Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.To read this article in full, please click here

How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic

How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic
How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic

Over the years when Cloudflare has had an outage that affected our customers we have very quickly blogged about what happened, why, and what we are doing to address the causes of the outage. Today’s post is a little different. It’s about a single customer’s website not working correctly because of incorrect action taken by Cloudflare.

Although the customer was not in any way banned from Cloudflare, or lost access to their account, their website didn’t work. And it didn’t work because Cloudflare applied a bandwidth throttle between us and their origin server. The effect was that the website was unusable.

Because of this unusual throttle there was some internal confusion for our customer support team about what had happened. They, incorrectly, believed that the customer had been limited because of a breach of section 2.8 of our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement which prohibits use of our self-service CDN to serve excessive non-HTML content, such as images and video, without a paid plan that includes those services (this is, for example, designed to prevent someone building an image-hosting service on Cloudflare and consuming a huge amount of bandwidth; for that sort of use case we have paid image and video Continue reading

Hard-drive failure rates tied to age in latest Backblaze analysis

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)To read this article in full, please click here

Hard-drive failure rates tied to age in latest Backblaze analysis

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)To read this article in full, please click here

Creating custom Event-Driven Ansible source plugins

 

We’re surrounded! Our modern systems and applications are constantly generating events. These events could be generated by service requests, application events, health checks, etc. With the wealth of information from event traffic surrounding everything we do, Event-Driven Ansible allows for automated responses to incoming events.

But not only are we completely engulfed in event data, we’re also enveloped by event sources. Think about your organization or even your household for a minute and consider how many pieces of equipment or applications are generating data that could be put to use if only you were able to easily collect it.

Event source plugins within Event-Driven Ansible act as a bridge between Ansible and event generating applications and services. Event-Driven Ansible already has a handful of event plugins to consume events from a variety of sources. But what if your source plug-in isn’t represented in that list? Or what if you’re a Red Hat partner who wants to connect Event-Driven Ansible to your own solution? The good news is, developing event source plugins for Event-Driven Ansible can be a relatively painless endeavor.

 

What is a source plugin?

Event-Driven Ansible leverages rulebooks to codify the response to an event. Rulebooks combine Continue reading

Improve BGP Startup Time on Cisco IOS

I like using Cisco IOS for my routing protocol virtual labs1. It uses a trivial amount of memory2 and boots relatively fast. There was just one thing that kept annoying me: Cisco IOS release 15.x takes forever to install local routes in the BGP table and even longer to select the best routes and propagate them3.

I finally found the culprit: bgp update-delay nerd knob. Here’s what the documentation has to say about it:

Improve BGP Startup Time on Cisco IOS

I like using Cisco IOS for my routing protocol virtual labs1. It uses a trivial amount of memory2 and boots relatively fast. There was just one thing that kept annoying me: Cisco IOS release 15.x takes forever to install local routes in the BGP table and even longer to select the best routes and propagate them3.

I finally found the culprit: bgp update-delay nerd knob. Here’s what the documentation has to say about it:

Network Break 416: Ericsson Flogs 5G Network Slicing For Laptops; Microsoft Loads Work Drudgery Onto ChatGPT

On this week's Network Break we examine Ericsson's push for 5G network slicing on laptops, Microsoft injecting ChatGPT into Teams to do the grunt work, financial results from Juniper and Amazon, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 416: Ericsson Flogs 5G Network Slicing For Laptops; Microsoft Loads Work Drudgery Onto ChatGPT appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IBM denies suggestion that AIX being deprioritized

IBM disputes a report that it has de-emphasized development of its Unix-based AIX operating system by moving development to India and said that it remains committed to the venerable OS.Commentary in The Register said AIX development had been transferred to India with a sub-headline not to expect "any more big AIX news." IBM’s response is that there has always been AIX development in India, and U.S.-based talent remains at work on the Power platform, which runs AIX.“For this transition, every single person that was on my US team on the day that we announced this was mapped to a new role where we needed them to help us next,” said Mark Figley, vice president of IBM Power development. To read this article in full, please click here