Unnumbered Links In OSPF

This post is going to be a real deep dive! First, I want to send my sincere thanks to the maestro Peter Palúch and the guru Ivan Pepelnjak for helping me research this topic. Ivan wrote a couple of great posts on unnumbered links:

In VXLAN fabrics, it is quite common to build the underlay using unnumbered links. The concept is not new. In the past, unnumbered links were mainly used with point to point serial links using encapsulation such as Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). There was a time before variable length subnet masks where addressing interfaces could be very wasteful. Using unnumbered links reduced the need for addressing. It was generally not allowed on multi access interfaces such as Ethernet, though. Even though we often use Ethernet as point to point links.

What benefits do unnumbered links provide in today’s networks? There are a few:

  • Reduce the number of IP addresses needed to address links.
  • Less unique configuration for each device.
  • Fewer lines of configuration.

Let’s dive deeper into each of these:

Reduced need of IP addresses – While these may be private IP addresses, it still Continue reading

VMware NSX+ centralizes cloud networking and security for multicloud environments

VMware customers that have both on-prem and cloud-based architecture can now manage networking and security for both in a single management console. Unveiled at this week's VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas, NSX+ is new cloud-managed service that’s geared for multicloud environments and is designed to enable consistent network and security operations, centralized security policy management, network and application visibility, and network detection and response.This latest evolution of VMware's core networking package will be available to current NSX customers as an upgrade and to new customers as both a free trial and a paid offering effective today. By the end of the year, NSX+ will also extend to businesses running their cloud infrastructure natively in public clouds, says Rob Markovich, who leads product marketing for multicloud networking and network virtualization for VMware.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware Cloud gains faster ransomware recovery, expanded management capabilities

VMware announced a raft of improvements to its VMware Cloud platform at this week's VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas.Previously, VMware's on-premises private cloud solution, VMware Cloud Foundation, and its public cloud offerings were managed separately. Now, enterprises will be able to manage all their cloud deployments from a single location. In addition, customers will see improved integrations with the major cloud providers as well as faster disaster and ransomware recovery.Central management "We're actually bringing together a lot of disparate solutions under a common framework, VMware Cloud," says Rick Walsworth, VMware's director of product marketing for the cloud infrastructure team.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing VMware NSX+ Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Controller

Continuing the operational simplicity journey with VMware NSX+ Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Services that now include Cloud Controller

Applications are the lifeline of today’s businesses. By 2025, 750 million different applications will exist. Load balancing a variety of applications is no easy task, and cloud admins will have their work cut out for them. To meet the needs of modern applications, load balancers need to be agile, and have the ability to scale with modern applications while maintaining operational simplicity. Therefore, legacy load balancing solutions may not be a good fit for modern applications. Software defined load balancing solutions such as the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) are purpose built for such emerging scenarios.

Today we are happy to announce yet another important milestone in the pursuit of making the NSX advanced load balancing solution simpler and more flexible. Starting today, NSX ALB will be natively available as a service on VMware Cloud on AWS. NSX+ ALB Cloud Controller is completely managed by VMWare, and aims to simplify Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations. This capability is available today on VMware Cloud on AWS and will be made available on public clouds in subsequent releases.

Adding application awareness Continue reading

Announcing VMware NSX+: A Simpler Path to Consistent Multi-Cloud Networking

Deploying applications on multi-cloud infrastructure is challenging. VMware has long been committed to making multi-cloud networking and security simpler and more consistent through initiatives like Project Northstar which we announced at VMware Explore last year.

Today, we’re excited to continue our mission of simplifying the multi-cloud by introducing VMware NSX+, a new multi-cloud service offering for VMware NSX that makes it easier than ever to achieve a consistent and secure multi-cloud infrastructure for your applications.

Multi-cloud presents unique networking and security challenges

Securely deploying applications and infrastructure on-premises and across multiple clouds is complex

Multi-Cloud Challenges

 

 

 

 

  • Complex network design and operations: Each cloud can have its own set of tools and controls, slowing down network deployment and operations. ​
  • Limited visibility: Network operators often cannot achieve the end-to-end visibility and monitoring across clouds.
  • Secure Controls for Threat Detection: Lack of visibility into cross-cloud traffic increases the risk of lateral movement of undetected threats. Also, correlating threats across multiple clouds can be challenging because of the diversity of cloud environments.
  • Skills and resource gap: Public cloud providers have their own unique networking constructs and architectures, making it challenging to bridge the skills gap, and hire and train a team equipped to manage the complexity of Continue reading

Self Service Consumption with Virtual Private Clouds Powered by NSX

How cloud consumption is making its way natively into NSX and NSX+

We are excited to introduce Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for private clouds and VMware Clouds, with the release of NSX 4.1.1.

