IDG Contributor Network: Waxing or WANing

Allow me to wax poetic about software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN):Ode to an SD-WAN I love your complexityAnd lack of deterministic behaviorI need your connectivityBut not new network layersOnly I can comprehendYour brittleness and insecurityAnd in the bitter endLike ATM fade in obscurityWhile SD-WANs are a hot topic currently, in reality, I believe that WANs will ultimately wane and give way to “wide area inter-networks." SD-WANs are already multi-network use cases (e.g. connecting branch networks to the corporate network). Right now, they are simple overlays, but over time, performance and functionality demands will require them to interact with the underlay network (and other layers).      To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2 options for deciding open computing standards—neither is great

How should open computing standards, such as the protocols and languages that make up much of the core of the internet, be decided on and handled? It’s not an easy question to answer. But the answer has vast and potentially severe ramifications for almost every company on the planet (at least if you rely on your website for doing any percentage of your business). A recent kerfuffle with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization responsible for standardizing much of the web that most people use on a daily basis, has caused many to ask for the shut-down of the W3C and the creation of a new standards body. But is that actually a good idea?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ok, I’m Giving Ubiquiti Networks Another Chance

After quite a few discussions resulting from my Epic Evaluation: Ubiquiti ERPro-8 vs Play-Doh where (spoiler alert!) the Play-Doh™ won hands down after an exhaustive six-month test, I’ve been persuaded to give Ubiqiuti Networks (aka UBNT) another chance. Another two chances, in fact.

Ubiqitui Networks Products

As I said in the evaluation post, I was hesitant about recommending against UBNT products not least because I owned four other UBNT devices (three wireless access points and a 48-port switch). Despite being persuaded to try UBNT again, I strongly maintain my previous recommendation to avoid the ERPro-8 like a wedding invitation from Walder Frey. For the rest of the product range I’ve decided to suspend my previous “NO BUY” verdict and reserve my final judgement while I try out some new additions to my home network and see if they can restore balance to the nerd universe.

I would also like to add that while Ubiquiti’s official Support and RMA channels were no help to me whatsoever when my ERPro-8 was behaving badly, I did appreciate one employee reaching out privately and trying to help. The conclusion for now is that flash itself has indeed become irrecoverably corrupted and the device Continue reading

Announce: Briefings In Brief – A New Packet Pushers Podcast Channel

Briefings In Brief is a new podcast channel from the Packet Pushers that summarizes tech news and announcements in quick doses.

The post Announce: Briefings In Brief – A New Packet Pushers Podcast Channel appeared first on EtherealMind.

Pre-Order the New Echo, Echo Plus, or Fire TV Here – Deal Alert

The 2nd generation Echo costs just $99, and has a 2.5” downward-firing woofer and 0.6” tweeter powered by Dolby to deliver crisp vocals and dynamic bass throughout the room. You can play music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and more. With Amazon Music, you can search by lyrics, time-period, or let Alexa pick the music for you. You can also listen to audiobooks from Audible, podcasts, radio stations or news briefs. Make calls, set alarms and timers, ask questions, check your calendar, weather, traffic, and sports scores, manage to-do and shopping lists, control smart home devices, and more. Multiple Echo devices around your house work together -- ask Alexa to play your favorite music on all Echo's, or different styles in different rooms. The new Echo won't ship until October 31, but if you order now and select 2-day shipping, you'll have it on your doorstep the day it's released. See it on Amazon here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Forrester: 3 ways IoT can drive business value

You can’t escape the IoT momentum these days. The Internet of Things is being used for everything from saving the rhino from poaching to leveraging stray dogs to fight crime. (No, really, I’m not kidding… check the links!) But even as vendors spend billions to try and grab IoT market share, it’s not always clear exactly how their business customers are supposed to actually benefit from IoT. (The challenges can be equally hard to understand). According to a thoughtful new report from Forrester, the answer lies in three fundamental business scenarios:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 ways IoT can drive business value

You can’t escape the IoT momentum these days. The Internet of Things is being used for everything from saving the rhino from poaching to leveraging stray dogs to fight crime. (No, really, I’m not kidding… check the links!) But even as vendors spend billions to try and grab IoT market share, it’s not always clear exactly how their business customers are supposed to actually benefit from IoT. (The challenges can be equally hard to understand). According to a thoughtful new report from Forrester, the answer lies in three fundamental business scenarios:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is MP – Merge Point in MPLS Traffic Engineering ?

