Ansible Collaboration Day at OpenStack Summit

SimpleOpenStack

OpenStack has long had a reputation for being difficult to install and manage. This reputation may be a bit overblown, but it's not entirely unwarranted.

The plain truth is that OpenStack has a lot of components, all of which must be working in concert to be successful. A simple misconfiguration in one component can lead to cascading failures throughout the system, which can then be difficult to diagnose and correct.

It's one of the essential problems of managing any distributed system: one must effectively manage both individual components (i.e. configuration) and the relationships between those components (i.e. orchestration).

Ansible is a simple tool that excels at both -- which helps to explain Ansible's surging popularity in the OpenStack ecosystem. Over the past year, several OpenStack projects have emerged to take full advantage of Ansible's power and simplicity.

We've been watching with great interest. Now we think it's time to get more directly involved.

On Monday, May 18th, we will hold an Ansible Collaboration Day at the OpenStack Summit. Our collective goal is simple and ambitious: to make the installation and management of OpenStack as simple as we can possibly make it.

The first part of the day will Continue reading

General Howe’s Dog

The morning after a battle — one of the first won by the American army in its battle for freedom from the British Empire — if you happened to be on the scene, you might see an American soldier, under a white flag of truce, struggling with something small he is carrying between the lines. Approaching, you can see the package is, in fact, a small terrier — a dog. If you could read the note the carrier is holding there in his scrip, you would find it says —

General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return to him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on his collar, appears to belong to General Howe… October 6th, 1777

So — in the midst of a war that cut people down from their young lives, we find a singular scene of a man carrying a dog across a field to return it to the enemy’s commander. What has any of this to do with the life of an engineer? Perhaps more than you think.

Let me return to a much younger time in my technical life, a time when I was Continue reading

Don’t panic! How to fix 5 common PC emergencies

Your PC may not be as essential to you as your smartphone, but chances are it’s still pretty damn important. So it’s completely understandable if your first reaction is to freeze and freak out when you run into a PC emergency, such as a broken screen, accidentally-deleted important file, or a virus. But panicking is counter-productive, because time is often of the essence.Don’t worry. While you can’t call 9-1-1, here’s what you can do to fix five common PC emergencies.Broken laptop screen A few months ago, I was working on my MacBook Air next to my French bulldog, Blanka. For some unexplained dog reason, Blanka suddenly decided he needed to be in my lap, so he jumped on me—and landed on my laptop’s screen. A laptop screen is no match for a 27-pound Frenchie, so, needless to say, my screen was toast.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Galaxy S6 edge an impressive enterprise phone — with one big exception

Samsung, one of the largest and most popular Android partners, has slowly been making inroads in enterprise. Last month, the company released its two new flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge, which are identical except for the GS6 edge's curved display and slightly larger battery.Due to the popularity of Samsung's Galaxy S devices, it's easy to find GS6 reviews, but our evaluation is written specifically for business users — and the IT staffers who need to support them. I've been using both devices regularly for almost two months, though I gravitated to the GS6 edge. As such this evaluation is focused on the GS6 edge, though most of conclusions apply to both phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 11

China’s smartphone market slows downThe world’s largest smartphone market may be losing its appetite: first quarter shipments of the devices in China dropped by 4 percent year over year, according to IDC. It’s the first time in six years that China’s smartphone market has contracted.IBM’s slimmed down Power servers aim at cloud, in-memory databaseIBM has brought out another round of Power8 servers, targeting private, public and hybrid clouds as well as in-memory database applications and analytics. The multipurpose servers include the four-socket Power E850 and the more powerful Power E880.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 11

China’s smartphone market slows downThe world’s largest smartphone market may be losing its appetite: first quarter shipments of the devices in China dropped by 4 percent year over year, according to IDC. It’s the first time in six years that China’s smartphone market has contracted.IBM’s slimmed down Power servers aim at cloud, in-memory databaseIBM has brought out another round of Power8 servers, targeting private, public and hybrid clouds as well as in-memory database applications and analytics. The multipurpose servers include the four-socket Power E850 and the more powerful Power E880.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare “Interview Questions”

For quite some time we've been grilling our candidates about dirty corners of TCP/IP stack. Every engineer here must prove his/her comprehensive understanding of the full network stack. For example: what are the differences in checksumming algorithms between IPv4 and IPv6 stacks?

