Get Started with Junos Quickly (and free!)

When I got started in networking, my education (like so many network engineers) was all about Cisco. All my networking courses in college, as well as my early networking jobs all used Cisco curricula and equipment, and valued Cisco certifications like the CCNA/CCNP/CCIE above all.

It wasn’t until I had already been in the industry for about three years or so before I even got my hands on a Juniper device, and by that time, my IOS habits had taken root in my muscles, which made the new set/delete style of Junos configurations even more strange. While my Junos experience never came close to exceeding my IOS/NXOS experience, I grew to appreciate some of the subtle advantages that Juniper bakes into its software. However, getting this experience meant I had to work that much harder to get my hands on lab gear to make it more a part of my day-to-day experience.

These days, it’s way easier to get started with Junos. You don’t have to wait for someone to get you some lab gear - you can set up a virtual lab right on your laptop. While there are a few places you can do this, one of the Continue reading

OMG The Stupid It Burns

“The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the positions of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.” <- I sincerely hope so…
“the cyber guns of August” https://t.co/xdybbr5B0E

— the grugq (@thegrugq) April 22, 2018

Describing Network Automation: Automate the Coffee

How to Describe Automation

Cisco Live, Milan, 2014, the place where everyone drinks a caffé! It was this year that Cisco’s DevNet began to grow and my passion for software, automation and networking was in for a roller-coaster ride. I watched various refreshment stands delivering coffee to the endless queues of guests and began to see something special in the thing that I originally called an espresso!

For so long we’ve used pipes and water to describe networking itself and for a long time I was hunting for a good way to talk about network automation. Turns out a caffé is a great way to describe automation and especially network automation. We also feel emotionally about it and understand the process used to have one placed in ones hand.

Annoyingly so, when automation is the topic up for conversation, we start with "Let’s automate the network" and not with what it is we want to automate. If you’ve raised your eyebrow, point in case. Even worse is when you’re asked for a use-case. The answer is nothing more than a reflection: "Tell me what your humans do". This isn’t a product, it’s the deep integration of human process and digitised Continue reading

What Came First: VLANs or VRFs?

One of my friends sent me this question:

Do you remember if VLANs came first or was it VRFs?

I remember VLANs using ISL (pre-802.1q encapsulation) on early Cisco Ethernet switches (mid 90s), the earliest reference I could track down on Wikipedia is from 1988.

Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF)

I am currently studying to rectify my CCIE and it is at these times that I realise there is so much I have studied and learnt but forgotten. There are many cool things I come across that I think at the time are useful features that I need to remember, but unfortunately if you don’t have a real world use for them they are soon put to the back of the brain and over time forgotten. The same applies with taking for granted the way things work, be that ARP, DHCP or the process a switch or router goes through when moving traffic. I came across some of my old notes on CEF which I thought worth sharing.

Analyzing data with Pandas Package – An Intro to Pandas

Hi,

Title may sound extremely Hitech for someone who never heard about pandas ;), but what I have written is a simple hello world equivalent  program, which I guess should start to help my day to day analysis, as always the aim is to let anyone know the advantage of something than hammering with some theory !

I was going through various python packages available to analyze data and came across pandas package along with numpy package. These are not there by default in Python installation and if you like them to be on your system, you should install them via PIP, I have them installed already hence you can see that it complains in the below image.

Note :

Understand why you need to have something like Pandas / Numpy even if you have never heard of them, that’s the point of this tiny program

Imagine, how you would solve this if you never knew Pandas/Numpy and you will see the power of these

packages, again you don’t have to know these to realize their full power.

Now coming to the requirement, here is a sample spreadsheet that I have below, its a CSV Sheet which contains certain Continue reading

OPL2 Audio Board: an AdLib sound card for Arduino

In a previous article, I presented the OPL2LPT, a sound card for the parallel port featuring a Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2—the chip of the AdLib sound card. The OPL2 Audio Board for Arduino is another indie sound card using this chip. However, instead of relying on a parallel port, it uses a serial interface, which can be drived from an Arduino board or a Raspberry Pi. While the OPL2LPT targets retrogamers with real hardware, the OPL2 Audio Board cannot be used in the same way. Nonetheless, it can also be operated from ScummVM and DOSBox!

Unboxing?