What is MP, Merge Point in MPLS Traffic Engineering ? Understanding Merge Point in MPLS Traffic Engineering will help you to understand the MPLS TE – Fast Reroute   MP (Merge Point) is the term is used in the context of Fast Reroute. I briefly mentioned from Merge Point in the MPLS Traffic Engineering Fast Reroute Link Protection post earlier and in this […]

The post What is MP – Merge Point in MPLS Traffic Engineering ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Introducing Cloudflare Warp: Hide Behind The Edge

I work at a company whose job it is to be attacked. As I’m writing this, an automatic mitigation is fighting two ongoing DDoS attacks. Any machine that’s publicly routable on the internet today can be a vector for attack, and that’s a problem.

Today we want to turn the tables and give you a new way of exposing services to the internet without having them be directly, publicly routable. Meet Cloudflare Warp.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Christian Ortiz

Playing Hide and Seek with Bots and Hackers

Cloudflare internally runs about 4,000 containers that make up about 1.5K services and applications. Some of these containers need to network with other local containers, and others need to accept connections over the wire.

Every devops engineer knows that bad things happen to good machines, and so our platform operations team tries to hide servers altogether from the internet. There are several ways to do this:

• Rotate IP addresses
• Deploy proxies
• Create firewall rules
• Configure IP tables
• Limit connections by client certificate
• Cross connect with an upstream provider
• Configure a GRE tunnel
• Authentication mechanisms like OAuth or OIDC

These can be complicated or time consuming, yet none of them are Continue reading

What is PI and PA ? Provider Independent and Provider Assigned ?

What is PI and PA ? Provider Independent and Provider Assigned ? In this post, I will explain the important considerations on PI (Provider Independent) and PA (Provider Assigned).     In this post, I will explain below points :   What is PI and PA ?  Why PI and PA addresses are used ? […]

The post What is PI and PA ? Provider Independent and Provider Assigned ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Making of Cloudflare Warp

In the real world, tunnels are often carved out from the mass of something bigger - a hill, the ground, but also man-made structures.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Matt Brown

In an abstract sense Cloudflare Warp is similar; its connection strategy punches a hole through firewalls and NAT, and provides easy and secure passage for HTTP traffic to your origin. But the technical reality is a bit more interesting than this strained metaphor invoked by the name of similar predecessor technologies like GRE tunnels.

Relics

Generic Routing Encapsulation or GRE is a well-supported standard, commonly used to join two networks together over the public Internet, and by some CDNs to shield an origin from DDoS attacks. It forms the basis of the legacy VPN protocol PPTP.

Establishing a GRE tunnel requires configuring both ends of the tunnel to accept the other end’s packets and deciding which IP ranges should be routed through the tunnel. With this in place, an IP packet destined for any address in the configured range will be encapsulated within a GRE packet. The GRE packet is delivered directly to the other end of the tunnel, which removes the encapsulation and forwards the original Continue reading

Juniper SRX Password Recovery

I can imagine that is how I looked when I got my “new” Juniper SRX from (insert favorite auction site) …

Continue reading →

The post Juniper SRX Password Recovery appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.