Thanks to NSX Network Virtualization, customers can operate their networking, security, and services from a single place through the UI or API. This functionality allows one-click deployment of multi-tier network topologies, backed by distributed networking and security. The software-defined networking solution enables large-scale, self-service IaaS initiatives.

In addition, the introduction of native multi-tenancy in NSX 4.1.0 allows multiple users to consume the platform in parallel without the risk of overlap or disruption. This makes it possible to provide users with direct access to NSX, but to segment each within isolated environments where they can configure their own NSX objects and apply rules only to their workloads.

Now we are taking it to the next level!

With the introduction of VPC in both NSX and NSX+, we are both extending the multi-tenancy framework and offering cloud consumption to users natively, both on-premises and in VMware Cloud. Customers can apply the VPC construct on the cloud/s of their choice with efficient and consistent operations. This Continue reading

Delivering a True Cloud Operating Model with Cloud Speed: NSX+ Innovates for Multi-Cloud

Companies in every geography and industry have had the fortune, in recent years, to choose from a variety of remarkable cloud platforms to run their applications—including on-prem private cloud, VMware clouds, and native public clouds. In fact, 83% of organizations surveyed by VMware have their application workloads distributed across multiple cloud environments1.  

But every major technological advancement creates new challenges and opportunities. IT leaders have been telling me that they need a true cloud operating model across multi-cloud to address two key challenges: 

  • First, they’re stuck in partial automation purgatory. It takes their siloed teams many IT tickets to set up security, networking, and load-balancing services to deploy an application. This isn’t just operationally inefficient, it breeds friction between the infrastructure and application owners. 
  • Second, operating across multi-cloud environments is complicated. Teams lack consistent visibility, policy, and operations across cloud deployments. This causes change management nightmares, security blind spots, and unprecedented delays in troubleshooting issues. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, I’m proud to share that VMware is taking a significant step towards making a single cloud operating model for managing and securing networks a reality through our launch of NSX+. Our Continue reading

UK authority OKs Broadcom’s VMware buy but regulatory hurdles remain

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority Monday approved the proposed $61 billion megamerger between Broadcom and VMware, saying that the deal would not substantially affect innovation or harm the ability of rivals to compete against the merged company.While Broadcom said that it expects to receive all regulatory approvals necessary to close the deal VMware deal by the end of October, it acknowledged that it is still working with some authorities to obtain consent, and said in a filing with the US Securities Exchange Commission on Monday that it has agreed with VMware to extend the "Outside Date" for the deadline to conclude the deal. The new date was not immediately specified by Broadcom.To read this article in full, please click here

Bugs in x86 chips force Linux kernel update

Bugs emerged earlier this month in Intel and AMD processors that affect both client and server processors over multiple generations. Fortunately, the bugs were found some time ago and researchers kept it quiet while fixes were developed.Google researchers found the Intel bug known as Downfall (CVE-2022-40982) and reported it to Intel more than a year ago, so both parties had plenty of time to work things out. The Downfall bug exploits a flaw in the "Gather" instruction that affected Intel CPUs use to grab information from multiple places in a system's memory. A Google researcher created a proof-of-concept exploit that could steal encryption keys and other kinds of data from other users on a given server.To read this article in full, please click here

Bugs in x86 chips force Linux kernel update

Bugs emerged earlier this month in Intel and AMD processors that affect both client and server processors over multiple generations. Fortunately, the bugs were found some time ago and researchers kept it quiet while fixes were developed.Google researchers found the Intel bug known as Downfall (CVE-2022-40982) and reported it to Intel more than a year ago, so both parties had plenty of time to work things out. The Downfall bug exploits a flaw in the "Gather" instruction that affected Intel CPUs use to grab information from multiple places in a system's memory. A Google researcher created a proof-of-concept exploit that could steal encryption keys and other kinds of data from other users on a given server.To read this article in full, please click here

Navigating your way around the Linux file system

One of the first things Linux users need to learn is how to move around the Linux file system and, eventually, how to make it even easier to move around the file system. This post describes both the basic commands you need and some smart moves to make navigating easier.Absolute and relative paths Before we get moving, it’s important to understand the difference between absolute paths (like /home/jdoe) and relative paths (like images/photos and ..). Absolute paths always begin with a / that, of course, represents the base of the file system. If the specified path doesn’t start with a /, it’s relative. Here are some examples of both relative and absolute paths:To read this article in full, please click here

