Review: Consider VPN services for hotspot protection

Virtual private networks have many uses. Typically, businesses deploy VPNs so employees can securely access the corporate network from outside the office. However, we’ve seen a rise in third-party VPN services that use the same underlying technology, the encrypted tunnel, to simply provide a secure Internet connection. Why would you ever need to do this? When connected to a VPN service, the websites you access think you’re at the location where the VPN server is located. This can help anonymize your Internet traffic so it’s much harder for websites to track your personal browsing history. This also allows you to access websites, services, and content that’s restricted where you are currently located, such as Netflix or Hulu when traveling overseas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Kubernetes Authentication plugins and kubeconfig

Kubernetes offers several different authentication mechanisms or plugins.  The goal of this post is to review each of them and provide a brief example of how they work.  In addition, we’ll talk about the ‘kubeconfig’ file and how it’s used in association with authentication plugins.

Note: In theory there’s no requirement to use any of these authentication plugins.  With the proper configuration, the API server can accept requests over HTTP on any given insecure port you like.  However – doing so is insecure and somewhat limiting because some features of Kubernetes rely on using authentication so it’s recommended to use one or more of the following plugins.

Kubernetes offers 3 default authentication plugins as of version 1.0.  These plugins are used to authenticate requests against the API server.  Since they’re used for communication to the API, that means that they apply to both the Kubelet and Kube-Proxy running on your server nodes as well as any requests or commands you issue through the kubectl CLI tool.  Let’s take a look at each option…

Client Certificate Authentication
This is the most common method of authentication and is widely used to authentication node back Continue reading

The Power of Test-Driven Network Automation

Over the past few years, I’ve seen (and contributed to) a rise of real network engineers taking on the new and sometimes challenging world of network automation. Every time I check in on Jason Edelman’s Network Automation Slack channel, I’m very happy to see the sheer number of folks asking questions, trying to get the the concepts and tools of network automation working in their own environment. For many, this is all very new, and there’s a lot to soak up.

The Power of Test-Driven Network Automation

Over the past few years, I’ve seen (and contributed to) a rise of real network engineers taking on the new and sometimes challenging world of network automation. Every time I check in on Jason Edelman’s Network Automation Slack channel, I’m very happy to see the sheer number of folks asking questions, trying to get the the concepts and tools of network automation working in their own environment. For many, this is all very new, and there’s a lot to soak up.

The Power of Test-Driven Network Automation

Over the past few years, I’ve seen (and contributed to) a rise of real network engineers taking on the new and sometimes challenging world of network automation. Every time I check in on Jason Edelman’s Network Automation Slack channel, I’m very happy to see the sheer number of folks asking questions, trying to get the the concepts and tools of network automation working in their own environment.

For many, this is all very new, and there’s a lot to soak up. Linux networking has broken onto the scene in a big way. We’ve started using text formats like YAML and Jinja2 to template out network configurations to make more consistent network changes. We’ve started using tools like Ansible to drive those changes in a meaningful way to our network infrastructure. It’s clear that these ideas are useful, and are taking hold in a big way.

At this point, I’d like to ask you this question; with all of this tooling, which admittedly helps us achieve consistency of change, does it really ensure the success of a change? How do we even define success? At what point can we sit back and be able to truly say, “that change did not Continue reading

The Power of Test-Driven Network Automation

Over the past few years, I’ve seen (and contributed to) a rise of real network engineers taking on the new and sometimes challenging world of network automation. Every time I check in on Jason Edelman’s Network Automation Slack channel, I’m very happy to see the sheer number of folks asking questions, trying to get the the concepts and tools of network automation working in their own environment.

For many, this is all very new, and there’s a lot to soak up. Linux networking has broken onto the scene in a big way. We’ve started using text formats like YAML and Jinja2 to template out network configurations to make more consistent network changes. We’ve started using tools like Ansible to drive those changes in a meaningful way to our network infrastructure. It’s clear that these ideas are useful, and are taking hold in a big way.

At this point, I’d like to ask you this question; with all of this tooling, which admittedly helps us achieve consistency of change, does it really ensure the success of a change? How do we even define success? At what point can we sit back and be able to truly say, “that change did not Continue reading

After New York, gigabit public Wi-Fi comes to Berlin

Ask someone in Hanover, Germany, where to find the best public Wi-Fi and the answer may well be "In Berlin," 250 kilometers to the East.That's because free gigabit Wi-Fi for Berliners was one of the first new services announced at the Cebit trade show in Hanover this week.New York got its first taste of free gigabit Wi-Fi in January, when CityBridge turned on its first LinkNYC hotspots, which are gradually replacing payphones in the city.In Berlin, it's not a billboard-advertising-funded startup that's delivering the service, but an established telecommunications operator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Retrieving network elements backup from 5620 SAM

Last week I faced a routine (and quite common) task to get the latest backups of current configuration and BOF files for ~700 routers on a customers network. Sure thing sane man would use some automatization techniques, which could be: 5620 SAM scripts some scripting language to grab latest backups from the global NE backup location

Digiwell will teach you an NFC trick your old dog may already know

Patrick Kramer pulled back his sleeves and reached out an empty hand to offer his business card. His contact details appeared on the smartphone screen as if by magic, but it was a sufficiently advanced technology that made it happen. For an encore, he opened a locked door without a key. When anyone else touched the handle, it remained locked. Unlike other magicians, Kramer willingly explained the secret to the trick, which is so simple a dog could perform it: In the flesh between his left thumb and forefinger, he has inserted a tiny glass bead containing an NFC chip.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t feel comforted by an antivirus’s security certification

If you feel comforted by your antivirus vendor’s boast of having a certification from Verizon, then maybe you need to rethink that. Google Project Zero security researcher Tavis Ormandy says the methodology behind Verizon’s certification is “about as ridiculous as you would expect,” but vendors follow the gimpy guideline criteria (pdf), pay the fee to be certified and users tend to view the certification as some sign of excellence to be trusted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EFF uncovers US DoJ spying on you!

From our "Your Tax Dollars At Work" department: You, my friend, are being spied on ... but you probably already knew that. But what you might not know is that besides the usual suspects, the NSA (thanks to Edward Snowden) and probably every other TLA (Three Letter Agency) with any kind of signals intelligence mission, it turns out that the Department of Justice (DoJ) has also been secretly snagging your cell phone data by overflying urban areas with light aircraft equipped with a device called a “Dirtbox,” a successor or maybe more accurately, a sibling, to an earlier device called the StingRay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microservices

Figure 1: Visibility and the software defined data center
In the land of microservices, the network is the king(maker) by Sudip Chakrabarti, Lightspeed Venture Partners, makes the case that visibility into network traffic is the key to monitoring, managing and securing applications that are composed of large numbers of communicating services running in virtual machines or containers.
While I genuinely believe that the network will play an immensely strategic role in the microservices world, inspecting and storing billions of API calls on a daily basis will require significant computing and storage resources. In addition, deep packet inspection could be challenging at line rates; so, sampling, at the expense of full visibility, might be an alternative. Finally, network traffic analysis must be combined with service-level telemetry data (that we already collect today) in order to get a comprehensive and in-depth picture of the distributed application.
Sampling isn't just an alternative, sampling is the key to making large scale microservice visibility a reality. Shrink ray describes how sampling acts as a scaling function, reducing the task of monitoring large scale microservice infrastructure from an intractable measurement and big data problem to a lightweight real-time data center wide visibility solution for monitoring, managing, Continue reading
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