The OPL2 Audio Board can be purchased on Tindie, either as a kit or fully assembled. I have paired it with a cheap clone of the Arduino Nano. A library to drive the board is available on GitHub, along with some examples.

One of them is DemoTune.ino. It plays a short tune on three channels. It can be compiled and uploaded to the Arduino with PlatformIO—installable with pip install platformio—using the following command:¹

$ platformio ci \
    --board nanoatmega328 \
    --lib ../.. Continue reading

Found on the Web: Your CLI Should Be a Server

Guess what I found: a software developer trying to persuade his peers that they need an API version of their CLI tool. Yes, I checked and it’s still 2018, and the year CLI dies seems to be a bit further out than some people thought.

I’d guess this proves that the rest of the world is not so far ahead of us lowly network engineers as blabbering pundits and vendor marketers would have us believe.

Needless to say, the engineers architecting Junos knew this almost 20 years ago.

Here’s how NetQ injects S.O.U.L into your network

Our passion at Cumulus is all around networking with S.O.U.L. Simple. Open. Untethered. Linux. These tenants come together to help organizations build a web-scale, modern, automated network that is necessary for the digital age. So it’s no surprise that Cumulus NetQ and networking with S.O.U.L go hand-in-hand. Let’s take a closer look at how Cumulus NetQ builds on these tenants of S.O.U.L.

Simple

NetQ is all about simplifying network operations. The deep visibility achieved through Cumulus NetQ is extremely powerful from a network validation, management and troubleshooting standpoint.

• Simplifying rollout validation: Cumulus NetQ helps reassure networking teams that what they are rolling into production will actually work. Its validation system lets users check their configuration during production rollout. And with NetQ’s powerful tracing capability, you can validate that you have the true end-to-end connectivity you expected. Tracing saves a huge amount of time as you work to ensure that the path of the packet is working as expected. Without Tracing, you have to go box-by-box and validate all the way up and down the stack. Instead, with NetQ, you can see the pathways the packets flow. This network validation works down Continue reading

Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking

It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. But in the first quarter of this year, network chip, adapter, switch, and cable supplier Mellanox Technologies – which has products aimed at all three of these segments – managed to do it.

And with activist investor, Starboard Value, pressing Mellanox to make the kinds of profits that other networking companies command, the swing to a very decent net income could not have come at a better time. Starboard has been on the …

Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Ericsson Hired 500 Engineers for 5G

CEO Borje Ekholm’s cost-cutting measures seem to be working. In the first quarter, the company reined in its losses and improved its gross margin.

Micro-segmentation Starter Kit

Micro-segmentation Starter Kit Traditional security solutions are designed to protect the perimeter.  As applications and data are becoming increasingly distributed, they are often spanning not only multiple sites, but also multiple clouds.  This is making it harder to identify where the perimeter actually is in order to secure it.  But even if the perimeter can... Read more →

Micro-segmentation Starter Kit

Traditional security solutions are designed to protect the perimeter.  As applications and data are becoming increasingly distributed, they are often spanning not only multiple sites, but also multiple clouds.  This is making it harder to identify where the perimeter actually is in order to secure it.  But even if the perimeter can be reliably identified, securing it alone is not enough. The east-west traffic inside of the environment must be secured as well. VMware NSX makes security an intrinsic part of the infrastructure that applications and data live on, rather than a bolted-on afterthought; security is built in Day 0.

VMware created a Micro-segmentation Starter Kit to help you get started with securing your network from Planning to Enforcement to Troubleshooting.  Each kit includes 6 CPUs of both NSX ADV and vRealize Network Insight ADV at 25% off the global list price.

• Plan: Take the manual and subjective process out of determining what security policies to put in place and where. vRealize Network Insight provides a comprehensive net flow assessment and analysis to model and recommend security groups and firewall rules across your physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

• Enforce: Micro-segmentation, the implementation of security policy Continue reading

Is Open Source The AI Nirvana for Intel?

Intel has been making some interesting moves in the community space recently, including free licenses for its compiler suite for educators and open source contributors can now be had, as can rotating 90 day licenses for its full System Studio environment for anyone who takes the time to sign up.

In the AI space, Intel recently announced that its nGraph code for managing AI graph APIs has also been opened to the community. After opening it up last month, Intel has been followed up on the initial work on MXNet with further improvements to TensorFlow.

