Cisco’s customer experience group aims to boost ROI for enterprise purchases

Cisco continues to invest in its customer experience (CX) group, which provides product lifecycle management and aims to ensure that customers get what they want out of their technology purchases.Alistair Wildman, senior vice president of Cisco Global Customer Experience, says his team of 20,000 is primed to make sure enterprises are effectively choosing, implementing, and using the technologies they purchase to achieve their business goals. Cisco CX offers a suite of services to help customers optimize their network infrastructure, security, collaboration, cloud and data center operations – from planning and design to implementation and maintenance.To read this article in full, please click here

The Case For IT Unionization

This post originally appeared in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure newsletter. You can subscribe for free here. We never share or sell your details to anyone. One unforeseen event following the COVID-19 pandemic has been an uptick in attempts to organize workers. Starbucks and Amazon warehouse employees are two high-profile examples. Though private-sector union membership […]

The post The Case For IT Unionization appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The European Network Usage Fees proposal is about much more than a fight between Big Tech and Big European telcos

There’s an important debate happening in Europe that could affect the future of the Internet. The European Commission is considering new rules for how networks connect to each other on the Internet. It’s considering proposals that – no hyperbole – will slow the Internet for consumers and are dangerous for the Internet.

The large incumbent telcos are complaining loudly to anyone who wants to listen that they aren’t being adequately compensated for the capital investments they’re making. These telcos are a set of previously regulated monopolies who still constitute the largest telcos by revenue in Europe in today's competitive market. They say traffic volumes, largely due to video streaming, are growing rapidly, implying they need to make capital investments to keep up. And they call for new charges on big US tech companies: a “fair share” contribution that those networks should make to European Internet infrastructure investment.

In response to this campaign, in February the European Commission released a set of recommended actions and proposals “aimed to make Gigabit connectivity available to all citizens and businesses across the EU by 2030.” The Commission goes on to say that “Reliable, fast and secure connectivity is a must for everybody and Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Nokia Delivers 800GE Routing With An Eye On Performance And Efficiency (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk with Nokia about 800G Ethernet. Nokia is deploying 800G Ethernet routing to customers (primarily hyperscalers and providers). We examine the drivers of 800G, and how Nokia balances performance with efficiencies for power and density. Our guest from Nokia is Igor Giangrossi, Sr. Director, Consulting Engineering - Webscale Segment.

Tech Bytes: Nokia Delivers 800GE Routing With An Eye On Performance And Efficiency (Sponsored)

The post Tech Bytes: Nokia Delivers 800GE Routing With An Eye On Performance And Efficiency (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 429: Palo Alto Previews Azure Firewall; White House Chases AI Horse After It Escapes Barn

Take a Network Break! This week we discuss a new Azure-native cloud firewall from Palo Alto Networks, why pharma giant Merck might be owed a big settlement from its cyber-insurers, and why HPE wants to simplify its branding. Lumen offers 400G IP transit ports, the US White House announces actions to promote safe, responsible AI; Versa Networks rolls out zero trust for remote and campus users, and Rogers teams up with SpaceX to allow SMS messaging via satellite.

Network Break 429: Palo Alto Previews Azure Firewall; White House Chases AI Horse After It Escapes Barn

The post Network Break 429: Palo Alto Previews Azure Firewall; White House Chases AI Horse After It Escapes Barn appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Four ways to view files and file permissions on Linux

There are a number of ways to view files on Linux, because, after all, files on Linux are multifaceted. They have names, they have content, they have access permissions, and they have dates and times associated with their "birth" (when they were initially added to the file system) as well as when they were last changed and last accessed. This post covers the commands that allow you to view all these details.Listing files The easiest and most obvious way to list files is with the ls command. By default, ls will list files in the current directory in name order, but you can reverse that by adding the -r option.To read this article in full, please click here

Four ways to view files and file permissions on Linux

Qualcomm buys Autotalks to boost SnapDragon Digital Chassis automotive product line

Qualcomm is acquiring fabless Israel-based automobile chip maker Autotalks in a bid to add safety features to its Snapdragon Digital Chassis product family and strengthen its semiconductor product portfolio for the booming car-to-cloud communications and autonomous-driving market.The Snapdragon Digital Chassis product family is designed to provide assisted and autonomous driving technology, as well as in-car infotainment and cloud connectivity.Autotalks has been working on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications since 2009, Qualcomm noted in its announcement of the deal on Monday. The Israel-based company provides automotive dual-mode global V2X technology compatible with multiple V2X standards that are designed to reduce collisions and improve mobility, Qualcom said.To read this article in full, please click here

Navigating the Challenges of Interacting with F5 Programmatically

Interacting with the F5 Programatically is an exciting yet challenging journey. During my experience, I faced timeouts that disrupted session stability and hindered effective API communication with F5 devices.

