Your absurd story doesn’t make me a Snowden apologist

Defending truth in the Snowden Affair doesn't make one an "apologist", for either side. There plenty of ardent supporters on either side that need to be debunked. The latest (anti-Snowden) example is the HPSCI committee report on Snowden [*], and stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal [*]. Pointing out the obvious holes doesn't make us "apologists".

As Edward Epstein documents in the WSJ story, one of the lies Snowden told was telling his employer (Booz-Allen) that he was being treated for epilepsy when in fact he was fleeing to Hong Kong in order to give documents to Greenwald and Poitras.

Well, of course he did. If you are going to leak a bunch of documents to the press, you can't do that without a bunch of lies to your employer. That's the very definition of this sort of "whistleblowing". Snowden has been quite open to the public about the lies he told his employer, including this one.

Rather than evidence that there's something wrong with Continue reading

My Personal Look Back on 2016

I haven't ever written a “year in review” type of post before. Sure, I do a post to summarize how the blog has done over the year but I've never done a personal look back. Last night-New Years Eve-I was thinking about everything that I was involved in during 2016 and I realized “I should write this down! I was involved in or a participant of some amazing things last year!”

So here we go. In an effort to show a more personal side and not just my geeky side, here is my personal 2016 year in review.

2016 End of Year Blog Statistics

Happy New Year! I just realized the other day that this blog turned 5 years old in 2016. It’s been a lot of fun and has paid me back for my time in terms of building my brand and being a means to explore and learn new topics. I have plans to put more focus on my writing in 2017 and reduce the friction between starting with a blank page and hitting that “Publish” button.

Anyways! Here’s a look back at 2016 on packetmischief.ca.

2016 YoY Overall
2016 YoY Overall

Hmm. Basically flat growth in terms of views and visitors. I feel like this is to be expected based on how much writing and promotion I did throughout the year. I can improve these numbers for 2017.

Just like last year, the new vs returning visitor numbers are basically unchanged.

2016 YoY Visitors
2016 YoY Visitors

The 5 most popular posts in 2016 are:

2016 Most Popular Posts
2016 Most Popular Posts

Quick links:

And the top 5 posts in 2016 that Continue reading

Hybrid cloud recent solutions from Microsoft and VMWare – 2 different ends of the hybrid cloud spectrum

Public clouds have grown tremendously over the last few years and there are very few companies who do not use public cloud at this point. Even traditional enterprises with in-house data centers have some presence in the public cloud. I was looking at Amazon’s re:Invent conference details and I was amazed by the number of … Continue reading Hybrid cloud recent solutions from Microsoft and VMWare – 2 different ends of the hybrid cloud spectrum →

2016 End of Year Blog Statistics

Happy New Year! I just realized the other day that this blog turned 5 years old in 2016. It's been a lot of fun and has paid me back for my time in terms of building my brand and being a means to explore and learn new topics. I have plans to put more focus on my writing in 2017 and reduce the friction between starting with a blank page and hitting that “Publish” button.

Anyways! Here's a look back at 2016 on packetmischief.ca.

2016 Recap and 2017 Goals

Yet another recap post to follow up on last year’s. 2015 was a big transition year for me, and last year I wanted to make sure I kept the momentum going. I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2016 Recap and 2017 Goals

Yet another recap post to follow up on last year’s. 2015 was a big transition year for me, and last year I wanted to make sure I kept the momentum going. I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2016 Recap and 2017 Goals

Yet another recap post to follow up on last year’s. 2015 was a big transition year for me, and last year I wanted to make sure I kept the momentum going.

I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2015 Goal Recap

First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.

Network Automation Book - At this time last year, I announced that I was working on a network automation book with Scott Lowe and Jason Edelman. This has certainly taken a bit more time than any of us would have liked, but we’re very near the end. The three of us have had a very busy year, and there are very few things to do for this release. However, we have pushed several additional chapters to O’Reilly, so you can still read these via Safari.

Open Source - Given that I now work for a company centered around an open Continue reading

2016 Recap and 2017 Goals

Yet another recap post to follow up on last year’s. 2015 was a big transition year for me, and last year I wanted to make sure I kept the momentum going.

