[Sponsored] Short Take – Forward Networks

In this sponsored Network Collective Short Take, Brandon Heller, Co-Founder and CTO of Forward Networks, joins Network Collective to talk about how network verification and modeling are empowering network operators to increase efficiency, reduce mistakes, and shorten the mean-time-to-resolution when troubleshooting network issues.

Forward Networks does this through a complete and accurate mathematical model of the way your network operates, allowing you to quickly assess traffic flows and operational issues in your network without needing to query multiple devices manually.

Having an accurate model of your network also empowers you to validate changes before ever touching your production environment, giving you confidence that the change you are implementing will achieve the desired outcome.

For more technical details, short demo videos, and a chance to try Forward on your network to gain greater insight, head on over to http://forwardnetworks.com/collective.

 

Brandon Heller
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host

The post [Sponsored] Short Take – Forward Networks appeared first on Network Collective.

Safe Online, Safe On Land: Promoting Safe Internet Use to Children in Kenya

On February 16th this year, MediaNet Works and the Internet Society Kenya Chapter launched “Safe Online, Safe On Land” a 12-month project that seeks to promote safe Internet usage and practices among children in Kenya. With funding from the Internet Society’s Beyond the Net Grants Program the project anticipates to reach 700 children, targeting Koinonia Community, four children’s homes, one secondary school, and three other schools in Ngong, Kajiado County.

In addition, 12 teachers, 15 child protection and social workers, 10 journalists from both the community and mainstream media, including the Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), will benefit from this project.

Justification of the Project

The launch of this project coincided with media coverage of Internet and social media safety issues in the country. Cases of online child abuse and human trafficking have recently featured in local media. Consequently, the National Assembly on 26 April, 2018, passed the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Bill which is set to be presented to the president for assent. The Bill’s offenses relevant to this project include publication of fake news, pornography, cyberterrorism, cybersquatting, and child pornography.

To set the ball rolling consultative meetings between representatives of MediaNet Works and Koinonia Community were held Continue reading

The Cargo Cult of Google Tools

You should definitely watch this amazing video from Ben Sigelman of LightStep that was recorded at Cloud Field Day 4. The good stuff comes right up front.

In less than five minutes, he takes apart crazy notions that we have in the world today. I like the observation that you can’t build a system more than three or four orders of magnitude. Yes, you really shouldn’t be using Hadoop for simple things. And Machine Learning is not a magic wand that fixes every problem.

However, my favorite thing was the quick mention of how emulating Google for the sake of using their tools for every solution is folly. Ben should know, because he is an ex-Googler. I think I can sum up this entire discussion in less than a minute of his talk here:

Google’s solutions were built for scale that basically doesn’t exist outside of a maybe a handful of companies with a trillion dollar valuation. It’s foolish to assume that their solutions are better. They’re just more scalable. But they are actually very feature-poor. There’s a tradeoff there. We should not be imitating what Google did without thinking about why they did it. Sometimes the “whys” will apply Continue reading

What is Nmap? Why you need this network mapper

Network administrators, IT managers and security professionals face a never-ending battle, constantly checking on what exactly is running on their networks and the vulnerabilities that lurk within. While there is a wealth of monitoring utilities available for network mapping and security auditing, nothing beats Nmap's combination of versatility and usability, making it the widely acknowledged de facto standard.What is Nmap? Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks.To read this article in full, please click here

What is Nmap? Why you need this network mapper

Network administrators, IT managers and security professionals face a never-ending battle, constantly checking on what exactly is running on their networks and the vulnerabilities that lurk within. While there is a wealth of monitoring utilities available for network mapping and security auditing, nothing beats Nmap's combination of versatility and usability, making it the widely acknowledged de facto standard.What is Nmap? Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks.To read this article in full, please click here

What is Nmap? Why you need this network mapper

Network administrators, IT managers and security professionals face a never-ending battle, constantly checking on what exactly is running on their networks and the vulnerabilities that lurk within. While there is a wealth of monitoring utilities available for network mapping and security auditing, nothing beats Nmap's combination of versatility and usability, making it the widely acknowledged de facto standard.What is Nmap? Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks.To read this article in full, please click here

Technology Short Take 103

Welcome to Technology Short Take 103, where I’m back yet again with a collection of links and articles from around the World Wide Web (Ha! Bet you haven’t seen that term used in a while!) on various technology areas. Here’s hoping I’ve managed to include something useful to you!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around, sorry!

