IoT gives Microsoft opportunity for cloud leadership

Next month, Microsoft will hold its Ignite and Envision conferences in Orlando, Florida. Ignite is aimed at enterprise IT professionals, and Envision is aimed at IT decision makers. Combining Ignite and Envision in the same venue increases the overall enterprise IT audience, so expect several enterprise-related announcements. The action will be in the cloud, as Microsoft has become cloud obsessed. Last month’s quarterly results put Microsoft as the second largest cloud company behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) — and growing faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: 5 top Linux distros for enterprise servers

Linux distros are plentiful, and choosing the right server product can be a daunting task. Are you looking for a supported product, or can you go with a free version? Need Cloud support or virtualization? We’ll try to provide some answers.Although many Linux distros can quite capably be configured to run as a server, for this review we focused solely on dedicated server products, named and supported as such.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: What is Linux? A powerful component of modern data centers+We tested Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) 16.04.02, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Enterprise Server 7.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2, Fedora Server 26 and Oracle Linux 73. All five products tested are designed and supported as server operating systems, and each product boasts a large user base. However, each of these products appeals to a different target audience, as noted in the narrative and summary chart.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Questions and Answers about Cisco 3850 Switches

Today I am going to talk about the queries about the Cisco 3850 Switch as it is one of the most used switch at the access layer in the large enterprise network and at core layer in some of the small and the mod sized enterprise networks. 

I will address some of the concerns which some of you have for using the Cisco 3850 switch in your network. Below are some of the questions and the answer to that questions regarding the Cisco 3850 switches.

Fig 1.1- Cisco 3850 Switch


Q: What are the supporting uplink modules in the Cisco 3850 Switches ?
A: There are some of the supported uplink network modules in Cisco 3850 Switches and these are 

  • 4x 1G Network Module 
  • 2 x 1/10 G Network Module
  • 4 x 1/10 G Network Module and can be used for 48 port RJ models
  • 8 x 10 G Network Module
  • 2 x 40 G Network Module
Q: Does the Cisco Catalyst 3850 10G SFP+ 48-port switch support uplink modules ?
A: No. It has 4 fixed 40G QSFP ports for uplinks. 

Q: Are the uplinks between the Cisco Catalyst 3850 and the 3750-X interchangeable?
A: No Because they are not compatible Continue reading

DNS over TLS: experience from the Go6lab

After the experiment with DPRIVE at IETF99, we thought we’d try to implement it in the Go6lab and see how this actually works in day-to-day reality.

The first step was to take a look at https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/ as we had a feeling this might be the best source for information around this topic. There’s a ton of info about DNS over TLS, but what we were really looking for was simple instructions on how to setup a recursive DNS server to serve DNS responses over TLS (port 853), as well as how to setup a local client on our device that could talk to the server and accept local DNS queries over TLS, thereby protecting our DNS communications over the Internet.

We decided that running a  TLS proxy was not the way to do it, so we used CentOS 7 VPS with Unbound installed. After some time and with extensive help from Willem Toorop from NLnet Labs (thanks Willem!!!) we managed to navigate the setup process for server and client.

Firstly, we installed the default Unbound from the CentOS7 default yum repositories, which turned out not to be a very good idea, as this version is 1.4.20 Continue reading

State of MAC address randomization

tldr: I went to DragonCon, a conference of 85,000 people, so sniff WiFi packets and test how many phones now uses MAC address randomization. Almost all iPhones nowadays do, but it seems only a third of Android phones do.


Ten years ago at BlackHat, we presented the "data seepage" problem, how the broadcasts from your devices allow you to be tracked. Among the things we highlighted was how WiFi probes looking to connect to access-points expose the unique hardware address burned into the phone, the MAC address. This hardware address is unique to your phone, shared by no other device in the world. Evildoers, such as the NSA or GRU, could install passive listening devices in airports and train-stations around the world in order to track your movements. This could be done with $25 devices sprinkled around a few thousand places -- within the budget of not only a police state, but also the average hacker.

In 2014, with the release of iOS 8, Apple addressed this problem by randomizing the MAC address. Every time you restart your phone, it picks a new, random, hardware address for connecting to WiFi. This causes a few problems: every time you restart Continue reading

Worth Reading: Malware in your screen

Phone touchscreens, and other similar hardware components such as orientation sensors, wireless charging controllers, and NFC readers, are often produced by thirdparty manufacturers and not by the phone vendors themselves. Third-party driver source code to support these components is integrated into the vendor’s source code. In contrast to “pluggable” drivers, such as USB or network drivers, the component driver’s source code implicitly assumes that the component hardware is authentic and trustworthy. As a result of this trust, very few integrity checks are performed on the communications between the component and the device’s main processor. —Shattered Trust (PDF)

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Hey Alexa, Turn my lab on!

TL/DR Put together a custom Alexa Skill so I can turn switches and routers off in my lab as shown in the video here. Feels pretty great.

 

As most of my twitter followers have noticed, I’ve been doing a lot of Home Automation, mostly with Apple #homeKit. But I also picked up an Amazon Dot because… well why not?

One of the great things abut the digital voice assistance from Amazon, is that they have created an extensible framework that enables those with a little bit of coding skills to add to Mrs. A’s already already impressive impressive array of abilities.

The Amazon Alexa developer page is pretty impressive. There’s a ton of information and tutorials there, as well as an SDK and code examples in Node.js. I’m almost exclusively a python coder at this point, so I decided to look for something a little more familiar and came upon this.

Flask-Ask

Flask-Ask is a Flask extension that makes building Alexa skills for the Amazon Echo easier and much more fun.

Essentially, John Wheeler took the flask WSGI ( web) framework and made it super easy to be able to create Amazon Alexa skills using this familiar library. Continue reading

Worth Reading: It’s okay to forget what you read

Many of us feel this near-existential fear that we might “lose” what wisdom we extract from the books we read.Such fears are unfounded. First of all, if you love books, memory is never a problem. If I read for pure pleasure, what harm is there is forgetting? I get to enjoy the same wonderful book over and over again — for the book-lover, what better gift is there than forgetfulness? But many of us read books for reasons other than pleasure. We want to get something from the books we read. There is much written on retaining what you read (note it, connect it, summarize it, teach it, yawn…), but Paul Graham, I think, has something new and interesting to say. —Charles Chu on Medium

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