Ansible 2.5: Traveling space and time

Welcome to another Ansible release! Version 2.5–“Kashmir”–has a lot of great stuff to play around with, and we're excited to get it in your hands so you can try it out.

Some of the items in this release have been covered in depth in previous Feature Spotlights: AWS EC2 Dynamic inventory plugin, the new Loop keyword, and the all-new ec2_instance module. But those are just appetizers for all of the new things that are included in this release.

Fact Namespacing

In 2.5, we are introducing fact namespacing, which makes Ansible facts available under the ansible_facts namespace (i.e. ansible_facts.os_distribution) without the ansible_ prefix.

Facts will continue to be added into the main namespace directly, but there is now a configuration boolean to enable this. Today, it’s ”On” by default, in a future release, we’ll switch that to “Off”.

Module Blacklisting

We have added a configuration file that enables administrators to filter modules that should be excluded from being used in playbook runs. Operationally, this ensures administrators have more control over which Ansible Modules are approved for use.

New magic vars

Magic vars are variables that Ansible provides to playbook runs without having to be requested. Continue reading

New FCC Rules May Lower 5G Network Costs for Verizon and AT&T

Small cell sites, like those needed for 5G, will no longer require federal historical and environmental reviews.

AT&T, ONF Mash Acronyms in Support of Software Control Over Networks

The collaboration will look to integrate Virtual Optical Line Termination Hardware Abstraction software with the Open Networking Automation Platform. The work builds on AT&T's work with passive optical networking and the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center framework.

SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — March 23, 2018

ETSI NFV and OPNFV co-locate their testing events; Telefónica and Huawei partner on big data; Canada jumps toward 5G standardization.

Should Bug Bounty Programs Pay Hackers Millions to Find Bugs?

Netflix it the latest company taking its bug bounty payouts public with Bugcrowd. But there’s more to fixing security vulnerabilities than simply doling out cash.

Weekend Reads 032318

Today, we are discussing some of our more complex, heuristic techniques to detect malicious use of this vital protocol and how these detect key components of common real-world attacks. These analytics focus on behavior that is common to a variety of attacks, ranging from advanced targeted intrusions to the more mundane worms, botnets and ransomware. Such techniques are designed to complement more concrete signature-based detection, giving the opportunity to identify such behavior prior to the deployment of analyst driven rules. —John Booth @Azure

List of Third Parties (other than PayPal Customers) with Whom Personal Information May be Shared

There appears to be a huge disconnect here between the EU’s professed concern for keeping Europeans safe — as expressed in the one-hour rule — and the EU’s actual refusal to keep Europeans safe in the offline world. The result is that Europeans, manipulated by an untransparent, unaccountable body, will not be kept safe either online or off. And what if the content in question, as has already occurred, may be trying to warn the public about terrorism? —Judith Bergman @ Gatestone

Ransomware has long been a headache for PC and smartphone users, but in the future, it could be robots that Continue reading

Sleeping Lion

Google Is Working on Blockchain Technology, Too

The secretive company joins cloud competitors Microsoft, AWS, and IBM, which are all looking at blockchain and being more open about it.

Shedding light on broadband performance for an optimized SD-WAN

A decade ago, if I had asked a network manager to consider using broadband to connect branch offices, he would have looked at me as if I had a second head. Times and opinions change, though, and broadband is now as viable as MPLS or any other network service.The catalyst for this has been the rise of software-defined WANs (SD-WANs). Their multipath capabilities and network optimization make it possible to use broadband for business connectivity, and organizations of all sizes have been jumping aboard this trend. One of the challenges that remain, though, is that not all connections or types of broadband are created equal.Not all broadband is created equal A network manager at a business with branches located nationwide recently told me that his company's preferred broadband type has been cable, but he has been surprised by the variability in the resulting bandwidth by location and time of day. For example, in one large metro area, he is purchasing 50MB of bandwidth, more than adequate for most branches. During the mornings he often sees throughput of 100MB or more. Later in the day, however, when kids get home from school and the Xboxes and Netflix subscriptions start Continue reading

Show 382: Whitebox In The Enterprise With Pica8 (Sponsored)

The post Show 382: Whitebox In The Enterprise With Pica8 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BrandPost: How Wi-Fi Won the Super Bowl 

With a thrilling win over the New England Patriots, the Philadelphia Eagles are this year’s Super Bowl Champions, the first championship in their franchise’s history. Game-changers weren’t exclusively on the field during this year’s game; they were in the stands as well and they come with unique post-game analysis.For the 5th straight year, Extreme Networks was named the Official Wi-Fi Analytics provider of the Super Bowl. ExtremeAnalytics provides granular insights into how the network performed throughout the event, as well as providing a detailed understanding of the mobile engagement behaviors of connected fans.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: An Efficient Network: The Fabric of a Complex Paperless Hospital System

