Big Changes in 2017

This past June when I was in North Carolina at Cisco’s CPOC lab, I learned that there was a chance–albeit a slim one, but a chance nonetheless–that a position would be opening up on the CPOC team in the fall. By that point I had been to CPOC three times and knew many of the engineers who worked there. I spoke to them to get their feedback, met with the newly-hired manager of the team, and just generally did all the things I thought I should be doing to take advantage of my time being face to face with these folks.

Then I flew home, subscribed to the “new jobs at Cisco mailing list” and waited.

And then, one day, it was posted: CPOC Technical Projects Systems Engineer. I immediately sent a message to my wife who responded as only she knows how:

Val_CPOC_job_reaction.png
Excitement :-)

Five short interviews later I was offered the job!

This brings me to change #1: As of this month (January), I am no longer a Systems Engineer with Cisco Systems Canada. I am now a Systems Engineer on the CPOC team reporting to a manager in the US.

Beyond the basic level of Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The futility of fighting future technologies

Last year, I flew to Calgary, Canada, to host an executive roundtable on behalf of Intel and two partner organizations. I got off the plane, pulled out my phone and opened my Uber app.It has become my standard travel routine. Except this time, there were no Uber cars to be had—bylaw changes in 2015 forced the transportation company to cease operations. The fees imposed were too much, the company said.One of the sponsoring vendor executives opened the meeting by asking, “What’s up with Calgary? Do you guys want to stay stuck in the past?”+ Also on Network World: How to be a CTO in the age of digital disruption (and live to tell about it) + The Calgary city council has since approved new bylaws that "make the city's licensing fee structure more favourable for the company," CBC News reported. And Uber is operating again in the city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Before you select a visual collaboration platform, ask yourself these questions

Once you’ve realized how important it is to invest in a digital workplace and have secured the budget you need to move forward with your plan, it’s time to begin looking for a collaboration solution to support this new way of work.Ultimately, the goal is to bring your people, content and technology together in a single, unified content-experience platform that promotes effective team collaboration. To get there, you’ll need to move beyond conventional collaboration applications, which typically include only file sharing or chat, to a more comprehensive solution that includes visual collaboration. But with so many new visual collaboration platforms emerging, how can you decide which one best suits your needs?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dictionary: optic boom

optic boom

A flash produced when electrons move faster than light, akin to the boom of supersonic jets. Breaking the “light barrier” sounds like sci-fi, but physicists say it can happen in graphene sheets. The discovery could spark development of optical circuits a million times faster than silicon chips.

Link: The 21 Best New Words of 2016 | WIRED https://www.wired.com/2016j/12/21-best-new-words-2016/

The post Dictionary: optic boom appeared first on EtherealMind.

The best Android phones that fit every budget

Top Android phones from 2016Image by Google, HTC, MotorolaToday, it is nearly impossible for smartphone manufacturers to build a bad phone. Component makers and the supply chain that serve the manufacturers have amazing momentum. It is the same momentum that drove PCs to market share leadership in the 1990s. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX and SRM: Disaster Recovery Overview and Demo

In this post, I’ll briefly expand on the benefits of utilizing NSX as part of a disaster recovery (DR) solution. For additional information check out my prior multi-site and disaster recovery with NSX posts on the VMware Network Virtualization blog. Additionally, I recently presented at 2016 US VMworld and Europe VMworld on multi-site and disaster recovery solutions and recorded sessions can be viewed here: US VMworld, Europe VMworld.

Prior NSX Multi-site and Disaster Recovery Posts:

With disaster recovery, two challenges in general are:

  1. Recovering the application with the same IP address at the recovery site; this is important because typically there are other dependencies on this IP address such as possibly security, load balancer configs, DNS, application dependencies, etc.

  2. Ensuring security for the application is in place for the application upon disaster recovery; traditional solutions rely on manually updating or syncing security policies across the protected and recovery sites which is Continue reading

Happy New Year

Hi Everyone,

I wish you all a Happy New Year!

