CCDE – The CCDE Mindset

This post was written to help CCDE candidates get into the right mindset but is very applicable to network architects and network engineers in general.

We humans tend to have a lot of bias. Sometimes it’s based on experience but often it’s based on how pure a technology is or a bad implementation of a protocol. Often we don’t reevaluate our opinion so if we had a STP incident in the past, STP becomes inherently bad for all future.

Preparing for the CCDE from a technology standpoint is relatively easy compared to getting into the right mindset and getting enough exposure to network designs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a technically difficult exam but the number of candidates taking the exam that have the right knowledge level of technology are far higher than the number of people actually passing the exam. I have seen this time and time again.

Because we have this bias we immediately base our feeling and design based on our feelings or previous experience without taking the business requirements and technical constraints into consideration.Yes, maybe MPLS was the best answer to the question from a technical standpoint but maybe there was a constraint that only Continue reading

Worth Reading: Windows 10 steps up ransomware defenses

Here’s some good news for the countless businesses getting ready for the migration to Windows 10: Microsoft recently announced that its Windows 10 Anniversary Update features security updates specifically targeted to fight ransomware. No defense is completely hack-proof, but it’s great to see the biggest names in the tech world are putting ransomware at the top of their list of concerns. —Cloud Security Alliance

The post Worth Reading: Windows 10 steps up ransomware defenses appeared first on 'net work.

US Park Service tweets were result of old Twitter passwords

Two instances of tweets from U.S. National Park Service accounts that became political hot potatoes in the last few days were the result of bad password management, according to officials.The first incident took place on inauguration day when the main National Park Service account retweeted images from a CNN reporter that compared unfavorably the crowd size at President Donald Trump's inauguration with that of President Barack Obama's in 2009.When Trump began to openly dispute the images and smaller crowd sizes, the National Park Service deleted the retweet and apologized."We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you," it said on Saturday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US Park Service tweets were result of old Twitter passwords

Two instances of tweets from U.S. National Park Service accounts that became political hot potatoes in the last few days were the result of bad password management, according to officials.The first incident took place on inauguration day when the main National Park Service account retweeted images from a CNN reporter that compared unfavorably the crowd size at President Donald Trump's inauguration with that of President Barack Obama's in 2009.When Trump began to openly dispute the images and smaller crowd sizes, the National Park Service deleted the retweet and apologized."We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you," it said on Saturday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Snapchat the real augmented reality powerhouse?

When you think of augmented reality (AR), names like Microsoft Hololens, MagicLeap, Vuforia and Blippar come to mind. When you think of social media, you think of Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin and Facebook. However, one of these social media players is an augmented reality company in disguise—Snapchat.Snapchat, owned by Snap Inc., is one of the biggest AR companies today. Over the past few years, Snapchat has been rolling out more and more features to its ephemeral photo sharing app that are blurring the line between our physical and digital worlds. Snapchat’s evolution In July 2014, we saw Snapchat’s first move towards AR with geofilters. AR overlays digital assets on the real environment. With geofilters, users could now place location-based image tags on their photos. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s new mixed reality initiatives tap power of HoloLens

Late last year, Microsoft announced the launch of Trimble's SketchUp Viewer for its HoloLens headset, which would allow for 3D images designed in SketchUp to be viewed in a more life-like scenario. The Viewer is just for viewing models but is done on a flat monitor. With HoloLens, the models appeared real. Since then, Microsoft has been working with Trimble and the Construction Information Technology Lab at the University of Cambridge to expand on use of HoloLens and mixed reality technology in the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industries. Today, the Microsoft announced details of two new trials that are underway at Cambridge. The first is Automated Progress Monitoring, a way to address routine maintenance and inspection of remote structures. It can be a laborious, time consuming and error-prone procedure, one where automation can replace humans because machines don’t get sloppy. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: The industry’s largest survey of IT practitioners and managers

Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.Puppet is pleased to announce our sixth annual State of DevOps survey. It's the biggest, most in-depth survey of IT professionals in the industry. Just as we have for the past few years, we've created the survey in collaboration with the principals of DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA): Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OSPF TLVs: Taking advantage of improvements in computing power

OSPF was originally designed in an age when processors were much less capable, available memory was much smaller, and link bandwidths were much lower. To conserve processing power, memory, and n-the-wire bandwidth, OSPF was designed using fixed length fields (FLFs). TLVs are more difficult to process than an FLF; to process a set of FLFs, you build a structure that mimics the FLF formatting, and simple “impose” it on the memory location where you have stored the data to be decoded, as shown below.

In the FLF model, the structure can simply be imposed on the memory locations, and the values can be read directly. In the TLV model, each type code must be read to determine the kind of information and the length must be read to determine the size of the field. Only once these two items in the TLV header have been read can the actual data be related to a particular field in the resulting data structure.

In the intervening years, however, compute, storage, and network capabilities have increased dramatically; the following chart, taken from a book I’m working on, shows this growth since about the start of the “network era.”