Navigating your way around the Linux file system

One of the first things Linux users need to learn is how to move around the Linux file system and, eventually, how to make it even easier to move around the file system. This post describes both the basic commands you need and some smart moves to make navigating easier.Absolute and relative paths Before we get moving, it’s important to understand the difference between absolute paths (like /home/jdoe) and relative paths (like images/photos and ..). Absolute paths always begin with a / that, of course, represents the base of the file system. If the specified path doesn’t start with a /, it’s relative. Here are some examples of both relative and absolute paths:To read this article in full, please click here

Human error in network operations and how to deal with it

You might have been alarmed to read recently that half of all network problems are due to human error. Well, bad news. That’s true of the number of problems. If you look at the hours of degraded or failed operation, three-quarters of all of it is due to human error. Furthermore, the great majority of degraded or failed operation can be traced to four specific activities: Fault analysis and response, which network professionals and their management say creates 36% of error-induced outage time Configuration changes (attributed to 27% of error-induced outage time) Scaling and failover tasks (attributed to 19% of error-induced outage time) Security policies (attributed to 18% of error-induced outage time) Not surprisingly, network professionals are eager to find remedies for each of the four primary culprits. Before that can happen, it’s important to understand why the human error occurs.To read this article in full, please click here

4 activities that lead to human error in network operations

You might have been alarmed to read recently that half of all network problems are due to human error. Well, bad news. That’s true of the number of problems. If you look at the hours of degraded or failed operation, three-quarters of all of it is due to human error. Furthermore, the great majority of degraded or failed operation can be traced to four specific activities: Fault analysis and response, which network professionals and their management say creates 36% of error-induced outage time Configuration changes (attributed to 27% of error-induced outage time) Scaling and failover tasks (attributed to 19% of error-induced outage time) Security policies (attributed to 18% of error-induced outage time) Not surprisingly, network professionals are eager to find remedies for each of the four primary culprits. Before that can happen, it’s important to understand why the human error occurs.To read this article in full, please click here

The Interplay Of GDP, Inflation, And IT Spending

Data changes behavior and behavior changes data. It is a phenomenon that is akin to the Observer Effect in physics in that you can’t observe something without changing its behavior. …

The post The Interplay Of GDP, Inflation, And IT Spending first appeared on The Next Platform.

The Interplay Of GDP, Inflation, And IT Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Application Security Report: Q2 2023

Application Security Report: Q2 2023
Application Security Report: Q2 2023

Cloudflare has a unique vantage point on the Internet. From this position, we are able to see, explore, and identify trends that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this report we are doing just that and sharing our insights into Internet-wide application security trends.

This report is the third edition of our Application Security Report. The first one was published in March 2022, with the second published earlier this year in March, and this is the first to be published on a  quarterly basis.

Since the last report, our network is bigger and faster: we are now processing an average of 46 million HTTP requests/second and 63 million at peak. We consistently handle approximately 25 million DNS queries per second. That's around 2.1 trillion DNS queries per day, and 65 trillion queries a month. This is the sum of authoritative and resolver requests served by our infrastructure. Summing up both HTTP and DNS requests, we get to see a lot of malicious traffic. Focusing on HTTP requests only, in Q2 2023 Cloudflare blocked an average of 112 billion cyber threats each day, and this is the data that powers this report.

But as usual, before we dive in, Continue reading

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape
An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

In 2023, cybersecurity continues to be in most cases a need-to-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack and its consequences. Attacks have gotten more sophisticated, while conflicts (online and offline, and at the same time) continue, including in Ukraine. Governments have heightened their cyber warnings and put together strategies, including around critical infrastructure (including health and education). All of this, at a time when there were never so many online risks, but also people online — over five billion in July 2023, 64.5% of the now eight billion that are the world’s total population.

Here we take a look at what we’ve been discussing in 2023, so far, in our Cloudflare blog related to attacks and online security in general, with several August reading list suggestions. From new trends, products, initiatives or partnerships, including AI service safety, to record-breaking blocked cyberattacks. On that note, our AI hub (ai.cloudflare.com) was just launched.

Throughout the year, Cloudflare has continued to onboard customers while they were being attacked, and we have provided protection to many others, including once.net, responsible for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest online voting system Continue reading

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