Currently im very busy studying for my 2nd attempt at the CCDE Practical exam.
I have it booked for the next slot, which is February 22nd in London.

Thankfully there are more and more material available for the CCDE than just a year ago. One of my primary sources are the study group which I have mentioned before, which Daniel (lostintransit.se) and I started way back.

Im also going through the INE scenarios as well as LiveLessons available through a Safari subscription. Those are really good and I highly recommend them.

One of the primary things im practicing at the moment is picking up business requirements from a given scenario. This is quite hard as im at heart an implementation-focused guy. But its good to learn something new and very useful.

If you are not following it just yet, I can highly recommend the “Unleashing CCDE” site on Cisco Learning Network (https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/unleashing-ccde). There are alot of good posts there on how to pick up these “soft” skills.

I will keep the blog updated with my study progress through February and we’ll see what happens February 22nd ?

Take Care.

/Kim

Device Configurations Are Not a Good Source of Truth

One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the second part of Network Automation Tools webinar (or maybe it was Elisa Jasinska's presentation in the Data Center course):

Elisa mentions that for a given piece of data, there should be “one source of truth”. It gets a bit muddled when you have an IPAM tool and Git source control simultaneously. It is not hard to imagine scenarios where these get out of sync especially if you consider multi-operator scenarios.

Confused? He provided a simple scenario:

Read more ...

Privacy legislation reintroduced for mail older than 180 days

A bill has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before they poke around users’ emails and other communications in the cloud that are older than 180 days.The Email Privacy Act, reintroduced on Monday, aims to fix a loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allowed the government to search without warrant email and other electronic communications older than 180 days, stored on servers of third-party service providers such as Google and Yahoo.“Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox,” digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy legislation reintroduced for mail older than 180 days

A bill has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before they poke around users’ emails and other communications in the cloud that are older than 180 days. The Email Privacy Act, reintroduced on Monday, aims to fix a loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allows the government to search without warrant email and other electronic communications older than 180 days, stored on servers of third-party service providers such as Google and Yahoo. “Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox,” digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NAT is a firewall

NAT is a firewall. It's the most common firewall. It's the best firewall.

I thought I'd point this out because most security experts might disagree, pointing to some "textbook definition". This is wrong.

A "firewall" is anything that establishes a barrier between some internal (presumably trusted) network and the outside, public, and dangerous Internet where anybody can connect to you at any time. A NAT creates exactly that sort of barrier.

What other firewalls provide (the SPI packet filters) is the ability to block outbound connections, not just incoming connections. That's nice, but that's not a critical feature. Indeed, few organizations use firewalls that way, it just causes complaints when internal users cannot access Internet resources.

Another way of using firewalls is to specify connections between a DMZ and an internal network, such as a web server exposed to the Internet that needs a hole in the firewall to access an internal database. While not technically part of the NAT definition, it's a feature of all modern NATs. It's the only way to get some games to work, for example.

There's already more than 10-billion devices on the Internet, including homes with many devices, as well as most mobile phones. Continue reading

Watch Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone and change the world

10 years ago today, Steve Jobs delivered one of the most masterful product introductions in history when he unveiled the iPhone. Though the idea that Apple was working on a phone had been making its way through the rumor mill over the preceding few months, what the iPhone actually delivered to the table surpassed even the most optimistic of expectations.With a multitouch display and intuitive access to the entire web via mobile Safari, the iPhone instantly changed the way people used their smartphones. And that's not to say nothing of the App Store which went live in July of 2008 and quickly turned the smartphone industry on its head.Apple earlier today, naturally, celebrated 10 years of the iPhone with a special splash page on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

No, Yahoo! isn’t changing its name

Trending on social media is how Yahoo is changing it's name to "Altaba" and CEO Marissa Mayer is stepping down. This is false.

