authorization, and encryption. When working with Windows, this means making sure the hosts know all of the necessary identities, that each user is appropriately verified, and that the data is protected (by, for example, encryption) so that it can only be accessed by authorized parties.
Integrity is about making sure that the data is not tampered with or damaged so that it is unusable. When you’re sending data across a network you want to make sure that it arrives Continue reading
Why Spanning Tree Is Important: A Demo
In this video, David Bombal shows you how Spanning Tree Protocol is essential for most layer 2 switched networks.
Upcoming Webinars and Events: Autumn 2018
On Tuesday I had the last webinar in spring 2018. One more online course session and it will be time for long summer break. In the meantime, we’re already planning the autumn events:
- We’ll start with Lean Start in Network Automation workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, on August 30th. Register here.
- Building Network Automation Solutions online course starts on September 20th.
We also have the first webinars scheduled:
- We’ll start with two introductory webinars: SDDC 101 on August 28th and SD-WAN Overview on September 4th.
- The first session of technical deep dive into VMware NSX will be on September 11th.
- Amazon Web Service Networking workshop was a huge success, and we’ll turn it into a webinar in early October.
- There will be an interesting math-focused webinar on October 8th;
- Dinesh Dutt will talk about fabric troubleshooting in mid-November;
You can attend all these webinars with an ipSpace.net webinar subscription.
Generalized data structure synthesis
Generalized data structure synthesis Loncaric et al., ICSE’18
Many systems have a few key data structures at their heart. Finding correct and efficient implementations for these data structures is not always easy. Today’s paper introduces Cozy (https://cozy.uwplse.org), which can handle this task for you given a high-level specification of the state, queries, and update operations that need to be supported.
Cozy has three goals: to reduce programmer effort, to produce bug-free code, and to match the performance of handwritten code. We found that using Cozy requires an order of magnitude fewer lines of code than manual implementation, makes no mistakes even when human programmers do, and often matches the performance of handwritten code.
Let’s start out by looking at four case studies from the evaluation, to get a feel for where Cozy applies.
- ZTopo is a topological map viewer implemented in C++. A core data structure is the map tile cache for map tiles that are asynchronously loaded over the network and cached on disk or in memory.
- Sat4j is a Boolean sat solver implemented in Java. A core data structure is the variable store.
- Openfire is a large scalable IRC server implemented in Java. Continue reading
Create a nested virtual machine in a Microsoft Azure Linux VM
Microsoft Azure unofficially supports nested virtualization using KVM on Linux virtual machines, which makes it possible to build network emulation scenarios in the cloud using the same technologies you would use if you were using your own PC or a local server.
In this post, I will show you how to set up a Linux virtual machine in Microsoft Azure and then create a nested virtual machine inside the Azure virtual machine. This is a simple example, but you may use the same procedure as a starting point to create more complex network emulation scenarios using nested virtualization.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you need an Azure account. Microsoft offers a free-trial period that provides up to $300 in credits for up to 30 days. Creating a free trial account is easy: follow the instructions at: https://azure.microsoft.com/free.
If you have not used MS Azure before, I recommend the free training offered on their web site. The first course you should take is the beginner-level Azure Administrator course, which demonstrates all the basic topics you will need to understands when managing virtual machines in Azure.
In this tutorial, I will use the Azure CLI to create and manage Continue reading
Serverless SDN – Network Engineering Analysis of Appswitch
Virtual networking has been one of the hottest areas of research and development in recent years. Kubernetes alone has, at the time of writing, 20 different networking plugins, some of which can be combined to build even more plugins. However, if we dig a bit deeper, most of these plugins and solutions are built out of two very simple constructs:
- a virtual switch - anything from a linux bridge through VPP and IOVisor to OVS
- ACL/NAT - most commonly implemented as iptables, with anything from netfilter to eBPF under the hood
Note1: for the purpose of this article I won’t consider service meshes as a network solution, although it clearly is one, simply because it operates higher than TCP/IP and ultimately still requires network plumbing to be in place
If those look familiar, you’re not mistaken, they are the same exact things that were used to connect VMs together and enforce network security policies at the dawn of SDN era almost a decade ago. Although some of these technologies have gone a long way in both features and performance, they still treat containers the same way they treated VMs. There are a few exceptions that don’t involve the above Continue reading
Argo Tunnels: Spread the Load
We recently announced Argo Tunnel which allows you to deploy your applications anywhere, even if your webserver is sitting behind a NAT or firewall. Now, with support for load balancing, you can spread the traffic across your tunnels.
A Quick Argo Tunnel Recap
Argo Tunnel allows you to expose your web server to the internet without having to open routes in your firewall or setup dedicated routes. Your servers stay safe inside your infrastructure. All you need to do is install cloudflared (our open source agent) and point it to your server. cloudflared will establish secure connections to our global network and securely forward requests to your service. Since cloudflared initializes the connection, you don't need to open a hole in your firewall or create a complex routing policy. Think of it as a lightweight GRE tunnel from Cloudflare to your server.
Tunnels and Load Balancers
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Carey Lyons
If you are running a simple service as a proof of concept or for local development, a single Argo Tunnel can be enough. For real-world deployments though, you almost always want multiple instances of your service running on seperate machines, availability zones, or even countries. Cloudflare’s Continue reading
HPE CEO: Software-Defined Is a Gimmick. We Have Edge to Cloud
Antonio Neri says software defined is just a means to deliver a true edge-to-cloud architecture. He says HPE can deliver, but Dell can’t.
NGINX Series C Gathers $43M from Goldman Sachs
The company is looking to boost its product offerings based on its NGINX Plus platform, as well as target Kubernetes and Istio.