NSX Sessions to geek out at VMworld 2018

VMworld 2018 is around the corner and we have an exciting lineup of over 80+ breakout sessions, customer deployment stories and Hands-on Labs for you from the VMware NSX family!

For the tech nerds interested in deep-dives and deployment strategies, we have a list of recommended “geek” NSX VMworld 2018 sessions to choose from in various focus areas.

Security:

Deep Dive into NSX Data Center Security for Clouds, Containers, and More [SAI1527BU]
Speakers: Ganapathi Bhatt
This technical session will focus on key security features and use cases for VMware NSX-T Data Center in a multi-hypervisor, heterogeneous workload environment (VMs, containers, bare metal), the architecture and implementation of NSX-T distributed firewalls and edge firewalls, and the grouping/policy model for NSX-T Data Center. You will also find out how VMware NSX Data Center extends a uniform security policy model to VMware NSX Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS environments.

Securing Horizon and Citrix End-User Computing with NSX Data Center [SAI1851BU]
Speakers: Geoff Wilmington
Organizations deploying virtual desktop infrastructures are tasked with designing for security, networking, and network services for this infrastructure. This can be a complex design process and include multiple products to meet the requirements. When coupling VMware NSX Data Continue reading

Instructor Spotlight: Keith Bogart

Keith Bogart is one of INE’s most esteemed and experienced instructors. Keith has been with INE for 4 years designing and instructing videos and bootcamps, as well as hosting live web-series, designing workbooks, and contributing to our IEOC Forum and INE Blog. Keith has a CCNA in Routing and Switching, CCIE in Dial-ISP, CWNA and is currently working towards his CCNA Security certification.

Before he was with INE, Keith worked as a service representative, technical assistance engineer and network consulting engineer at Cisco Systems. After 17 years at Cisco and a short time with a small start-up, Keith brought his talents to INE and became our #1 CCNA Routing & Switching instructor.

So what has Keith been up to?

On a typical day you can find Keith in our North Carolina office working on his latest project – a new CCNA Security Bootcamp. This bootcamp is still in its early stages of design, however, according to Keith, it’s shaping up to be a 5-day Bootcamp that will be offered online at least twice in the first half of 2019.

PrettyTable – Printing anything in Table

Hi,

As the scripting and programming deals in logging into the device and fetching data, there will be a time where presentability of Data matters. PrettyTable is one such package which greatly helps in reading things

A simple example, re-visiting the code to get the list of routes from the Device

PrettyTable will help in tabulating the Data, the installation and usage can be found here

Pip Package  – https://pypi.org/project/PrettyTable/

Usage – http://zetcode.com/python/prettytable/

Once we have the code, let take a look at how the program looks

The Table form looks something like this

Hope this help for anyone who gets started with presentability of Data, honestly, there was one time I got crazy with the print statement just to make the data presentable.

IBM Finishes Power9 Systems Rollout With Big Iron

Sometimes, a workload needs more memory, more compute, or more I/O than is available in the two socket server that has been the standard pretty much since the dot-com boom two decades ago. …

IBM Finishes Power9 Systems Rollout With Big Iron was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Worth Reading: A new way to attack WPA2 weakenesses

On August 4, 2018, Jens “Atom” Steube, the lead developer of Hashcat, released a forum post disclosing a new technique that attempts to obtain and crack Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) passwords. —Ryan Morrow @Cisco

Nvidia DGX1-V Appliance Crushes NLP Training Baselines

A research team from Nvidia has provided interesting insight about using mixed precision on deep learning training across very large training sets and how performance and scalability are affected by working with a batch size of 32,000 using recurrent neural networks. …

Nvidia DGX1-V Appliance Crushes NLP Training Baselines was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Knative, Red Hat Remind Us That Names Are Hard

The Knative GitHub page begins with a pronunciation guide because no one understands how to pronounce the platform's name.

Cisco Says Its Open vRAN Alliance Is Behind the Latest xRAN Forum Spec

There is a lot of work required to virtualize the RAN and standards groups like the xRAN/O-RAN Alliance and the 3GPP can’t do it all, says Cisco.

Instana Tailors Its APM to Each Enterprise User

More users need access to APM tools because of the growing complexity of architectures. Instana developed a tool to personalize APM tools for specific users.

Cisco Execs: Cryptomining, Election Security Threats Loom Large

When asked to rank U.S. election security preparedness, Cisco’s director of threat management and incident response said “little to none.”

Research: Are We There Yet? RPKI Deployment Considered

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system is designed to prevent hijacking of routes at their origin AS. If you don’t know how this system works (and it is likely you don’t, because there are only a few deployments in the world), you can review the way the system works by reading through this post here on rule11.tech.

Gilad, Yossi & Cohen, Avichai & Herzberg, Amir & Schapira, Michael & Shulman, Haya. (2017). Are We There Yet? On RPKI’s Deployment and Security. 10.14722/ndss.2017.23123.

The paper under review today examines how widely Route Origin Validation (ROV) based on the RPKI system has been deployed. The authors began by determining which Autonomous Systems (AS’) are definitely not deploying route origin validation. They did this by comparing the routes in the global RPKI database, which is synchronized among all the AS’ deploying the RPKI, to the routes in the global Default Free Zone (DFZ), as seen from 44 different route servers located throughout the world. In comparing these two, they found a set of routes which the RPKI system indicated should be originated from one AS, but were actually being originated from another AS in the default free zone.