IDG Contributor Network: How the hybrid cloud has made the digital transformation possible

Competition in the 21st Century economy is fierce. Consumers are more tech-savvy than ever, as we all carry around more computing power in our pockets than Neil Armstrong took to the moon—and potential customers pay attention to differentiated experiences. Increasingly for all businesses, investing in agile software development is a way to achieve that differentiation.In other words, in the 21st Century, every business is a software business.All that software that’s enabling this transformation toward digital experiences has to run somewhere, and it turns out a hybrid cloud strategy gives businesses maximum choice when it comes to what runs where.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Upcoming Spousetivities Events

Long-time readers/followers know that my wife, Crystal, runs a program called Spousetivities. This program organizes events for spouses/partners/significant others at IT industry conferences. This fall is a particularly busy season for Crystal and Spousetivities, as she’ll be organizing events at DockerCon EU, the fall OpenStack Summit, and AWS re:Invent! Here are some details on these upcoming events.

DockerCon EU 2017

For the first time, Spousetivities will be present at DockerCon EU, taking place this year in Copenhagen, Denmark. There’s a great set of activities planned:

• City tour of Copenhagen
• Castle tour, including Kronborg and Frederiksborg
• Food tour and Tivoli Gardens

More information is available on the Spousetivities web site; if you’d like to register for any of the events, tickets are available right now.

OpenStack Summit Sydney

Spousetivities returns to the fall OpenStack Summit, held this year in beautiful Sydney, Australia. Spousetivities is no stranger to the OpenStack Summits, having supported the OpenStack community for several years now.

Once again, Crystal has arranged a great set of activities in and around Sydney:

• Picturesque tour up to the Blue Mountains
• City tour of Sydney, including some beautiful hidden beaches
• Hunter Valley wine tour

This blog post on the Spousetivities Continue reading

Top 3 Data Center Myths Debunked

What is happening to the World !! Shall we expect World War ?

Lots of stupid things I am hearing everyday anymore, which affect my business and affects so many people I think. Will World War III start or what ?   Couple months before I think at least it was , six countries announced that they closed their borders and airspace for Qatar, a country where I live. […]

The post What is happening to the World !! Shall we expect World War ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Redundancy Does Not Result in Resiliency

A while ago a large airline had a bad-hair day claiming it was caused by a faulty power supply. Not surprisingly, I got a question along the lines of “is that feasible?”

Short answer: Yes. However, someone should be really worried if that wasn’t made up.

What is intent-based networking?

The networking industry's hottest new buzzword -- intent-based networking -- is the next evolution of network software management. Get up to speed fast with this visual explainer.

Nvidia gets broad support for cutting-edge Volta GPUs in the data center

Data center workloads for AI, graphics rendering, high-performance computing and business intelligence are getting a boost as a Who's Who of the world's biggest server makers and cloud providers snap up Nvidia's Volta-based Tesla V100 GPU accelerators.Nvidia is rallying its entire ecosystem, including software makers, around the new Tesla V100s, effectively consolidating its dominance in GPUs for data centers.IBM, HPE, Dell EMC and Supermicro announced at the Strata Data Conference in New York Wednesday that they are or will be using the GPUs, which are now shipping. Earlier this week at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in Beijing, Lenovo, Huawei and Inspur said they would be using Nvidia's HGX reference architecture to offer Volta architecture-based systems for hyperscale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia gets broad support for cutting-edge Volta GPUs in the data center

Data center workloads for AI, graphics rendering, high-performance computing and business intelligence are getting a boost as a Who's Who of the world's biggest server makers and cloud providers snap up Nvidia's Volta-based Tesla V100 GPU accelerators.Nvidia is rallying its entire ecosystem, including software makers, around the new Tesla V100s, effectively consolidating its dominance in GPUs for data centers.IBM, HPE, Dell EMC and Supermicro announced at the Strata Data Conference in New York Wednesday that they are or will be using the GPUs, which are now shipping. Earlier this week at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in Beijing, Lenovo, Huawei and Inspur said they would be using Nvidia's HGX reference architecture to offer Volta architecture-based systems for hyperscale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here