Understanding CNI (Container Networking Interface)

If you’ve been paying attention to the discussions around container networking you’ve likely heard the acronym CNI being used.  CNI stands for Container Networking Interface and it’s goal is to create a generic plugin-based networking solution for containers.  CNI is defined by a spec (read it now, its not very long) that has some interesting language in it.  Here are a couple of points I found interesting during my first read through…

  • The spec defines a container as being a Linux network namespace.  We should be comfortable with that definition as container runtimes like Docker create a new network namespace for each container.
  • Network definitions for CNI are stored as JSON files.
  • The network definitions are streamed to the plugin through STDIN.  That is – there are no configuration files sitting on the host for the network configuration.
  • Other arguments are passed to the plugin via environmental variables
  • A CNI plugin is implemented as an executable.
  • The CNI plugin is responsible wiring up the container.  That is – it needs to do all the work to get the container on the network.  In Docker, this would include connecting the container network namespace back to the host somehow.
  • The CNI plugin is responsible for Continue reading

SAP license fees are due even for indirect users, court says

SAP's named-user licensing fees apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data, a U.K. judge ruled Thursday in a case pitting SAP against Diageo, the alcoholic beverage giant behind Smirnoff vodka and Guinness beer.The consequences could be far-reaching for businesses that have integrated their customer-facing systems with an SAP database, potentially leaving them liable for license fees for every customer that accesses their online store."If any SAP systems are being indirectly triggered, even if incidentally, and from anywhere in the world, then there are uncategorized and unpriced costs stacking up in the background," warned Robin Fry, a director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, who has been following the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Japan Keeps Accelerating With Tsubame 3.0 AI Supercomputer

The Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been at the forefront of accelerated computing, and well before GPUs came along and made acceleration not only cool but affordable and normal. But its latest system, Tsubame 3.0, being installed later this year, the Japanese supercomputing center is going to lay the hardware foundation for a new kind of HPC application that brings together simulation and modeling and machine learning workloads.

The hot new idea in HPC circles is not just being able to run machine learning workloads side by side with simulations, but to …

Japan Keeps Accelerating With Tsubame 3.0 AI Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Insecure Android apps put connected cars at risk

Android applications that allow millions of car owners to remotely locate and unlock their vehicles are missing security features that could prevent tampering by hackers.Researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab took seven of the most popular Android apps that accompany connected cars from various manufacturers and analyzed them from the perspective of a compromised Android device. The apps and manufacturers have not been named.The researchers looked at whether such apps use any of the available countermeasures that would make it hard for attackers to hijack them when the devices they're installed on are infected with malware. Other types of applications, such as banking apps, have such protections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Insecure Android apps put connected cars at risk

Android applications that allow millions of car owners to remotely locate and unlock their vehicles are missing security features that could prevent tampering by hackers.Researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab took seven of the most popular Android apps that accompany connected cars from various manufacturers and analyzed them from the perspective of a compromised Android device. The apps and manufacturers have not been named.The researchers looked at whether such apps use any of the available countermeasures that would make it hard for attackers to hijack them when the devices they're installed on are infected with malware. Other types of applications, such as banking apps, have such protections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Test driving App Firewall with IPTables

With more and more application moving to the cloud, web based applications have become ubiquitous. They are ideal for providing access to applications sitting on the cloud (over HTTP through a standard web browser). This has removed the need to install specialized application on the client system, the client just needs to install is a … Continue reading Test driving App Firewall with IPTables

Worth Reading: Extend your ITIL

Defining precise cybersecurity services in the context of an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is very important. From my perspective, many organizations struggle with cybersecurity because they do not understand what these essential services are. In the first post of this series, I discussed how ITIL misses the mark when it comes to operational security. In this post, I will discuss the six essential cybersecurity services required to run a credible security operation and how you can implement them in security operations. —APNIC

The post Worth Reading: Extend your ITIL appeared first on 'net work.

IDG Contributor Network: What’s a data infrastructure?

Whether you realize it or not, you may already be using, rely upon, affiliated with, support or otherwise involved with data infrastructures. Granted what you or others generically refer to as infrastructure or the data center may, in fact, be the data infrastructure. download Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures overview image Greg Schulz - Server StorageIO Generally speaking, people tend to refer to infrastructure as those things that support what they are doing at work, at home, or in other aspects of their lives. For example, the roads and bridges that carry you over rivers or valleys when traveling in a vehicle are referred to as infrastructure. This is also the situation with IT systems and services where, depending on where you sit or use various services, anything below what you do may be considered infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What’s a data infrastructure?