Security

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

Fairness without demographics in repeated loss minimization

Fairness without demographics in repeated loss minimization Hashimoto et al., ICML’18

When we train machine learning models and optimise for average loss it is possible to obtain systems with very high overall accuracy, but which perform poorly on under-represented subsets of the input space. For example, a speech recognition system that performs poorly with minority accents.

We refer to this phenomenon of high overall accuracy but low minority accuracy as a representation disparity… This representation disparity forms our definition of unfairness, and has been observed in face recognition, language identification, dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, academic recommender systems, and automatic video captioning.

For systems that are continually trained and evolved based on data collected from their users, the poor performance for a minority group can set in place a vicious cycle in which members of such a group use the system less (because it doesn’t work as well for them), causing them to provide less data and hence to be further under-represented in the training set…

… this problem of disparity amplification is a possibility in any machine learning system that is retrained on user data.

An interesting twist in the problem is that the authors assume neither the Continue reading

Cisco certified? Join us at VMworld!

No, you’re not a fish out of water. You’re actually in the right place to be exposed to content that will change the way you think about networking and security.

We know you have spent years honing your skills around switching, routing, load balancing and network security so the concepts of NSX will be familiar to you. Get ready! We will dive deeper into new applications of these concepts to support the enterprise shift to cloud-centric networking and security.

Here is a list of the top 10 sessions for CCIEs and other Cisco Certified networking and security professionals to attend at VMworld to help you maximize your professional development into VMware NSX by covering the personal, business and technical benefits.

Make sure to scroll to the bottom for special NSX Mindset activities.

 

Top 10 Networking and Security Sessions for CCIEs – VMworld 2018

1. The NSX Keynote: Building the Network of the Future with the Virtual Cloud Network
Monday, Aug 27, 1:30-2:30PM
NS3729KU
Speaker: Tom Gillis (@_tomgillis)

2. NSX Mindset: Clouds Collide, Opportunity Strikes 
Monday, 4:00PM – 5:00PM
NET1919BU
Speaker: Chris McCain (@hcmccain). Stay to the end for a surprise!

3. Deploying NSX Data Center Continue reading

Nyansa Voyance at NFD18

Disclaimer : I was lucky enough to have been invited to attend Network Field Day 18 this past July in Silicon Valley. This event brings independent thought leaders to a number of IT product vendors to share information and opinions. I was not paid to attend any of these presentations, but Tech Field Day did provide travel, room, and meals for the event. There is no expectation of providing any blog content, and any posts that come from the event are from my own interest. I’m writing about Nyansa strictly from demonstrations of the product.  I’ve not installed it on my own network and have no experience running it.

Anyway,…on with the show!

Nyansa (pronounced nee-ahn’-sa) is focused on user expereince on the access network. Their product, Voyance, analyzes data from a list of sources to provide a view into what client machines are seeing. This is more than just logs from the machine itself. We’re talkin about taking behaviors on the wireless, access network, WAN, and Internet, and correlating those data points to predict user experience issues and recommend actions to remediate those problems. As we discussed in the presentation, there are products that do each of Continue reading

Reaction: Network software quality

Over at IT ProPortal, Dr Greg Law has an article up chiding the networking world for the poor software quality. To wit—

When networking companies ship equipment out containing critical bugs, providing remediation in response to their discovery can be almost impossible. Their engineers back at base often lack the data they need to reproduce the issue as it’s usually kept by clients on premise. An inability to cure a product defect could result in the failure of a product line, temporary or permanent withdrawal of a product, lost customers, reputational damage, and product reengineering expenses, any of which could have a material impact on revenue, margins, and net income.

Let me begin here: Dr. Law, you are correct—we have a problem with software quality. I think the problem is a bit larger than just the networking world—for instance, my family just purchased two new vehicles, a Volvo and a Fiat. Both have Android systems in the center screen. And neither will connect correctly with our Android based phones. It probably isn’t mission critical, like it could be for a network, but it is annoying.

But even given software quality is a widespread issue in our world, it is still Continue reading

1 … 1,543 1,544 1,545 1,546 1,547 … 3,888