Dublin, Ireland: CloudFlare’s 38th data center

Top of the morning to our users and readers from Ireland! Our latest PoP in Dublin is our 38th globally, and 14th in Europe following our Bucharest deployment last week. As of yesterday, traffic from Ireland's 3.6 million Internet users will now be routed through Dublin as opposed to our London PoP (which will still serve as a point of redundancy).

Silicon Docks

By now you've heard of Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, and possibly even Silicon Prairie, but across the pond there's another tech hub making quite a name for itself. Silicon Docks, the Dublin neighborhood bordering the Grand Canal Docks, is home to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, AirBnb, LinkedIn and CloudFlare customer, Yelp, just to name a few. While our own European headquarters is in London, Dublin's exploding tech scene made it an obvious choice for a new PoP.

Clearly our focus was more on helping #savetheweb than on the photo itself...

Dublin is also near to our hearts as the home of CloudFlare customers Web Summit and F.ounders, two of the world's premier tech conferences. Visitors to the 2012 Web Summit and F.ounders events may even remember being greeted Continue reading

Unsupported BNA Hacks

Here’s a couple of quick hacks for working with Brocade Network Advisor. It’s unsupported, but you can run BNA on Ubuntu. You can also suppress the client-side JRE version mismatch warning.

Warning: These are both completely unsupported by Brocade. Do not be surprised if it does not work as expected, and do not log a TAC case about it. These are provided for informational purposes only. If it breaks, you keep the pieces.

Ubuntu Install

If you try to install BNA on Ubuntu, it fails during the DB initialization & setup phase. There are two reasons for this:

  • gawk is not where the installer thinks it should be
  • Some scripts run as “/bin/sh”, but use bashisms.

Before running the installation, make these two changes:

  • Run “sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gawk /bin/gawk”
  • Run “sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash” and select “No”

After that the DB setup will complete. Leaving the gawk symlink in place won’t hurt anything else. You can probably change the system shell back to dash, but you may run into problems if you run any of the BNA utility scripts.

Client-side JRE check

When you launch the BNA Desktop client, it checks your local JRE version against a list of supported versions. It’s Continue reading

Up and to the Right: Forrester Research Ranks CloudFlare as a “Leader” for DDoS Services Providers

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Forrester Research, Inc. has released The Forrester Wave™: DDoS Services Providers, Q3 2015 report which ranks CloudFlare as a leader. How do you get placed “up and to the right”? The leaders in this Wave, including CloudFlare, demonstrated effective portals, good client and revenue growth, and a focus on customer service. They also all have the ability to defend against the largest amplification attacks and the most pernicious application attacks.

Here’s some of the criteria CloudFlare received the highest possible scores for:

  • Attack types defended
  • Data/scrubbing center geographic presence
  • Detection tactics
  • SSL traffic inspection

The DDoS Services Providers Wave also notes that CloudFlare boasts fast mitigation times, and that our customers gave us high marks for service delivery. The report cited CloudFlare’s excellent capabilities to deliver hybrid DDoS solutions as well.

So how does the report evaluate vendors? It evaluates vendors based on three major categories, each with specific criteria:

  • Current offering: The strength of vendors’ current DDoS product offering is based on evaluation categories including: business description, amplification attack defense, attack types defended, customer portal features, customer references, data/scrubbing center geographic presence, SSL traffic inspection, and standard mitigation times.

  • Strategy: Vendors’ position on the horizontal axis of Continue reading

Sounds can knock drones out of the sky

Knocking a drone out of the sky is sometimes possible using an invisible weapon—sound.The vulnerability in some drones comes from a natural property of all objects—resonance. Take a wine glass: if a sound is created that matches the natural resonant frequency of the glass, the resulting effects could cause it to shatter.The same principle applies to components inside drones. Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejon, South Korea, analyzed the effects of resonance on a crucial component of a drone, its gyroscope. Their paper will be presented next week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NetSol’s new con; renewing unwanted .xyz domains

My friend Michael Williams, a private investigator based in Santa Barbara, Calif., is really pissed off with Network Solutions. This is what made him mad: Mike Williams That’s from an email message he received from Network Solutions a couple of weeks ago and Mike’s problem is that he doesn’t own the domain mswssi.xyz. While Mike does own the domains mswssi.com, mswssi.net, and mswssi.org this was a domain he knew nothing about so the letter made no sense. Mike called Network Solutions customer service and discovered that he had been “given” the domain by the company but, to his knowledge, had never been told anything about it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Vagrant and Docker Machine Together

In this post, I’m going to show you a quick tip I used today to combine the power of Vagrant with that of Docker Machine to quickly and easily create Docker-enabled virtual machines (VMs) on your laptop. This could be useful in a variety of scenarios; I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the best way to leverage this functionality in his or her own environment.