I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2015 Goal Recap

First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.

Network Automation Book - At this time last year, I announced that I was working on a network automation book with Scott Lowe and Jason Edelman. This has certainly taken a bit more time than any of us would have liked, but we’re very near the end. The three of us have had a very busy year, and there are very few things to do for this release. However, we have pushed several additional chapters to O’Reilly, so you can still read these via Safari.

Open Source - Given that I now work for a company centered around an open Continue reading

34% off TurboTax Deluxe 2016 Tax Software Federal & State – Deal Alert

TurboTax coaches you every step of the way and double checks your return as you go to handle even the toughest tax situations, so you can be confident you’re getting every dollar you deserve. Its typical list price of $59.99 has been reduced a generous 34% to $39.86, a deal that is exclusive to Amazon. Learn more, or take advantage of the deal now, on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PIXEL, the latest Raspberry Pi OS … for x86!

Apparently Santa thought that Raspberry Pi users deserved something special this Christmas because there, underneath the digital Christmas tree, was the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s x86 port of its Debian + PIXEL Linux desktop environment designed to run on pretty much any hardware even old, pensioned-off gear. Lovers of horrible backronyms might have rejoiced at the name PIXEL which is derived from “Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight” but as clumsy as the name’s derivation might be, the PIXEL distro is way cool and a seriously good idea.  Mark Gibbs PIXEL is a highly modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment on Debian “Jessie” and was originally released in September 2016 but only for Raspberry Pi boards. This Christmas release now allows you to run PIXEL on most X86 devices including many machines that are veritable antiques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Panama expands Cloudflare network to 50 countries

Panama expands Cloudflare network to 50 countries

A man, a plan, a canal, a data center. Over 5 million Internet properties are now faster across Panama, as Cloudflare turned up its newest data center in Panama City. This is our 102nd data center globally, and brings us to a special milestone as our network now spans 50 countries. While perhaps not quite as big an announcement as the $5B Panama Canal expansion, the websites of many important newspapers, TV stations, banks and airlines can be accessed directly from Panama.

‘A man a plan a canal’ y un data center! A Partir de hoy más de 5 millones de sitios en internet serán mas rápidos desde Panamá, ya que hemos introducido nuestro más reciente centro de datos en Ciudad de Panamá. Es nuestro centro de datos número 102 a nivel mundial. Es una hito especial ya que la red global de Cloudflare alcanza 50 países a nivel mundial. Tal vez no es un anuncio tan grande como la inauguración de la expansión del canal, pero a partir de hoy muchos de los sitios importantes de diarios, Televisoras, bancos y aerolíneas serán servidos directamente desde Panamá.

Panama expands Cloudflare network to 50 countries

Bridge of the Americas
Puente de las Américas

Internet in Panama

El Internet Continue reading

New Year’s Resolution: Learn Docker

Remember last year when I said the market for Docker jobs was blowing up? Well, it’s more than doubled in the last year. And Swarm is also rising quickly, growing 12829%, almost all of that in the last year. We expect that with our partnership with Microsoft and Windows Docker containers, that this will grow even faster in the next year as .NET developers start to containerize their applications and Windows IT Professionals start porting their infrastructure to Docker. Take a look at this trendline from indeed.com.

Learn Docker to get a Docker job

So what are you doing to increase your Docker skills? Want a few suggestions?

Whether you’re a developer or more an ops person, a great place to start is the Docker Labs repository, which has currently 28 labs for you to choose from. They range from beginner tutorials, to orchestration workshops, security and networking tutorials, and guides for using different programming languages and developer tools.

Of course there’s also the Docker Documentation, which has a rich set of resources.

At Dockercon 2017 in April, there will be rich set of material for beginners and experts alike, and you will get to meet people from all over the world Continue reading

Quickly Adding an NMS to VIRL

I’ve spent the last few days experimenting with APIC-EM and the path trace capabilities. My lab environment is currently leveraging VIRL (Virtual Internet Routing LAB). Since it wasn’t obvious how to integrate APIC-EM with the lab platform, I wanted to share my configuration.