What is happening instead is that everything we know of as "Yahoo" (including the brand name) is being sold to Verizon. The bits that are left are a skeleton company that holds stock in Alibaba and a few other companies. Since the brand was sold to Verizon, that investment company could no longer use it, so chose "Altaba". Since 83% of its investment is in Alibabi, "Altaba" makes sense. It's not like this new brand name means anything -- the skeleton investment company will be wound down in the next year, either as a special dividend to investors, sold off to Alibaba, or both.

Marissa Mayer is an operations CEO. Verizon didn't want her to run their newly acquired operations, since the entire point of buying them was to take the web operations in a new direction (though apparently she'll still work a bit with them through the transition). And of course she's not an appropriate CEO for an investment company. So she had no job left -- she made her own job disappear.


What happened today Continue reading

Stock-tanking in St. Jude Medical security disclosure might have legs

For better or worse, a security firm’s attempt to cash in on software bugs -- by shorting a company’s stock and then publicizing the flaws -- might have pioneered a new approach to vulnerability disclosure.Last August, security company MedSec revealed it had found flaws in pacemakers and other healthcare products from St. Jude Medical, potentially putting patients at risk.However, the controversy came over how MedSec sought to cash in on those bugs: it did so, by partnering with an investment firm to bet against St. Jude’s stock. Since then, the two parties have been locked in a legal battle over the suspected vulnerabilities. But on Monday, MedSec claimed some vindication.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stock-tanking in St. Jude Medical security disclosure might have legs

For better or worse, a security firm’s attempt to cash in on software bugs -- by shorting a company’s stock and then publicizing the flaws -- might have pioneered a new approach to vulnerability disclosure.Last August, security company MedSec revealed it had found flaws in pacemakers and other healthcare products from St. Jude Medical, potentially putting patients at risk.However, the controversy came over how MedSec sought to cash in on those bugs: it did so, by partnering with an investment firm to bet against St. Jude’s stock. Since then, the two parties have been locked in a legal battle over the suspected vulnerabilities. But on Monday, MedSec claimed some vindication.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CyberPowerPC’s Oculus-ready system costs $499 — if you buy a Rift

CyberPowerPC's $499.99 Gamer Ultra VR is the first desktop ready for the Oculus Rift headset that is priced under $500, but there's a caveat.You'll need to buy it with the Oculus Rift headset, which costs more than the PC at $599.99.The bundle will put you back $1,099.98, but that's still a good deal for an Oculus Rift plus desktop, which could otherwise get pretty expensive.The Gamer Ultra VR desktop is available on Best Buy and will also be sold by Amazon. The standalone price for the desktop without the headset is $649.99 on both Best Buy and Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Changes in 2017

This past June when I was in North Carolina at Cisco's CPOC lab, I learned that there was a chance-albeit a slim one, but a chance nonetheless-that a position would be opening up on the CPOC team in the fall. By that point I had been to CPOC three times and knew many of the engineers who worked there. I spoke to them to get their feedback, met with the newly-hired manager of the team, and just generally did all the things I thought I should be doing to take advantage of my time being face to face with these folks.

Some Reading on Application Containers

One aspect of my pending migration to Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop has been the opportunity to explore “non-traditional” uses for Linux containers. In particular, the idea of using Docker (or systemd-nspawn or rkt) to serve as a sandbox (of sorts) for GUI applications really intrigues me. This isn’t a use case that many of the container mechanisms are aiming to solve, but it’s an interesting use case nevertheless (to me, anyway).

So, in no particular order, here are a few articles I found about using Linux containers as application containers/sandboxes (mostly focused around GUI applications):

A Docker-Like Container Management using systemd
Running containers without Docker
Containerizing Graphical Applications on Linux with systemd-nspawn
Debian Containers with systemd-nspawn
Using your own containers with systemd-nspawn and overlayfs

I was successful in using Docker to containerize Firefox (see my “dockerfiles” repository on GitHub)), and was also successful in using systemd-nspawn in the same way, including the use of overlayfs. My experiments have been quite helpful and informative; I have some ideas that may percolate into future blog posts.

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