Continue reading

Finally, a smart way for insurers to leverage IoT in smart homes

Like many consumers, I tend to be automatically suspicious of insurance companies’ plans to track my behavior. And like many tech journalists, I’m also skeptical of clever new smart home automation schemes. But painful personal experience has me all excited about a new pilot program involving Travelers insurance and Notion smart home sensors.According to a post in Coverager: “Travelers has tapped Notion, the home awareness solution and smart home sensor, to offer smart home monitoring systems to Travelers customers in California. Travelers is working with Notion to provide data-driven insights to customers through Notion’s home monitoring system in order to prevent and mitigate threats such as water leaks, fire damage, and thefts.To read this article in full, please click here

What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago?

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there's a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.

I say unfortunately because ten years ago, even five years ago, I still believed decentralization would win. Why? For all the idealistic technical reasons I laid out long ago in Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing In The Ambient Cloud.

While the internet and the web are inherently decentralized, mainstream applications built on top do not have to be. Typically, applications today—Facebook, Salesforce, Google, Spotify, etc.—are all centralized.

That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977),  TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999).

We do have new decentalized services: Bitcoin(2009), Minecraft(2009), Ethereum(2104), IPFS(2015), Mastadon(2016), and PeerTube(2018). We're still waiting on Pied Piper to deliver the decentralized internet. 

On an evolutionary timeline decentralized systems are neanderthals; centralized systems are the humans. Neanderthals came first. Humans may have interbred with neanderthals, humans may have even killed off the neanderthals, but Continue reading

Worth Reading: AI for security is a dangerous gamble

Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help guard against cyberattacks, but hackers can foil security algorithms by targeting the data they train on and the warning flags they look for. —Martin Giles @Technology Review

The Week in Internet News: US Gov’t Wants More Encryption – For Itself

Encryption for us, not for you: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is researching ways to improve mobile encryption for federal users, even as the FBI continues to fight against encrypted data on the smartphones of ordinary users. FifthDomain has a story on the DHS effort.

Safety labels for the IoT: The Internet of things needs food safety-style labels detailing the safety and privacy controls on IoT devices, suggests a story at Motherboard.

Consumer Reports and other groups have begun working on a new open source standard intended to help make Internet-connected hardware safer, the story says.

Let’s Encrypt gains support: Let’s Encrypt, the Internet Society-supported secure certificate authority, has picked up endorsements from major root programs like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry, Packt Hub reports. The zero-cost service allows website operators to pick up SSL certificates for free.

That’s a lot of AI: Intel sold $1 billion worth of Artificial Intelligence chips in 2017, Reuters reports. That’s even a conservative estimate, Intel says. Prepare now for the smart robot takeover!

Hired by AI: Meanwhile, AI is coming to the hiring process, Bloomberg reports, and that may not be such a bad thing. AI may actually be Continue reading

Apcela optimizes Office 365 performance, improving user productivity

More than 120 million Microsoft Office accounts have moved from on-premises to the cloud since the launch of Microsoft Office 365. Many of those accounts belong to users in large enterprises that weren’t fully prepared for the transition. The fact is as many as 30 to 40 percent of enterprises struggle with some level of application performance as they make the shift to cloud.Some of the signs of poor performance (and the source of users’ frustration) include Outlook responding slowly when the user tries to open messages, VoIP calls over Skype for Business having rough spots, and documents being slow to open, close and save in Word. Performance problems in the Office applications manifest in many other ways, as well.To read this article in full, please click here

Apcela optimizes Office 365 performance, improving user productivity

More than 120 million Microsoft Office accounts have moved from on-premises to the cloud since the launch of Microsoft Office 365. Many of those accounts belong to users in large enterprises that weren’t fully prepared for the transition. The fact is as many as 30 to 40 percent of enterprises struggle with some level of application performance as they make the shift to cloud.Some of the signs of poor performance (and the source of users’ frustration) include Outlook responding slowly when the user tries to open messages, VoIP calls over Skype for Business having rough spots, and documents being slow to open, close and save in Word. Performance problems in the Office applications manifest in many other ways, as well.To read this article in full, please click here

How to display data in a human-friendly way on Linux

Not everyone thinks in binary or wants to mentally insert commas into large numbers to come to grips with the sizes of their files. So, it's not surprising that Linux commands have evolved over several decades to incorporate more human-friendly ways of displaying information to its users. In today’s post, we look at some of the options provided by various commands that make digesting data just a little easier.Why not default to friendly? If you’re wondering why human-friendliness isn’t the default –- we humans are, after all, the default users of computers — you might be asking yourself, “Why do we have to go out of our way to get command responses that will make sense to everyone?” The answer is primarily that changing the default output of commands would likely interfere with numerous other processes that were built to expect the default responses. Other tools, as well as scripts, that have been developed over the decades might break in some very ugly ways if they were suddenly fed output in a very different format than what they were built to expect.To read this article in full, please click here

Displaying data in a human-friendly way on Linux

Not everyone thinks in binary or wants to mentally insert commas into large numbers to come to grips with the sizes of their files. So it's not surprising that Linux commands have evolved over several decades to incorporate more human-friendly ways of displaying information to its users. In today’s post, we’re going to look at some of the options provided by various commands that make digesting data just a little easier.Why not default to friendly? If you’re wondering why human-friendliness isn’t the default –- we humans are, after all, the default users of computers -- you might be asking yourself “Why do we have to go out of our way to get command responses that will make sense to everyone?” The answer is primarily that changing the default output of commands would likely interfere with numerous other processes that were built to expect the default responses. Other tools as well as scripts that have been developed over the decades might break in some very ugly ways if they were suddenly fed output in a very different format than what they were built to expect. It’s probably also true that some of us might prefer to see all of Continue reading

8 Networking Startups Shaking Up the Industry