Cisco Clock Issue – This Is Really Bad
Check out this advisory from Cisco that came out a couple days ago. You need to read it and act on it immediately! I’ll summarize for you : Thanks to a faulty clock signal component, certain Cisco devices will stop functioning after about 18 months and become really expensive bricks! Reading through it, you’ll see phrases like “we expect product failures” and “is not recoverable.” Seriously, what the hell? This really warms the heart.
The fault affects a couple Meraki devices, the Nexus 9504, and some models of the ISR 4000s – the ISR4331, ISR4321, and ISR4351. The 4000s are part of Cisco’s flagship branch routers, and I know several people (including myself!) who have some of the affected units deployed in production. Some unnamed people on Twitter tell me that they have 50 and even 120 of these guys deployed in the field. That’s a lot of faulty clocks.
The fix is to open a TAC case and get a new device. Cisco is using the word “platform” when talking about replacement, meaning that they’ll send you a naked device. If you have cards or memory upgrades or a Continue reading
SSH is a BAD API
Okay, so its not meant to be an API. I get that. I’ve been watching a rather good video about executing interactive commands with Parimiko and two thoughts came to my mind.
- Very powerful/flexible way to do tasks across many devices
- This could be a LOT easier if we simply had the RESTful API’s we want everywhere
In any case, I think the video below is a worthwhile watch if you’re struggle to leverage Python and SSH to make a modification across a large number of devices.
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.
The post SSH is a BAD API appeared first on PacketU.
Automation: Build or Consume?
The question of “home grown vs. off the shelf” comes up a lot. It comes up both in a professional capacity and social.
Home grown, usually born out of frustration to solve an immediate problem, often is a path that leads to consuming something off the shelf either Open Source or commercial. Home grown can deliver rapid results for simple things but has an exponential learning growth curve to do something more complex.
Why learn the oddities and nuances of a full programming language to write a multi-threaded application that automates concurrently, when you can write simple instructions that makes something else takes care of all of that mucking about in parallelism, logging and worrying about covering every use case. If you like hacking and building things, is it not better to apply that yearning solving rapidly rewarded challenges or to work on building something that starts off fragile and like all babies, has to learn to crawl, walk and be weened off milk?
Good tools deal with things like input, decision making and invoking output. It’s always better to control the pipeline and write linkages than to build the whole thing. After all, the problem with software is, you Continue reading
Starting SDN Learning Journey- Through Open vSwitch
Introduction
Software Defined networking (SDN) is no more a new topic but still many Network/ System engineers feel it painful how to start learning SDN. Many SDN solution exists in market and each has its pros and cons. Objective of this blog is to give an idea about SDN basics to the engineers who want to start their SDN learning curve.
Reference topology
- 2 x Ubuntu host (14.04 LTS) each with multiple NICs
- Open vSwitch installed in each host and 1 instance created.
- Virtual Box installed in each host, vBox will be used to host guest virtual machines (VM-A & VM-B)
Topology Description
Open vSwitch (e.g br0) in each host will have following interfaces:-
- A tap interface which will be used to bind guest VM to Open vSwitch
- Eth1 of each host will be added to Open vSwitch
- IP address / sub netmask for Eth1 of each host will be configured on Open vSwitch itself (br0)
- Guest VM eth1 will be configured with IP/sub net mask different that host IP/ sub net mask
- VXLAN / GRE will be configured on each host (by using host IP addresses)
Step by Step setting up Lab
It is assumed Ubuntu 14. Continue reading
Arista Adds DANZ Monitoring to its Universal Leaf and Spine
DANZ addresses customer's concerns for more security.
TIP: How To Do MD5 and SHA1 File Checksum Validation
It’s always a good idea to calculate an MD5 or SHA1 file checksum to validate file integrity after download or transfer, especially when dealing with firmware binaries. While most modern systems are smart enough to validate images before attempting an installation, not all are so wise, and I’m sure I’m not the only one to have seen a device bricked (or stuck in ROMMON or a similar bootloader or equivalent) after a bad image was uploaded.
Here’s a quick reference guide to creating file checksums on Macos (OSX), Windows and Linux.
File Checksum Validation
There are various ways to check md5/sha1 checksums depending on your preferred platform. Vendors tend to publish the MD5 or SHA1 checksums (or both) for downloadable files, so it’s silly not to do checksum validation and confirm that the file has downloaded completely and uncorrupted. I try to validate after each time I transfer a file so that I don’t waste time sending a corrupted file on to the next hop. For example:
- Download image file from Cisco’s website
- — View the checksum and compare
- SCP the file to a target jump server
- — View the checksum and compare
- SCP the file to the end device
Delta Outages Reveal Flawed Disaster Recovery Plans
Delta's recent IT failures put spotlight on the faulty nature of enterprise disaster recovery planning.
Data, Analytics, Probabilities and the Super Bowl
Data is quickly becoming the coin of the realm in most aspects of the business world, and analytics the best way for organizations to cash in on it. It’s easy to be taken in by the systems and devices – much of the discussion around the Internet of Things tends to be around the things themselves, whether small sensors, mobile devices, self-driving cars or huge manufacturing systems. But the real value is in the data generated by these machines, and the ability to extract that data, analyze it and make decisions based on it in as close to real-time as …
Data, Analytics, Probabilities and the Super Bowl was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Worth Reading: Quantum safe glossary
The post Worth Reading: Quantum safe glossary appeared first on 'net work.
Another Political Problem for Tech: H-1B Visa Changes
As many as 1 million tech workers hold H-1B visas.