Ask Me About My Beez! A Look at NetBeez, 18 Months On.

I was first introduced to NetBeez at Networking Field Day 9, where I saw an interesting monitoring product using Raspberry Pi-based agents and a cloud-based management and reporting console. That was back in February 2015, but I met with NetBeez a second time at Networking Field Day 12 in September 2016. Eighteen months is plenty of time to make some significant updates, so I’m going to look at the current product from a capabilities perspective and also see how it works when using it in anger. As background it may be worth reading my review of NetBeez from June 2015 first.

NetBeez Overview

By way of a refresher, the NetBeez product is made of two parts:

• an Agent (aka a Beez, which always sounds odd to say because Beez sounds like it should be the plural form of the noun);
• a web management portal to which the agents send their data and from which the agents are managed and their uploaded data are analyzed.

The Agents

• FastEthernet – As I saw at NFD9, the FastEthernet Beez agent is a Raspberry Pi in a case with a NetBeez logo on it, and the micro-SD card slot is covered by Continue reading

Packet Blast: Top Tech Blogs, Oct. 14

Transforming Enterprise Communications Infrastructure

University IT employees fighting for jobs question security

Data security is a simmering issue in offshore outsourcing. The offshore workers who staff help desks, call centers and manage systems are accessing data in the U.S. The University of California IT employees, who will soon lose their jobs to overseas workers, are trying point this out.The IT employees say workers in India will have access to UCSF medical and financial information as well as to files with research and study data. The data will reside on hardware based in the U.S.They believe the university has an obligation to disclose its plans to the broader university community and give researchers, in particular, options about who can access this data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

University IT employees fighting for jobs question security

Data security is a simmering issue in offshore outsourcing. The offshore workers who staff help desks, call centers and manage systems are accessing data in the U.S. The University of California IT employees, who will soon lose their jobs to overseas workers, are trying point this out.The IT employees say workers in India will have access to UCSF medical and financial information as well as to files with research and study data. The data will reside on hardware based in the U.S.They believe the university has an obligation to disclose its plans to the broader university community and give researchers, in particular, options about who can access this data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

31% off SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive – Deal Alert

From a global leader in flash memory technology, the SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 Flash Drive is an ultra-small, low-profile drive with a storage capacity of 128GB, and enough speed to transfer a full-length movie in less than 30 seconds. It's a #1 Amazon Best Seller in its category with 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,500 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $40 has been reduced 31% to just $28. See the discounted Flash Drive from SanDisk now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

31% off SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive – Deal Alert

From a global leader in flash memory technology, the SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 Flash Drive is an ultra-small, low-profile drive with a storage capacity of 128GB, and enough speed to transfer a full-length movie in less than 30 seconds. It's a #1 Amazon Best Seller in its category with 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,500 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $40 has been reduced 31% to just $28. See the discounted Flash Drive from SanDisk now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

31% off SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive – Deal Alert

From a global leader in flash memory technology, the SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 Flash Drive is an ultra-small, low-profile drive with a storage capacity of 128GB, and enough speed to transfer a full-length movie in less than 30 seconds. It's a #1 Amazon Best Seller in its category with 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,500 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $40 has been reduced 31% to just $28. See the discounted Flash Drive from SanDisk now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google, IBM, and others team up to hasten data transfers in computers

Computational workloads are growing, and processors, memory, and storage are getting faster at a blazing pace. Emerging technologies could leave computers choking for bandwidth.The potential chokepoint worries companies like Google, IBM, Samsung, and Dell, which are moving to remedy the problem. New specifications from two new consortia will bring data unprecedented boosts in data transfer speeds to computers as early as next year.OpenCAPI Consortium's connector specification will bring significant bandwidth improvements inside computers. OpenCAPI, announced Friday, will link storage, memory, GPUs, and CPUs, much like PCI-Express 3.0, but will be 10 times faster with data speeds of 150GBps (gigabytes per second).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fast Linux Packet Forwarding with Thomas Graf on Software Gone Wild

We did several podcasts describing how one could get stellar packet forwarding performance on x86 servers reimplementing the whole forwarding stack outside of kernel (Snabb Switch) or bypassing the Linux kernel and moving the packet processing into userspace (PF_Ring).

Now let’s see if it’s possible to improve the Linux kernel forwarding performance. Thomas Graf, one of the authors of Cilium claims it can be done and explained the intricate details in Episode 64 of Software Gone Wild.

HP to cut up to 4,000 jobs in next three years

HP Inc. is cutting between 3,000 to 4,000 jobs over the next three years as part of a restructuring plan worked out by the company.The PC and printer firm, which was created about a year ago after Hewlett-Packard was split into two companies, said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday that it expects about “3,000 to 4,000 employees to exit between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2019.”The company's "printing business is challenged right now but the PC business is hitting on all cylinders," said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy. “The PC Group is gaining market share, increasing profits and innovating more than I have seen in years,” he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Note7 will cost Samsung another $3 billion in profit