In my case, I needed to be able to easily create/destroy/recreate a couple of Docker-enabled VMs for a project on which I’m working. The problem I faced was that the tools I would normally use for such a task—Vagrant and Docker Machine—each had problems when used on their own:

  • Vagrant has a Docker provisioner, but I could only get it to install the latest released version of Docker. In my case, I needed to run a test version (specifically, the RC2 build of Docker 1.8.0).
  • Docker Machine has various back-end drivers that can create VMs into which Docker is provisioned, but the VMware Fusion driver for Machine only works with Boot2Docker. In my case, I needed to run Ubuntu 14.04 in the VMs.

As it turns Continue reading

How to set up a local account in Windows 10 during or after installation

You can setup a local account in Windows 10 during a clean installation, as well as after installing Windows 10 using a Microsoft account. The process is a bit more straightforward than it was with Windows 8.If you wanted to create a local account in Windows 8.1, Microsoft made you jump through hoops and numerous screens before finally selecting "Sign in without a Microsoft account (not recommended)." Skip down to the second half if you want to know how to create a local account while installing Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to setup a local account in Windows 10 during or after installation

You can setup a local account in Windows 10 during a clean installation and you can also setup a local account after installing Windows 10 using a Microsoft account. The process is a bit more straightforward than it was in Windows 8. If you wanted to create a local account in Windows 8.1, Microsoft made you jump through hoops and numerous screens before finally selecting “Sign in without a Microsoft account (not recommended).” Skip down to the second half if you want to know how to create a local account while installing Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce taps Instagram’s new API with tailored marketing tools

Users of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud on Tuesday gained easier access to Instagram’s roughly 300 million users thanks to an integration made possible by a new API.Marketers can now use Salesforce’s cloud software to buy and manage Instagram advertising, publish content and offer customer service on the photo and video sharing site, among other capabilities.Making the new integration possible is Instagram’s Ad API, which was originally announced in June. At the time, the site said it would initially open up the application programming interface just to a select group of Facebook marketing partners and agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who goes there? CA will know with Xceedium buy

In a move to round out its portfolio of enterprise identity management software, CA Technologies is acquiring security software provider Xceedium.The purchase will allow CA to offer to enterprises more comprehensive coverage of who is allowed on their sensitive networks and systems, according to CA.Identity management is proving to be an increasingly vital component to securely managing the enterprise. It is the process of assigning each employee or contractor a systems account, and then limiting that user to only those systems that he or she has a legitimate reason to use.The recent breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management might have been thwarted, for instance, through tighter access controls.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker

written by Brian Goff, Technical Alliances at Docker, Inc. Integration allows Oracle users to easily distribute applications built and deployed in Oracle Solaris Zones Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Oracle on a few … Continued

EFF-led group wants to give do-not-track some bite

For years now, checking the “do-not-track” option on your browser has been little more than wishful thinking on the part of users who care about privacy online. But now a group led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking to make that a more meaningful action.The EFF and others have published a standard policy it hopes advertisers, analytics companies and publishers will adopt in order to respect the wishes of users who don’t want to be tracked online. Getting the support needed to make a real difference will be an uphill battle, they acknowledge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EFF-led group wants to give do-not-track some bite

For years now, checking the “do-not-track” option on your browser has been little more than wishful thinking on the part of users who care about privacy online. But now a group led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking to make that a more meaningful action.The EFF and others have published a standard policy it hopes advertisers, analytics companies and publishers will adopt in order to respect the wishes of users who don’t want to be tracked online. Getting the support needed to make a real difference will be an uphill battle, they acknowledge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CEO Rich Napolitano Named to the 2015 CRN Top 100 Executives List

We’re thrilled that CEO, Rich Napolitano has been named to CRN®’s Top 100 list of the IT industry’s foremost channel leaders. CRN’s annual list recognizes the efforts of agile decision-makers who play an integral role in evolving the way the channel does business. These 100 leaders, picked by the CRN editorial staff, represent the pre-eminent innovators, influencers, disrupters and channel sales leaders in the IT channel today.

Rich has been at the helm of Plexxi since November 2014. He brought with him a simple formula to success: bring high quality and disruptive products to market through partners that are looking to carve a new path in the market. With channel partners like CloudGov Technologies and Arrow Electronics, Plexxi is bringing this vision to the market and ushering in the next era of IT.

CRN also named Plexxi a 2015 Emerging Vendor, and reporter Michael Novinson recently spoke exclusively with Rich about our newly announced channel distribution agreement with Arrow Electronics and how this helps move the industry further faster.

“We are at a major transition point and opportunity in the IT landscape. This transformation will not only upend the networking industry as we know but will transform the Continue reading

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