In this blog post, I'll share my journey of overcoming these obstacles while developing a script to generate backups of F5 configurations. Although I focus on timeout challenges in Go, the principles and solutions discussed apply to any programming language. By sharing my insights, I aim to empower you to handle timeouts and generate F5 backups effectively, regardless of your language preference.

In the code examples below, I use the Go and its SDK to interact with the F5 guest, which can be found here.

Challenge 1: Session Timeout

The first timeout issue I encountered was the session timeout. This happened while trying to create a UCS backup of the device's configuration. This task can be quite time-consuming, especially when dealing with large configuration files -my file was over 1GB. The challenge arose when the F5 session would time out before the backup process completed, forcing me to establish a new connection to continue interacting with the F5 device.

Below is the code snippet for reference:

package main

import (
	"log"

	 Continue reading

EU’s changing stance on Huawei could impact 5G networks already in place

Ongoing US diplomatic efforts to keep Chinese-made equipment out of as many networks as possible appear to be bearing fruit, as Germany eyes a ban on Huawei and ZTE 5G equipment, which would follow in the footsteps of several other European nations. Sweden, Norway, and the UK have already implemented bans on Chinese-made equipment, following the US line that such hardware poses a national security threat thanks Huawei and ZTE’s close ties to the government in Beijing.News of a prospective German ban was originally broken in March by German newspaper Die Zeit, citing government sources.To read this article in full, please click here

Building a DMVPN Test Lab with netlab

I always love to hear about real-life netlab use cases, and try to make them even easier to implement with new netlab features – that’s how netlab got custom Vagrant configuration templates and per-node configuration templates.

When Anne Baretta sent me his initial DMVPN solution, we quickly figured out we could make it even cleaner if netlab supported tunnel interfaces; you can enjoy the results in release 1.5.2, and explore Anne’s solution on GitHub.

Building a DMVPN Test Lab with netlab

CDP and LLDP Neighbor Parser – neighborparser.com

As a network engineer, I’ve made heavy use of the [crayon-6458f26173405144816985-i/] and [crayon-6458f2617340b267906839-i/] commands to discover the physical topology of a network without having to physically trace cables. While these are very useful commands, their output is not very human-readable. I built neighborparser.com as a quick-and-easy tool to turn the semi-structured data from these commands […]

The post CDP and LLDP Neighbor Parser – neighborparser.com appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Wireless Network Design in the Era of Multiple Wireless Protocols

To successfully design wireless networks for multiple wireless protocols, IT personnel must have tools that can adapt to a complex environment.

VPP MPLS – Part 1

VPP

About this series

Ever since I first saw VPP - the Vector Packet Processor - I have been deeply impressed with its performance and versatility. For those of us who have used Cisco IOS/XR devices, like the classic ASR (aggregation service router), VPP will look and feel quite familiar as many of the approaches are shared between the two.

I’ve deployed an MPLS core for IPng Networks, which allows me to provide L2VPN services, and at the same time keep an IPng Site Local network with IPv4 and IPv6 that is separate from the internet, based on hardware/silicon based forwarding at line rate and high availability. You can read all about my Centec MPLS shenanigans in [this article].

Ever since the release of the Linux Control Plane [ref] plugin in VPP, folks have asked “What about MPLS?” – I have never really felt the need to go this rabbit hole, because I figured that in this day and age, higher level IP protocols that do tunneling are just as performant, and a little bit less of an ‘art’ to get right. For example, the Centec switches I deployed perform VxLAN, GENEVE and GRE all at Continue reading

MUST READ: End-to-End Arguments in System Design

In case you ever wondered how old the “keep network simple and do complex stuff at the endpoints” approach is, read the End-to-End Arguments in System Design article from 1981.

For whatever reason (hint: profits), networking vendors keep ignoring those arguments, turning the network into a kitchen sink of complexity.

Fun tidbit: the article describes a variant of relying on layer-2 checksums will corrupt your data. Some things never change.

MUST READ: End-to-End Arguments in System Design

In case you ever wondered how old the “keep network simple and do complex stuff at the endpoints” approach is, read the End-to-End Arguments in System Design article from 1981.

For whatever reason (hint: profits), networking vendors keep ignoring those arguments, turning the network into a kitchen sink of complexity.

Fun tidbit: the article describes a variant of relying on layer-2 checksums will corrupt your data. Some things never change.

The Internet as a Public Utility

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of public utilities, operating in areas of public transit, postal services, water reticulation, electricity generation and transmission, and telephony services. In the past fifty or so years the position of public sector utilities has been eroded, with progressive waves of deregulation and liberalisation of these public utility services. The internet could be see as one outcome of the deregulation of the telephony sector. But how's this going? Should we rethink how we operate public utility functions and the Internet in particular?

« Previous 1 … 244 245 246 247 248 … 3,783 Next »