One of the big questions about IPv6 is: “Should you use /64’s for subnets?” Tom Coffeen joins Eyvonne Sharp, Rick Graziani, and Russ as we discuss the various questions surrounding IPv6 addressing, planning, waste, and … should you /64?
Welcome to Technology Short Take #185, the first of 2025! I’m excited for the opportunity to continue to bring readers articles and links of interest across data center- and cloud-related technologies (along with some original content along the way). I had originally intended for this post to be my last post of 2024, but personal challenges got in the way. Enough of that, though—on to the content!
If you use URL filtering on your Palo Alto firewalls, you may come across situations where a specific URL category is set to block, but you need to allow certain sites. For example, you might block the 'social networking' category but still want to allow access to Facebook. Similarly, you may block 'newly registered domains,' but need immediate access to a site categorized as such. While you can request Palo Alto to re-categorize the site, sometimes you need a quicker solution.
In this blog post, we'll look at how to allow access to specific URLs that match a blocked URL category. There are two ways to achieve this, and I’ll cover both.
This blog post assumes you have some familiarity with URL filtering. In a typical setup, you create a URL Filtering profile, configure the categories to allow or block, and attach this profile to your security policies. For instance, if you block the 'proxy-avoidance' category and try to access a site like expressvpn.com, the traffic will be blocked.
To demonstrate this, I'll set the 'proxy-avoidance' category to block. This means that if I try to access expressvpn.com, it will be blocked. Continue reading
XtendISE is a user-friendly web application integrated with Cisco ISE and designed to simplify daily tasks and common challenges related to 802.1X without requiring extensive training on Cisco ISE. XtendISE helps manage MAC addresses, troubleshoot 802.1X authentication issues, and simplify the management of switch 802.1X configurations. It also validates configurations to ensure they are set up correctly and as intended.
We covered the basics of XtendISE in a previous article linked below. In this blog post, we will explore in detail three key features that XtendISE offers.
Suresh Vina
Typically, when a device doesn’t support 802.1X, we collect its MAC address and add it to a specific group in Continue reading
netlab release 1.9.3 brings these new features:
Other new features include:
COMMISSIONED: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become the gold standard for helping businesses refine their large language model (LLM) results with corporate data. …
Scaling Retrieval Augmented Generation With RAGOps And Agents was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A friend of mine recently wrote a nice post explaining how netlab helped him set up a large network topology in a reasonably short timeframe. As expected, his post attracted a wide variety of comments, from “netlab is a gamechanger” (thank you 😎) to “I prefer traditional labs.” Instead of writing a bunch of replies into a walled-garden ecosystem, I decided to address some of those concerns in a public place.
Let’s start with:
In today’s cloud-native environments, network security is more complex than ever, with Kubernetes and containerized workloads introducing unique challenges. Traditional tools struggle to monitor and secure these dynamic, interconnected systems, leaving organizations vulnerable to advanced threats, such as lateral movement, zero-day exploits, ransomware, data exfiltration, and more.
Network threat detection identifies malicious or suspicious activity within network traffic by using rules and analyzing patterns, behaviors, and anomalies. It enables organizations to spot attacks early, respond quickly, and mitigate risks before they escalate. Tools like Calico are specifically designed to address these challenges in Kubernetes, offering visibility, detection, and automated responses to protect workloads from known and emerging threats.
Calico delivers advanced network threat detection for Kubernetes environments, leveraging a variety of techniques to ensure comprehensive protection. Here are the key features of Calico’s network threat detection.
Calico uses machine learning algorithms to establish a baseline of normal network behavior and detect anomalies such as port scans, IP (Internet Protocol) sweeps, and domain generation algorithms (DGA), which are commonly used by malware to evade detection and maintain communication with command and control (C2) servers.
Calico’s anomaly detection capability evaluates traffic flows using machine learning to identify the baseline behavior Continue reading
At Cloudflare, we treat developer content like a product, where we take the user and their feedback into consideration. We are constantly iterating, testing, analyzing, and refining content. Inspired by agile practices, treating developer content like an open source product means we approach our documentation the same way an open source software project is created and maintained. Open source documentation empowers the developer community because it allows anyone, anywhere, to contribute content. By making both the content and the framework of the documentation site publicly accessible, we provide developers with the opportunity to not only improve the material itself but also understand and engage with the processes that govern how the documentation is built, approved, and maintained. This transparency fosters collaboration, learning, and innovation, enabling developers to contribute their expertise and learn from others in a shared, open environment. We also provide feedback to other open source products and plugins, giving back to the same community that supports us.
Great documentation empowers users to be successful with a new product as quickly as possible, showing them how to use the product and describing its benefits. Relevant, timely, and accurate content can save Continue reading
If you want to be at the top of the food chain on Earth, as human beings have ascended to after millions of years of evolution, there are a bunch of things that you need to be able to do. …
The Future Is The One We Generate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2018
Wanted to share this “too weird to believe” SNAFU I found when running integration tests with the Bird routing daemon. It’s irrelevant unless you want Bird to advertise the IPv6 prefix configured on the main loopback interface (lo) with OSPFv3.
Late last year, I decided to run netlab integration tests with the Bird routing daemon. It passed most baseline netlab OSPFv3 integration tests but failed those that checked the loopback IPv6 prefix advertised by the tested device (test results).
The original design manufacturers, or ODMs, as well as the portions of the original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, that act like ODMs in that they create custom machines for hyperscalers and cloud builders and sell that at high volume and low margin, have long since taken over the server market. …
Ethernet Switching Still In Recession Thanks To AI Shift was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can have hundreds or even thousands of time steps. These basic RNNs often suffer from the gradient vanishing problem, where the network struggles to retain historical information across all time steps. In other words, the network gradually "forgets" historical information as it progresses through the time steps.
One solution to address the horizontal gradient vanishing problem between time steps is the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based RNN instead of basic RNN. LSTM cells can preserve historical information across all time steps, whether the model contains ten or several thousand time steps.
Figure 6-1 illustrates the overall architecture of an LSTM cell. It includes three gates: the Forget gate, the Input gate (a.k.a. Remember gate), and the Output gate. Each gate contains input neurons that use the Sigmoid activation function. The reason for employing the Sigmoid function, as shown in Figure 5-4 of the previous chapter, is its ability to produce outputs in the range of 0 to 1. An output of 0 indicates that the gate is "closed," meaning the information is excluded from contributing to the cell's internal state calculations. An output of Continue reading
Hello my friend,
First of all, Happy New Year! We hope that you had a great festive time with your beloved ones, families and friends. That’s the one of the most important part of our lives and, in our opinion, spending some time off the grid impacts our mental well-being positively and gives us energy to move forward and achieve new heights in professional and business areas.
Talking about the topic of today blog post, we thought it will be useful to show you a concept, which is Go (Golang) specific, as there is no such a need in Python. This concept is called “interfaces”, and it is extremely helpful when you work with external data, which you will face working with external data source, e.g. retrieving data from APIs with JSON/XML encoding.
Disclaimer, we talk about interfaces only in the context of the data types in Go (Golang), as it is also used for class composition (object-oriented programming), so we put it aside for now. We may get back to it later in our blog series.
If you follow latest trends, you see that AI in various forms, whether this is agentic AI, Continue reading