The fallout from the Note7 debacle, which is expected to take a big chunk out of Samsung’s third-quarter profit, will keep hurting its business into next year, the company said. The fourth-quarter impact on Samsung Electronics' operating profit will be "in the mid-2 trillion won range," the company said in a press release early Friday. Using the midpoint of 2.5 trillion South Korean won, that would be about US$2.2 billion. The damage will continue in the first quarter of next year, with an impact of about 1 trillion won, Samsung said. The company announced Tuesday it had permanently stopped production of the Note7. It had launched a recall of the phone just weeks after it went on sale because of fires and explosions that destroyed some of the devices. Then, some replacement units it sent out as part of the recall had the same problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey says many companies want to phase out passwords

Don't be surprised if your company decides to do away with password logins. A new survey has found that most organizations are leaning toward phasing out password authentication.The results comes from Wakefield Research, which surveyed 200 IT decision makers in the U.S. last month. Sixty-nine percent of the respondents said they will probably do away with passwords completely in the next five years.Password login systems, though commonplace, are too vulnerable to hacking, according to SecureAuth, the company that commissioned the study. Not surprisingly, SecureAuth sells alternatives to password-based logins.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey says many companies want to phase out passwords

Don't be surprised if your company decides to do away with password logins. A new survey has found that most organizations are leaning toward phasing out password authentication.The results comes from Wakefield Research, which surveyed 200 IT decision makers in the U.S. last month. Sixty-nine percent of the respondents said they will probably do away with passwords completely in the next five years.Password login systems, though commonplace, are too vulnerable to hacking, according to SecureAuth, the company that commissioned the study. Not surprisingly, SecureAuth sells alternatives to password-based logins.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NETCONF, RESTCONF on IOS XE

There is a lot of buzz around network APIs such as NETCONF and RESTCONF. Here we’ll take a quick a look at these APIs on Cisco IOS XE. On the surface, it seems Cisco IOS XE is the first network device platform that supports NETCONF and RESTCONF both driven from YANG models.

Technically, RESTCONF isn’t officially supported or even seen in the CLI to enable it, but more on that later.

YANG

When APIs are model driven, the model is the source of truth. If done right, all API documentation and configuration validation could occur using tooling built directly from the models. YANG is the leading data modeling language and as such, all API requests using RESTCONF/NETCONF are directly modeled from the YANG models IOS XE supports. For this post, we’ll just say the models can easily be represented as JSON k/v pairs or XML documents. We’ll cover YANG in more detail in a future post.

NETCONF

You can directly access the NETCONF server on IOS XE using the following SSH command (or equivalent from a SSH client).

The NETCONF server is a SSH sub-system.

$ ssh -p 830 ntc@csr1kv -s netconf 

The full response from the IOS XE NETCONF Continue reading

NETCONF, RESTCONF on IOS XE

There is a lot of buzz around network APIs such as NETCONF and RESTCONF. Here we’ll take a quick a look at these APIs on Cisco IOS XE. On the surface, it seems Cisco IOS XE is the first network device platform that supports NETCONF and RESTCONF both driven from YANG models.

Technically, RESTCONF isn’t officially supported or even seen in the CLI to enable it, but more on that later.

YANG

When APIs are model driven, the model is the source of truth. If done right, all API documentation and configuration validation could occur using tooling built directly from the models. YANG is the leading data modeling language and as such, all API requests using RESTCONF/NETCONF are directly modeled from the YANG models IOS XE supports. For this post, we’ll just say the models can easily be represented as JSON k/v pairs or XML documents. We’ll cover YANG in more detail in a future post.

NETCONF

You can directly access the NETCONF server on IOS XE using the following SSH command (or equivalent from a SSH client).

The NETCONF server is a SSH sub-system.

$ ssh -p 830 ntc@csr1kv -s netconf 

The full response from the IOS XE NETCONF Continue reading

Gartner’s Integration Magic Quadrant: Atlantis, Pivot3 On The Move

The VMware-AWS deal could drive more companies into the cloud

The cloud partnership AWS and VMware announced Thursday makes Amazon's public cloud even more attractive for enterprises by letting them take the popular virtualization platform with them.The appropriately named VMware Cloud on AWS , announced at a press conference in San Francisco, will bring cloud-optimized versions of vSphere, VSAN and NSX software to the cloud platform. When users spin up a VMware environment on AWS, they'll get a cluster running the entire Software-Defined Data Center stack in the public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware & AWS Offer Combined Private and Public Cloud Service

Their service runs apps in a consistent hybrid cloud environment.

Winners and losers from the big AWS-VMware pact

Amazon Web Services and VMware on Thursday announced what executives at both companies call a long-term strategic partnership to make it easier to run VMware workloads on AWS’s cloud.At a press conference in San Francisco each company’s CEO boasted about the VMware on AWS offering which will be available as part of an invite-only beta early next year and rolled out to the masses in mid-2017.In a nutshell, AWS has dedicated a portion of its bare metal cloud infrastructure for running VMware’s core management software: vSphere (the ESXi hypervisor and virtualization management platform), vSAN (the virtual storage area network platform) and NSX (the virtual networking software). Customers can spin up three sizes of AWS on VMware and pay for it through a credit card or their existing VMware account. AWS is VMware’s “preferred” public cloud and VMware is AWS’s preferred private cloud, CEOs Andy Jassy of AWS and Pat Gelsinger of VMware said during the press conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here