Anti-Automation from the Antimatter Universe

One of my readers sent me a vivid description of his interactions with one of the so-called next-generation firewall vendors. Enjoy!

We’re using their highly promoted Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) management solution. New cutting edge software, centralized manager… but no CLI for configuration (besides some initial bootstrap commands). "You don't need that because everything is managed from our centralized manager GUI", says $vendor sales managers.

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Improving Routing Security: Introducing Six New MANRS Tutorials

Routing outages or attacks – such as hijacking, leaks, and spoofing – can lead to stolen data, lost revenue, reputational damage and more, all on a global scale. Routing security is therefore vital to the future and stability of the Internet, and the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative implements crucial fixes. Today, we are pleased to announce a series of six new MANRS tutorials that will help network operators improve both the Internet’s routing security and their own network’s operational efficiency.

These tutorials are intended for network administrators, network engineers, and others with a working knowledge of routing and security who are looking for steps to improve their network’s routing security and to join the growing list of MANRS participants.

About the Tutorials

Module 1: Introduction to MANRS

What is MANRS, and why should you join? MANRS is a global initiative to implement crucial fixes needed to eliminate the most common routing threats. In this module you will learn about vulnerabilities of the Internet routing system and how four simple steps, called MANRS Actions, can help dramatically improve Internet security and reliability.

Module 2: IRRs, RPKI, and PeeringDB

This module helps you understand the databases and repositories Continue reading

CI/CD For Networking Part 3

Gitlab is an open source platform for collaborating around code development that is managed via Git. Gitlab presents a nice and friendly web interface that makes it easy to view and track the changes made to a code base. Gitlab have a SAAS offering at https://gitlab.com and also release a...

CI/CD: What does it mean for the network engineer?

The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process is very popular in the DevOps industry. CI/CD creates a more agile software development environment, which provides benefits including the faster delivery of applications. As a network engineer, are there any aspects of this I can benefit from to improve network operations and achieve the same goal: design and deploy an agile network that provides customers access to those applications as fast as they are deployed? After all, quick, reliable application delivery is only as fast as customers can access it.

This blog post outlines how treating infrastructure as code and implementing a CI/CD workflow can ease the life of a network engineer. It also describes how using Cumulus VX and Cumulus NetQ can simplify this process further.

What does “infrastructure as code” mean?

Generally, it means treating all your network node configurations as code that you manage externally to the nodes. The program identifies each individual node and renders or produces all the configurations for all the nodes in the network in one step. This also means all configuration changes happen in this code, and the code itself accesses the box to deploy the configurations, not the engineer. Configuration deployment can be done Continue reading

Filtering EVPN Routes with PyEZ

Hi,

From the previous EVPN Blog post, the next logical thing was to do is to filter out EVPN routes from the device and have them analyzed for a task.

I have made the program to analyze Type 2 and Type 3 routes

Things to take-away:

-> Understand what module has what advantages – For example OP here has route-table level calls which can extract routing information from the device, while Device has the specific usecase of opening a connection to the device.

-> Understand there are many more efficient ways of doing the same thing, but goal here is to make the script work, there is no impact on the Device as the script parses the data offline once we get it, so even if there was a better way, just do the things the way you want.

Below is the sample program which is written to analyze the routes from vQFX series

 

 

Am not a Programmer by any stretch of imagination as you can see my code ;), but this helps and gets my tasks done, if any one of you want to download this here is the below github link

https://github.com/r2079/JDC/blob/master/evpn_pyez.py

 

Regards

Continue reading

How Does Your Organization Value Technology?

Just a quick thought here today. Thinking about the organization you work for or the organizations you work with, how would you say they view technology?

