Using DCNM to Automate Cisco FabricPath Operations

In my final post on Cisco’s Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), I’m taking a look at the deployment capabilities and templating features which allow configuration to be deployed automatically to multiple devices. In its simplest case, this might be used to set a new local username / password on all devices in the fabric, but in theory it can be used for much more.

DCNM

DCNM Scripting

Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: this ain’t no Jinja2 templating system. While DCNM’s templates support the use of variables and some basic loop and conditional structures, the syntax is fairly limited and the only real-time interaction with the device during the execution of the template amounts to a variable containing the output of the last command issued. There are also very few system variables provided to tell you what’s going on. For example I couldn’t find a variable containing the name of the current device; I had to issue a hostname command and evaluate the response in order to confirm which device I was connecting to. That said, with a little creativity and a lot of patience, it’s possible to develop scripts which do useful things to the fabric.

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IDG Contributor Network: People Power brings bots and A.I. to home security systems

Ever since smart thermostat maker Nest burst onto the scene with its unique combination of beautiful design and A.I.-powered automation, there has been increasing attention about how A.I. can be applied to the so-called smart home. The fact that Google acquired Nest and then, by all accounts, proceeded to screw up the opportunity that Nest created, doesn't in any way lessen the importance and opportunity that smart homes creates. So it was interesting to hear of another play, this time a combined software and hardware one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 steps to small business security

Swimming upstream?Image by ThinkstockIf you’re a small to midsized business and you wing it when it comes to network management and security then it’s not a question of if you will have a disaster, it’s merely a question of when. Why? Because malware, accidents and disasters are all waiting in the wings to pop out and make your life hell and cost you lots of money. Now I won’t lie to you, getting insulated from the bad stuff isn’t cheap, but if you think security and reliability is expensive, try fixing a disaster. Here are 12 steps that will, in the long run, make your business safer. Think you’ve got this covered? How many have you got in place?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 steps to small business security

Swimming upstream?Image by ThinkstockIf you’re a small to midsized business and you wing it when it comes to network management and security then it’s not a question of if you will have a disaster, it’s merely a question of when. Why? Because malware, accidents and disasters are all waiting in the wings to pop out and make your life hell and cost you lots of money. Now I won’t lie to you, getting insulated from the bad stuff isn’t cheap, but if you think security and reliability is expensive, try fixing a disaster. Here are 12 steps that will, in the long run, make your business safer. Think you’ve got this covered? How many have you got in place?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Stretchable screens will follow upcoming flexible ones

The smartphone in its current guise has been around for 10 years, and in that time it hasn’t changed form-factor much—a somewhat boring rectangular slab of plastic. Big deal.Ten years, however, are eons in tech life. Therefore one could ask just why haven’t smartphones morphed their shape in this decade of otherwise spectacular technological advancement? Have we really reached the pinnacle of communications tool design? More likely, a technical limitation.Samsung, though, is reportedly aiming to launch flexible devices soon, according to the Korea Herald. One of them is a “bendable Virtual Reality device with a flexible OLED display that can be bent to cover a user’s eyes completely,” for example, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 2.20.17

New products of the weekImage by RiverbedOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Ambra for DevelopersImage by ambraTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 2.20.17

New products of the weekImage by RiverbedOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Ambra for DevelopersImage by ambraTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft eyes Indian startups for cloud services

Microsoft is targeting Indian startups with its cloud services, and has signed up more than 2,000 such customers in the country in the last 12 months, the company’s CEO Satya Nadella said Monday at an event for startups in Bangalore.A large opportunity ahead for the company is the large number of developers who are building their services around a biometric database, consisting of fingerprints and iris scans, which the country has created of over 1 billion of its people.Under a new program for the digital exchange of information, called India Stack, the government is offering the biometric system, called Aadhaar, as an authentication mechanism for a variety of services offered by the private sector.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A: Migrating to Modern Data Center Infrastructure

One of my readers sent me a list of questions after watching some of my videos, starting with a generic one:

While working self within large corporations for a long time, I am asking myself how it will be possible to move from messy infrastructure we grew over the years to a modern architecture.

Usually by building a parallel infrastructure and eventually retiring the old one, otherwise you’ll end up with layers of kludges. Obviously, the old infrastructure will lurk around for years (I know people who use this approach and currently run three generations of infrastructure).

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February 2017 CCDE Training is over ! Waiting the attendees success now !

My February 2017 CCDE class is now over. The duration of the course was for 11 days and as usual it started with lots of advanced technology lessons. All the critical CCDE exam topics (IGP, BGP , MPLS and the other technologies) were covered in detail from the design point of view. A minimum of […]

The post February 2017 CCDE Training is over ! Waiting the attendees success now ! appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

New Zealand High Court clears Kim Dotcom extradition to the US

Megaupload website founder Kim Dotcom and three associates were on Monday cleared by a court in New Zealand to be extradited to the U.S. where he faces a variety of charges including copyright infringement and racketeering.Holding that copyright infringement by digital online communication of copyright protected works to members of the public is not a criminal offense under New Zealand’s Copyright Act, the High Court found that a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement amounts to a bid to defraud, which is an extradition offense listed in the treaty between the U.S. and New Zealand.An earlier District Court judgment permitting the extradition was upheld by the High Court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber orders investigation into employee’s charge of sexual harassment

Uber Technologies said Sunday it had ordered an urgent investigation after a former engineer triggered an uproar on social media, alleging sexual harassment, politics and discrimination at the ride-hailing company.In a blog post, Susan J. Fowler, who joined Uber in November 2015 and quit in December last year to join Stripe, alleged that her former manager in the company had said in messages over company chat that he was looking for women to have sex with.“It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR,” Fowler wrote in a blog post that created a storm online.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 17th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Gorgeous satellite images of a thawing Greenland (NASA).