As CTO of a large regional hospital system, I know that the network is vital to everything. I consider the network in the same critical category as electricity, oxygen, and water. It needs to be available 24x7x365 to support Concord Hospital’s half a million patients and over 5,000 network users across our 30 locations.Because we don’t do anything on paper, the network can never go down. Extreme Fabric Connect has solved that problem for us. It provides a secure, self-healing, highly-available network to serve our patients effectively in our complex paperless environment. All the Benefits of MPLS, None of the HeadachesWe decided to upgrade our network from Split Multi-Link Trunking to Fabric Connect to get the self-networking benefits of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) without the complexity. Fabric Connect is like having a carrier-class MPLS network, where you can put any network anywhere and only the right people can see it.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing Certificate Transparency and Nimbus

Certificate Transparency (CT) is an ambitious project to help improve security online by bringing accountability to the system that protects HTTPS. Cloudflare is announcing support for this project by introducing two new public-good services:

• Nimbus: A free and open certificate transparency log
• Merkle Town: A dashboard for exploring the certificate transparency ecosystem

In this blog post we’ll explain what Certificate Transparency is and how it will become a critical tool for ensuring user safety online. It’s important for website operators and certificate authorities to learn about CT as soon as possible, because participating in CT becomes mandatory in Chrome for all certificates issued after April 2018. We’ll also explain how Nimbus works and how CT uses a structure called a Merkle tree to scale to the point of supporting all trusted certificates on the Internet. For more about Merkle Town, read the [follow up post] by my colleague Patrick Donahue.

Trust and Accountability

Everything we do online requires a baseline level of trust. When you use a browser to visit your bank’s website or your favorite social media site, you expect that the server on the other side of the connection is operated by the organization indicated in Continue reading

Is Patching And Tech Support Bad? A Response

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to watch this 7 minute video from Greg Ferro about why better patching systems can lead to insecure software. If you haven’t, you should:

Greg is right that moral hazard is introduced because, by definition, the party providing the software is “insured” against the risks of the party using the software. But, I also have a couple of issues with some of the things he said about tech support.

Are You Ready For The Enterprise

I’ve been working with some Ubiquiti access points recently. So far, I really enjoy them and I’m interested to see where their product is going. After doing some research, the most common issue with them seems to be their tech support offerings. A couple of Reddit users even posted in a thread that the lack of true enterprise tech support is the key that is keeping Ubiquiti from reaching real enterprise status.

Think about all the products that you’ve used over the last couple of years that offered some other kind of support aside from phone or rapid response. Maybe it was a chat window on the site. Maybe it was an asynchronous email system. Hell, if you’ve ever installed Continue reading

Short Take – Complexity Wormhole

Have you ever found yourself in a complexity wormhole? Do you even know what that means? Russ White takes a look at some obvious symptoms that you’ve gone too far with complexity and proposes some ways to avoid the problem all together.

Russ White

The post Short Take – Complexity Wormhole appeared first on Network Collective.

IDG Contributor Network: Stay smart as you approach the edge

Fundamental to harnessing the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the need for decisions to be made in real time, and it’s in addressing this that discussions have turned to the subject of edge computing over recent years.Before the data generated by myriad of connected IoT devices is sent to the centralized cloud, edge computing sees it stored and processed locally, in distributed micro-clouds at the edge of the network, closer to where the devices are placed, and the data produced. Doing so cuts down on the need for data traffic to be back-hauled to and from a remote data center, thus making it ideal for supporting the real time data delivery required by the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Stay smart as you approach the edge

Fundamental to harnessing the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the need for decisions to be made in real time, and it’s in addressing this that discussions have turned to the subject of edge computing over recent years.Before the data generated by myriad of connected IoT devices is sent to the centralized cloud, edge computing sees it stored and processed locally, in distributed micro-clouds at the edge of the network, closer to where the devices are placed, and the data produced. Doing so cuts down on the need for data traffic to be back-hauled to and from a remote data center, thus making it ideal for supporting the real time data delivery required by the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Stay smart as you approach the edge

Fundamental to harnessing the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the need for decisions to be made in real time, and it’s in addressing this that discussions have turned to the subject of edge computing over recent years.Before the data generated by myriad of connected IoT devices is sent to the centralized cloud, edge computing sees it stored and processed locally, in distributed micro-clouds at the edge of the network, closer to where the devices are placed, and the data produced. Doing so cuts down on the need for data traffic to be back-hauled to and from a remote data center, thus making it ideal for supporting the real time data delivery required by the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker Orchestration Tools: A Comparison

Docker Orchestration Tools: A Comparison