  1. Key to Success – Technology is an enabler AND a primary differentiator
  2. Important – The core business requires a commitment to technology to succeed
  3. Just Another Budget Item – Technology is a necessary evil

It is important to realize how valuable technology is to your organization or organizations we work with. If the business views our skills as key differentiators, work will be much more rewarding. If technology is just a necessary evil, it will be cut with everyone else’s budget.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Back In The Future
  2. What’s Your Biggest Professional Challenge?
  3. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  4. OSX, Outlook 2011 and Evernote
  5. SSH is a BAD API

How Does Your Organization Value Technology?

Just a quick thought here today. Thinking about the organization you work for or the organizations you work with, how would you say they view technology?

  1. Key to Success – Technology is an enabler AND a primary differentiator
  2. Important – The core business requires a commitment to technology to succeed
  3. Just Another Budget Item – Technology is a necessary evil

It is important to realize how valuable technology is to your organization or organizations we work with. If the business views our skills as key differentiators, work will be much more rewarding. If technology is just a necessary evil, it will be cut with everyone else’s budget.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Back In The Future
  2. What’s Your Biggest Professional Challenge?
  3. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  4. OSX, Outlook 2011 and Evernote
  5. SSH is a BAD API

How Does Your Organization Value Technology?

Just a quick thought here today. Thinking about the organization you work for or the organizations you work with, how would you say they view technology?

  1. Key to Success – Technology is an enabler AND a primary differentiator
  2. Important – The core business requires a commitment to technology to succeed
  3. Just Another Budget Item – Technology is a necessary evil

It is important to realize how valuable technology is to your organization or organizations we work with. If the business views our skills as key differentiators, work will be much more rewarding. If technology is just a necessary evil, it will be cut with everyone else’s budget.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Back In The Future
  2. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  3. SSH is a BAD API
  4. OSX, Outlook 2011 and Evernote
  5. What’s Your Biggest Professional Challenge?

MPLS, L3VPN, Multicast, and mVPN Fun in the Lab: Building a MPLS L3VPN Unicast and Multicast Cloud (6 Part Blog Series)

I needed to build a MPLS cloud for something.  Thought I’d invite you along for the fun in the lab.  Party on!**

big_picture_party_fun

Ultimately what I want to do is have a multicast source up in the upper left in Headquarters and multicast receivers down in Site11 and Site 12 joining those groups.

For this blog series that will mean 6 blogs, plus zip files of the varying configs as we build them, plus sniffer traces for you to download and refer to.

MPLS Fun in the Lab: Building the MPLS Cloud – Part 1 of 6

Create the MPLS cloud and prep it for MPLS L3VPN Unicast for One L3VPN Customer

  • OSPF area 0
  • MPLS LDP neighbors between the PEs and the P
  • BGP VPNv4 peers from all PEs to the VPNv4 Route Reflector

MPLS Fun in the Lab: Connect a Customer – Part 2 of 6

  • Create a VRF in each PE.
  • Apply the VRF and IP addresses on the interfaces in each PE towards the CEs.
  • Create the BGP neighbors in the PEs towards the CEs.
  • Ping from HQ to Site 11
  • Look at the sniffer trace of the above Ping

MPLS Fun in the Continue reading

OPL2LPT: an AdLib sound card for the parallel port

The AdLib sound card was the first popular sound card for IBM PC—prior to that, we were pampered by the sound of the PC speaker. Connected to an 8-bit ISA slot, it is powered by a Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2. This chip can drive 9 sound channels whose characteristics can be fine tuned through 244 write-only registers.

AdLib sound card

I had one but I am unable to locate it anymore. Models on eBay are quite rare and expensive. It is possible to build one yourself (either Sergey’s one or this faithful reproduction). However, you still need an ISA port. The limitless imagination of some hackers can still help here. For example, you can combine Sergey’s Xi 8088 processor board, with his ISA 8-bit backplane, his Super VGA card and his XT-CF-Lite card to get your very own modernish IBM PC compatible. Alternatively, you can look at the AdLib sound card on a parallel port from Raphaël Assénat.

The OPL2LPT sound card?