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

  • 1 cubic millimeter: computer with deep-Learning; 1,600: data on nearby stars; 40M: users for largest Parse app; 58x: Tensorflow 1.0 speedup on 64 gpus; 46%: ecommerce controlled by Amazon; 60%: IT growth in public cloud; 200 TB: one tv episode; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @krishnan: Serverless will not be around in 5 years. It will be AI coding AI coding Ai....... Serverless or not doesn't matter #RunForrestRun
    • user5994461: Amazon: Create usual services and sell them. Google: Make unique products that push the boundaries of what was previously thought possible. Amazon: Don't care about inefficiencies and usage. Inefficiencies can be handled by charging more to the clients, usage doesn't matter because the users are mostly the clients and they don't feel their pain. Google: Had to make all their core technologies efficient, performant, scalable and maintainable or they couldn't sustain their business.
    • Hans Rosling: To me, the impressive thing is that people succeed at all.
    • @littleidea: Google Spanner didn't beat CAP, just mitigated the hell Continue reading

F-bombing cop recorded threatening to sic dog on driver to rip him up

Getting pulled over by the cops can be stressful, especially if one of the cops is shouting, cursing and threatening to sic a 90-pound dog on a motorist to rip the *bleep* out of him. The Atlantic City cop was dropping f-bombs all over the place, doing so at least 10 times in a one-minute, 20-second video clip of the traffic stop incident which was posted on Facebook.I don’t see how you could help but be offended by the video. If not by the cop’s spewing of foul-language, then by the threats the officer made. It is unclear why the cops pulled over the young men, but one of the cops nuked out upon discovering the driver was using his phone to film them. One of the unidentified cops said, “Listen there’s two ways that this can go. Take that phone and stick it out of my face. I’m not gonna tell you again.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

F-bombing cop recorded threatening to sic dog on driver to rip him up

Getting pulled over by the cops can be stressful, especially if one of the cops is shouting, cursing and threatening to sic a 90-pound dog on a motorist to rip the *bleep* out of him. The Atlantic City cop was dropping f-bombs all over the place, doing so at least 10 times in a one-minute, 20-second video clip of the traffic stop incident which was posted on Facebook.I don’t see how you could help but be offended by the video. If not by the cop’s spewing of foul-language, then by the threats the officer made. It is unclear why the cops pulled over the young men, but one of the cops nuked out upon discovering the driver was using his phone to film them. One of the unidentified cops said, “Listen there’s two ways that this can go. Take that phone and stick it out of my face. I’m not gonna tell you again.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Watch Air Gordon dunk with an assist from Intel drone

Give Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon and Intel credit for creativity: The NBA player employed an AscTec Neo drone as part of his NBA Slam Dunk Contest repertoire. Intel Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon practices with Intel’s AscTec Neo drone ahead of the Slam Dunk Contest, as part of NBA All-Star 2017 festivities. Unfortunately, it took the athletic player 4 attempts to grab a pass from the roughly 11-pound hexicopter and complete the dunk, and he wound up getting knocked out of the competition early.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Python – Kirk Byers Course Week 3 Part 2

This post will describe the exercises and solutions for week three of Kirk Byers Python for Network Engineers.

Exercise two of week three we already completed in a previous post where we used a For loop to loop through the BGP output.

Let’s move on to exercise three instead:

III. You have the following 'show ip int brief' output.
show_ip_int_brief = '''
Interface            IP-Address      OK?     Method      Status     Protocol
FastEthernet0   unassigned      YES     unset          up          up
FastEthernet1   unassigned      YES     unset          up          up
FastEthernet2   unassigned      YES     unset          down      down
FastEthernet3   unassigned      YES     unset          up          up
FastEthernet4    6.9.4.10          YES     NVRAM       up          up
NVI0                  6.9.4.10          YES     unset           up          up
Tunnel1            16.25.253.2     YES     NVRAM       up          down
Tunnel2            16.25.253.6     YES     NVRAM       up          down
Vlan1                unassigned      YES    NVRAM       down      down
Vlan10              10.220.88.1     YES     NVRAM       up          up
Vlan20              192.168.0.1     YES     NVRAM       down      down
Vlan100            10.220.84.1     YES     NVRAM       up          up
'''
From this output, create a list where each element in the list is a tuple consisting of (interface_name, ip_address, status, protocol).  Only include interfaces that are in the up/up state.
Print this list to standard output.

In this Continue reading

You don’t need printer security

So there's this tweet:



What it's probably refering to is this:


This is an obviously bad idea.

Well, not so "obvious", so some people have ask me to clarify the situation. After all, without "security", couldn't a printer just be added to a botnet of IoT devices?

The answer is this:
Fixing insecurity is almost always better than adding a layer of security.
Adding security is notoriously problematic, for three reasons

  1. Hackers are active attackers. When presented with a barrier in front of an insecurity, they'll often find ways around that barrier. It's a common problem with "web application firewalls", for example.
  2. The security software itself can become a source of vulnerabilities hackers can attack, which has happened frequently in anti-virus and intrusion prevention systems.
  3. Security features are usually snake-oil, sounding great on paper, with with no details, and no independent evaluation, provided to the public.

It's the last one that's most important. HP markets features, but there's no guarantee they work. In particular, similar features in Continue reading
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