As compute, storage, and Continue reading

US net neutrality repeal worries IT workers

More than eight in 10 U.S. IT workers support the nation's net neutrality regulations, and many are worried that President Donald Trump administration's likely repeal of the rules will hurt their industry.Eighty-two percent of 411 IT workers responding to an online survey by Spiceworks support the net neutrality rules, while just 11 percent oppose them, the company said Wednesday. If the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules are repealed, 59 percent of respondents said they believe their companies' internet costs will rise, and 47 percent said they believe their companies' access to important internet services will be degraded.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US net neutrality repeal worries IT workers

More than eight in 10 U.S. IT workers support the nation's net neutrality regulations, and many are worried that President Donald Trump administration's likely repeal of the rules will hurt their industry.Eighty-two percent of 411 IT workers responding to an online survey by Spiceworks support the net neutrality rules, while just 11 percent oppose them, the company said Wednesday. If the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules are repealed, 59 percent of respondents said they believe their companies' internet costs will rise, and 47 percent said they believe their companies' access to important internet services will be degraded.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What to ask IDaaS vendors before you buy

Identity as a service (IDaaS), also known as identity and access management as a service, uses a cloud infrastructure for securely managing user identities and access enforcement. At its most basic level, IDaaS enables single sign-on (SSO) for systems in the cloud or on-premises, but it goes well beyond that to include access provisioning and deprovisioning, governance and analytics.Leading vendors in the IDaaS field in 2016 (per Gartner) included Okta, Microsoft and Centrify, with OneLogin, Ping Identity, SailPoint, Covisint, Salesforce, Lighthouse Security (IBM) and EMC/RSA figuring prominently as well. Although each company offers IDaaS, differences in feature sets and capabilities can make one solution preferable over the others for a particular organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

What to ask IDaaS vendors before you buy

Identity as a service (IDaaS), also known as identity and access management as a service, uses a cloud infrastructure for securely managing user identities and access enforcement. At its most basic level, IDaaS enables single sign-on (SSO) for systems in the cloud or on-premises, but it goes well beyond that to include access provisioning and deprovisioning, governance and analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Ransomware makes California nursing school feel ill

About three months ago, an instructor at Gurnick Academy, a California-based nursing school, had his biggest fear come alive. When he tried to access his lectures, the files were encrypted. The teacher was literally locked out of his classroom.If it wasn’t for a quick acting IT department, the entire school might have been in the same situation. They noticed the incident at the early stage and managed to prevent the encryption from spreading by disconnecting the infected device from the corporate network.Val Paschenko, IT department manager at the school, said the instructor was met with a ransomware note demanding 1 bitcoin or $740 in exchange for the files to be decrypted. The instructor called support and requested to get his files back, but it was already too late. He lost some recently created files, and he needed to redo some of his work. It took a few hours to reinstall the OS and configure everything; obviously during that time he was not able to work on his PC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware makes California nursing school feel ill

About three months ago, an instructor at Gurnick Academy, a California-based nursing school, had his biggest fear come alive. When he tried to access his lectures, the files were encrypted. The teacher was literally locked out of his classroom.If it wasn’t for a quick acting IT department, the entire school might have been in the same situation. They noticed the incident at the early stage and managed to prevent the encryption from spreading by disconnecting the infected device from the corporate network.Val Paschenko, IT department manager at the school, said the instructor was met with a ransomware note demanding 1 bitcoin or $740 in exchange for the files to be decrypted. The instructor called support and requested to get his files back, but it was already too late. He lost some recently created files, and he needed to redo some of his work. It took a few hours to reinstall the OS and configure everything; obviously during that time he was not able to work on his PC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dictionary: Shallow Packet Inspection 

Vendors marketing is getting overexcited with hyperbole and suddenly basic filtering such as access-lists are Deep Packet Inspection.

Packet munging for layer 2-4 is shallow packet inspection. Specifically, its when you match Ethernet MAC, IP Addresses and TCP/UDP port numbers but nothing else. At time of writing, shallow packet inspection is simple, cheap and part of the forwarding ASIC.

Devices that perform inspection at Layer 5-7 of the OSI model is deep packet inspection (DPI). This requires exponentially more complex handling of the data in the ASICs, awareness of data formats and flow operations. In addition, the applications that configure are complex and sophisticated (the CLI just doesn’t cut it).

Use the OSI Model

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My worst tech purchase ever

As you can see from my profile picture above, I’ve been around the tech industry for a while now. And while I’ve surely learned a thing or two over the years, much of that wisdom has come at a heavy price.  I’ve spent years following dead-end technologies down rabbit holes, getting up to speed on promising new software that never came close to living up to its hype, and jumping on board publications that were just about to give up the ghost. But lately I took some time to think about the absolutely worst tech product I ever bought with my own hard-earned dineros. And as it turned out, it was pretty much a no-brainer to settle on the winner (or loser, I guess, depending on how you look at it) as well as two runners-up. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Fix EULAs

Traditionally, once a person has purchased a product, she has been free to use it however she sees fit without oversight or control from the copyright owner. Purchasers have also been free to use competitors’ add-on software and hardware that interoperate with the goods they buy, because innovators have been able to develop and distribute such technologies. That expectation is upended when it comes to products that come with embedded software, from tractors to refrigerators to toasters and children’s toys. That software is supposed to make our stuff smarter, but it also makes our stuff not really ours. —EFF

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41% off Netgear Arlo Security System Wireless HD Camera, Indoor/Outdoor, Night Vision – Deal Alert

The Arlo camera is a 100 Percent Wire-Free, completely wireless, HD smart home security camera – so you can get exactly the shot you need – inside or out. The Arlo camera is weatherproof and includes motion detection, night vision, and apps. It can capture clips and send you alerts whether you’re at home or away for round-the-clock peace of mind.  These motion activated cameras initiate automatic recording and alert you via email or app notifications. Free apps enable remote monitoring from anywhere and with the built-in night vision you’ll even see in dark.  This security camera currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from almost 10,000 customers (read reviews) and its list price of $219.99 is currently discounted 41% to $129.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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