Recently, the 8-Bit Guy released a video about an AdLib sound card for the parallel port, the OPL2LPT. While current motherboards don’t have a parallel port anymore, it’s easy to Continue reading

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

It takes a village to raise a child. Or so the old saying goes. Creating a product is the same. It takes more than small group of developers (or parents) to raise a product. There’s a lot more to creating a product than writing an application. Don’t mistake a feature or application for a product.

Look, Six Engineers Created a Product!

People hear about new applications or protocols, or small companies selling for millions. They then leap to conclusions:

“Why is it that big vendors like Cisco need thousands of people to create a product? Facebook can put 6 engineers on a project and produce something like Open/R. It’s easy, right? We don’t need big vendors any more!”

“Look at Instagram - they only had a dozen people and they sold their company for $1 billion dollars! You don’t need any more people than that.”

Let’s look a bit closer at Instagram. How much revenue did they have? Zero.

How long were they in business for? A couple of years. So how many generations of product were they supporting? One. And did they have complete support structures for users? No. How many products had gone through end of Continue reading

Technology Short Take 95

Welcome to Technology Short Take 95! This Short Take was a bit more challenging than normal to compile, given that I spent the week leading up to its publication visiting customers in Europe. (My travel schedule in Europe is also why it didn’t get published until Saturday instead of the typical Friday.) Nevertheless, I have persevered in order to deliver you this list of links and articles. I hope it proves useful!

Networking

  • Larry Smith Jr. has a nice write-up on Cisco XR stemming from a presentation at NFD 17.
  • VMware recently released a reference design guide for NSX-T; see here for more details.
  • The engineering team at Lyft recently discussed a new overlay-free networking approach they’ve been working on for Kubernetes: IPVLAN-based CNI stack for running within VPCs on AWS. This is pretty cool, but does introduce some potential design considerations for deploying Kubernetes on AWS. (For those that may be unfamiliar: CNI, or Container Network Interface, is the means whereby network mechanisms “plug into” Kubernetes. IPVLAN is a low-latency means of providing IP connectivity to containers. VPCs, or Virtual Private Clouds, are Amazon’s software-defined networking mechanism for workloads running on AWS.)
  • Viktor van den Berg writes Continue reading

Peak DNSSEC?

Has the adoption of DNSSEC already peaked well before any level of complete deployment? If so that what might that mean for the way in which we manage security and resilience on the Internet?

How EVPN saved SDN from the brink of death

In 2010 and 2011, Software Defined Networking (SDN) was the hot new way of looking at architecture, and everyone had high hopes that it would reduce the stress of highly manual and complex operations. That was then, but now we’re in 2018 and it appears that SDN hasn’t quite fulfilled what it advertised, as many networks remain expensive, complex and proprietary. Some may claim that SDN is dead, but perhaps that’s not the case; maybe SDN has changed from its previous understanding and taken on a new definition. With solutions like EVPN and freedom from proprietary controllers bringing it back to life, SDN has risen like a phoenix from the ashes to finish the mission it started. How did we get here and what’s changed? You can check out our white paper for a more in-depth, technical look at SDN’s journey, or you can keep reading here for a CliffsNotes version of the information.

A link to the past: what SDN promised us

SDN promised to enable the network to behave like the server world, where resources could be virtualized and new environments could be deployed or decommissioned almost instantaneously. SDN sought to break-up the vertical stack by moving the Continue reading

Weekend Reads 022318: Copyright, walls, and botnets

Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability. —Daniel Nazer @EFF

Security advances throughout the centuries have been mostly technical adjustments in response to evolving weaponry. Fortification — the art and science of protecting a place by imposing a barrier between you and an enemy — is as ancient as humanity. From the standpoint of theory, however, there is very little about modern network or airport security that could not be learned from a 17th century artillery manual. That should trouble us more than it does. —Jack Anderson

Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet, was released today in which it states that the analysis of more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month has found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious. Additionally, the report warns DDoS attacks Continue reading

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