The Next Platform …

Is Open Source The AI Nirvana for Intel? was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.

Link Propagation 115

10 tips to minimize IoT security vulnerabilities

Here’s a handy list of tips that can help you avoid the most common mistakes that business IT pros make when bringing IoT devices onto enterprise networks.The Online Trust Alliance’s new list lays out 10 suggestions for using IoT tech in the enterprise without making the enterprise more vulnerable to security threats. The list centers on awareness and minimizing access to less-secure devices. Having a strong understanding of what devices are actually on the network, what they’re allowed to do, and how secure they are at the outset is key to a successful IoT security strategy.[ For more on IoT see tips for securing IoT on your network, our list of the most powerful internet of things companies and learn about the industrial internet of things. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

We’ve Added a New Serverless Computing Course to Our Video Library!

Tired of creating and maintaining server instances for every app, language, and framework you use? Want to focus on pure function code, instead of wasting time on server management? Learn how to run your functions as a service, in a DevOps-free environment, with our Introduction to Serverless Computing.

In This Course You’ll Learn:

• What Serverless Computing is, and how it differs from conventional server hosting
• How to save on operational costs by reducing DevOps, and only paying when your functions are active
• Ways to easily run functions as microservices, which automatically scale as load increases
• How to create serverless functions in AWS Lambda, Azure functions, Google Cloud Functions, and
  Algorithmia

About The Instructor:

Jon Peck is a full-stack developer, consultant, teacher, and startup enthusiast. With a Computer Science degree from Cornell University and two decades of industry experience, he now focuses on bringing scalable, discoverable, and secure machine-learning microservices to developers across a wide variety of platforms.

Speaker (conferences): DeveloperWeek, SeattleJS, Global AI Conf, AI Next, Nordic APIs, DeveloperWeek, ODSC
Speaker (tech schools): Galvanize, CodeFellows, Metis, Epicodus, Alchemy
Organizer: Seattle Building Intelligent Applications Meetup
Educator: Cascadia College, Seattle C&W, independent instruction
Lead Developer: Empower Engine, Giftstarter, Mass General Hospital, Continue reading

Call for Participation – ICANN DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN62, Panama City

The DNSSEC Deployment Initiative and the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme, in cooperation with the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), are planning a DNSSEC Workshop during the ICANN62 meeting held from 25-28 June 2018 in Panama City, Panama.

If you are interested in participating, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to  [email protected] by Friday, 4 May 2018

The DNSSEC Workshop has been a part of ICANN meetings for several years and has provided a forum for both experienced and new people to meet, present and discuss current and future DNSSEC deployments.  For reference, the most recent session was held at the ICANN Community Forum in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 14 March 2018. The presentations and transcripts are available at:

• Part 1: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647563
• Part 2: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647564
• Part 3: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647565

As this is the shorter “Policy Forum” format for ICANN meetings, the DNSSEC Workshop Program Committee is developing a 3-hour program.  Proposals will be considered for the following topic areas and included if space permits.  In addition, we welcome suggestions for additional topics either for inclusion in the ICANN62 workshop, or for consideration for Continue reading

EU Swaps JuQueen BlueGene/Q For Modular Xeon JUWELS Supercomputer

The European Union has never been willing to cede the exascale computing race to the United States, Japan, or China.

In recent years, Europe has ramped up its investments in the HPC space through such programs as Horizon 2020, an effort to grow R&D in Europe, and EuroHPC to drive development of exascale systems, and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), which aims to develop a distributed supercomputing infrastructure that will be accessible to researchers, businesses, and academic institutions throughout the EU. The SAGE project will create a multi-tiered storage platform for data-centric exascale computing to enable …

EU Swaps JuQueen BlueGene/Q For Modular Xeon JUWELS Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Cisco axes Spark, elevates and enhances WebEx

Cisco has unified its two, largely separate, collaboration packages – Spark and WebEx – into a single platform that supports a single set of features.The move makes sense because Cisco had been developing the somewhat similar packages separately, and there was some confusion about that in the market and sales channels. No more.[ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Webex Teams combines collaboration features in Cisco Spark and WebEx  such as whiteboarding, persistent messaging, roster, meeting controls, content sharing and so on. To read this article in full, please click here