Whether you realize it or not, you may already be using, rely upon, affiliated with, support or otherwise involved with data infrastructures. Granted what you or others generically refer to as infrastructure or the data center may, in fact, be the data infrastructure. download Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures overview image Greg Schulz - Server StorageIO Generally speaking, people tend to refer to infrastructure as those things that support what they are doing at work, at home, or in other aspects of their lives. For example, the roads and bridges that carry you over rivers or valleys when traveling in a vehicle are referred to as infrastructure. This is also the situation with IT systems and services where, depending on where you sit or use various services, anything below what you do may be considered infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CyberTech conference showcases cybersecurity solutions originating in Israel  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Mention “cybersecurity conference” and most people think of the annual RSA Conference, which was held last week. But halfway around the world, the annual CyberTech Tel Aviv event is building momentum as one of the largest gatherings of cybersecurity professionals in the world. This year, more than 10,000 people representing 67 countries amassed in Tel Aviv, and I had the privilege of being one of them.Israel is making a name for itself, and that name is Cyber Nation. A 2011 government resolution created the National Cyber Bureau as an advising body for the Prime Minister. The bureau’s main mission is to bolster Israel’s national cybersecurity defenses, but a secondary mission is to promote research and development in the cyber field and encourage the commercial cyber industry in Israel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CyberTech conference showcases cybersecurity solutions originating in Israel  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Mention “cybersecurity conference” and most people think of the annual RSA Conference, which was held last week. But halfway around the world, the annual CyberTech Tel Aviv event is building momentum as one of the largest gatherings of cybersecurity professionals in the world. This year, more than 10,000 people representing 67 countries amassed in Tel Aviv, and I had the privilege of being one of them.Israel is making a name for itself, and that name is Cyber Nation. A 2011 government resolution created the National Cyber Bureau as an advising body for the Prime Minister. The bureau’s main mission is to bolster Israel’s national cybersecurity defenses, but a secondary mission is to promote research and development in the cyber field and encourage the commercial cyber industry in Israel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM and Visa plot to monetize IoT with sensor-driven invisible transactions

In a matter of years there will be about 20 billion connected devices on the planet. This is the internet of things (IoT), and financial services institution Visa today announced its intention to turn many of these into a way for you to pay.Speaking at today's opening of IBM's Watson IoT Centre in Munich, Germany - an enormous skyscraper with labs inside that will invite the company's many partners in IoT to take up residence - Visa's Jim McCarthy and IBM's Bret Greenstein laid out their vision.Think of what the plastic card in your wallet represents: it is a simple form factor that securely communicates a payment between the consumer and the retailer. But Greenstein suggested that its time may be up, as every object around us begins to have intelligence embedded within them, these could also be payment signifiers in some way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM delivers machine learning on the private cloud

IBM is making machine learning technology available in the place where much of the world's enterprise data resides: the z System mainframe. Today Big Blue announced IBM Machine Learning, a cognitive platform for creating, training and deploying a high volume of analytic models in the private cloud. The platform draws on the core machine learning technology from its Watson Machine Learning service on its Bluemix public cloud offering. "Our mission is making data simple and accessible to clients," says Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Analytics. "If you look at the data landscape today, over 90 percent of the data in the world today cannot be Googled. It's neither simple, nor accessible. Most of that data resides behind corporate firewalls in private clouds."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Usable Security Highlighted at NDSS 2017

A number of seminal papers appeared towards the end of the 20th century calling for more attention to be paid to the human in the security loop. For example, Anne Adams and Angela Sasse’s “Users are not the Enemy” and Mark Ackerman and Lorrie Cranor’s "Privacy critics: UI components to safeguard users' privacy." The research field of Usable Security was thereby launched, and quickly garnered interest amongst academics and in industry. Almost two decades later this field has achieved independent status with a number of conferences and workshops being dedicated to this research field.

Melanie Volkamer
Karen Renaud

43% off TP-Link Smart LED Wi-Fi Light Bulb, 50W Dimmable and Alexa Compatible – Deal Alert

TP-Link has discounted its 50W smart bulb 43% to just $19.99. Use the Kasa app to turn on/off or dim from anywhere in the world. Set up a schedule, set the mood, and even control with your voice via an Alexa-enabled device such as Echo or Dot. Reviewers rate 4 out of 5 stars (see reviews) on Amazon, where you can get yourself one (or more) for just $20, a good deal considering it typically lists north of $20 and sometimes $30 with various online retailers. See the discounted TP-Link smart LED bulb on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Rising Tide of CCIE Written Costs

CCIELogo

In CCIE news this week, Cisco has raised the price of their exams across the board. The CCNA has moved up to $325, and the CCIE Written moves from $400 to $450. It goes without saying that there is quite a bit of outcry in the community. Why is the price of the CCIE Written exam surging so high?

No Such Thing As A Free Test

The most obvious answer is that the amount of work going in to development of the exam has increased. The number of people working behind the scenes to create a better exam has caused the amount of outlay to go up, hence the need to recover those costs. This is the simplest explanation of all the cost increases.

As Cisco pours more and more technology into the tests, the amount of hands and fingers touching them has gone down. At the same time, the quality of the eyeballs that do look at the exam has gone up. It’s a lot like going to a specialist doctor. The quality of the care you receive for your condition is high, but the costs associated with that doctor are higher than a regular general practice doctor. Cisco’s Continue reading

Python – Kirk Byers Course Week 2 Part 4

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

The final assignment in week 2 is the following:

IV. You have the following string from "show version" on a Cisco router

cisco_ios = "Cisco IOS Software, C880 Software (C880DATA-UNIVERSALK9-M), Version 15.0(1)M4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)"

Note, the string is a single line; there is no newline in the string.

How would you process this string to retrieve only the IOS version:

   ios_version = "15.0(1)M4"


Try to make it generic (i.e. assume that the IOS version can change). 

You can assume that the commas divide this string into four sections and that the string will always have 'Cisco IOS Software', 'Version', and 'RELEASE SOFTWARE' in it.

The first thing we want to do is to split the string into several parts and put them in a list. We were told that we could use the comma as a separator. We’ll print the list and show the type to show what is going on.

cisco_ios_list = cisco_ios.split(",")
print(cisco_ios_list)
print(type(cisco_ios_list))

This gives us the following output:

daniel@daniel-iperf3:~/python/Week2$ python3 ios_version.py 
['Cisco IOS Software', ' C880 Software (C880DATA-UNIVERSALK9-M)', '\n Version 15.0(1)M4',  Continue reading
1 … 2,346 2,347 2,348 2,349 2,350 … 3,891