TL;DR–When building the topology, click the background and view the properties for the Topology. Change the Management Network to “Shared flat network”. This will put the all of the devices ‘Mgmt-intf’ vrf on the ‘flat’ (172.16.1.0/24 by default) network when the topology is built. 

When I started this process, I really didn’t realize how easy it could be. I actually tried to leverage a manual connection to L2 External (FLAT) to do the management in-band for the topology. This is certainly possible, but there is a much easier way. As most VIRL users have noticed, there is a management IP address that gets assigned to each device. There is a simple configuration change that will allow that address to be one from the ‘FLAT’ pool and connected externally to the ‘L2 External (FLAT)’ network.

flatmgmt

My configuration 

  1. APIC-EM built with IP address 172.16.1.2/24 (172.16.1.2-49 are unassigned and part of the Continue reading

Automating Your Job Away Isn’t Easy

programming

One of the most common complaints about SDN that comes from entry-level networking folks is that SDN is going to take their job away. People fear what SDN represents because it has the ability to replace their everyday tasks and put them out of a job. While this is nowhere close to reality, it’s a common enough argument that I hear it very often during Q&A sessions. How is it that SDN has the ability to ruin so many jobs? And how is it that we just now have found a way to do this?

Measure Twice

One of the biggest reasons that the automation portion of SDN has become so effective in today’s IT environment is that we can finally measure what it is that networks are supposed to be doing and how best to configure them. Think about the work that was done in the past to configure and troubleshoot networks. It’s often a very difficult task that involves a lot of intuition and guesswork. If you tried to explain to someone the best way to do things, you’d likely find yourself at a loss for words.

However, we’ve had boring, predictable standards for many years. Instead of Continue reading

2017 and the Internet: our predictions

An abbreviated version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch

Looking back over 2016, we saw the good and bad that comes with widespread use and abuse of the Internet.

In both Gabon and Gambia, Internet connectivity was disrupted during elections. The contested election in Gambia started with an Internet blackout that lasted a short time. In Gabon, the Internet shutdown lasted for days. Even as we write this countries like DR Congo are discussing blocking specific Internet services, clearly forgetting the lessons learned in these other countries.

CC BY 2.0 image by Aniket Thakur

DDoS attacks continued throughout the year, hitting websites big and small. Back in March, we wrote about 400 Gbps attacks that were happening over the weekend, and then in December, it looked like attackers were treating attacks as a job to be performed from 9 to 5.

In addition to real DDoS, there were also empty threats from a group calling itself Armada Collective and demanding Bitcoin for sites and APIs to stay online. Another group popped up to copycat the same modus-operandi.

The Internet of Things became what many had warned it would become: an army of devices used for attacks. A botnet Continue reading

When IOS XR Licenses Don’t Activate, What Then?

I came across a small but irritating issue with ASR / IOS XR licensing today, and since I found a way to fix it, I’m sharing my results.

Cisco ASR9006/ IOS XR

Licensing IOS XR on the ASR9k

I have an ASR9006 with two A9K-MOD160-TR linecards on which I need to run VRFs, so I purchased two of the A9K-IVRF-LIC linecard-based VRF licenses. I got the PAK keys from my reseller, and went to Cisco’s licensing portal to fulfill both of them following the usual process with the PID and S/N information taken from admin show license udi. I downloaded the license file and transferred it to an accessible jump server, then from the regular privileged exec mode (rather than the admin exec mode), I used sftp to transfer the file to the router.

Why not use the admin exec to transfer the licenses?

Simple: to transfer the license file within the admin exec means using tftp or ftp:

RP/0/RSP0/CPU0:asr9006-1(admin)#copy ?
  /recurse        Recursively list subdirectories encountered
  WORD            Copy from file
  bootflash:      Copy from bootflash: file system
  disk0:          Copy from disk0: file system
  disk0a:         Copy from disk0a: file system
  disk1:          Copy from disk1: file system
  disk1a:         Copy from disk1a: file system
  disk2:          Copy from disk2: file system
 Continue reading
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