I'm joking of course, but in the spirit of the old TCP/IP pub game I want to share some of the amusing TCP/IP quirks I've bumped into over the last few months while working on CloudFlare's automatic attack mitigation systems.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Daan Berg

Don't worry if you don't know the correct answer: you may always come up with a funny one!

Some of the questions are fairly obvious, some don't have a direct answer and are supposed to provoke a longer discussion. The goal is to encourage our readers to review the dusty RFCs, get interested in the inner workings of the network stack and generally spread the knowledge about the protocols we rely on so much.

Don't forget to add a comment below if you want to share a response!

You think you know all about TCP/IP? Let's find out.

Archaeology

1) What is the lowest TCP port number?

2) The TCP Continue reading

Geneve

One of the various problems we face in the data networking world is the absolute plethora of tunneling technologies we have available. Going way back to the beginning, there was SNA, GRE, IP-in-IP, and a host of others. In the midterm was have MPLS (though some will argue this isn’t a tunneling protocol — but […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, LinkedIn, and his author page on Amazon.
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The post Geneve appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

Old-school anti-virus vendors learn new tricks

In an era when businesses are scrambling to defend against sophisticated advanced persistent threats, old school anti-virus may seem like a relic. But traditional anti-virus companies are changing with the times, delivering defense-in-depth for a BYOD world.In this review, we looked at products from seven of the original anti-virus vendors, each dating back to at least the 1990s: AVG, ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Panda Software and Trend Micro. We focused on ease of installation and management, ease of use, plus the protection each suite offered beyond traditional signature-based anti-virus. Special emphasis was placed on the software’s ability to also protect mobile devices running both iOS and Android. (Read an analysis of the antivirus market.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

New products of the week 05.11.15

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Barracuda NG Firewall on AzureKey features – Barracuda NG Firewall now supports new routing functionality in Azure with User Defined Routes and also works with ExpressRoute providing additional security, redundancy, and application aware traffic routing. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 05.11.15

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Barracuda NG Firewall on AzureKey features – Barracuda NG Firewall now supports new routing functionality in Azure with User Defined Routes and also works with ExpressRoute providing additional security, redundancy, and application aware traffic routing. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chinese smartphone market shows rare shipment decline

The world’s largest smartphone market, China, isn’t so hungry for the products anymore.First quarter smartphone shipments there dropped by 4 percent year over year, according to research firm IDC. It’s the first time in six years that China’s smartphone market has contracted, signifying that the country’s appetite for the handsets is reaching its limit.The number of shipments to China was still high, at 98.8 million units. IDC expects the market to remain flat for the rest of the year. To drive future growth vendors in the country will have to convince existing users to upgrade to newer phones, IDC said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP AIGP

In this post we will look at something which is relatively new but not as cool as my previous post on Segment Routing. We will take a look at a new BGP feature called “Accumulated IGP, metric of path to prefix” (RFC 7311 AIGP)  which is an optional non-transitive attribute . A new AIGP TLV was created for this which contains […]

Author information

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh,(3xCCIE,CCDE) is a Sr. Engineer mostly focused on service providers , data center and security. He is a network enthusiast passionate about network technologies so not only is it his profession, but something of a hobby as well.
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The post BGP AIGP appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.

Do We Need Network Programmability?

Jsicuran left this comment on my You Must Understand the Fundamentals to Be Successful blog post:

I just went through some Cisco webinar where they were showcasing the use of NX-OS API and Python to add a VLAN. I do some Python myself and have used that API for some simple DevOps-like uses, but for the most part if you are an enterprise and use Prime DCIM to add VLANs, why should you go through the coding process?

It obviously depends on where you are in your IT automation journey.

Read more ...

IBM’s flexible Power servers can take on cloud, databases

IBM is building slimmer versions of its Power hardware—used by its Watson supercomputer—to run complex database applications as well as simpler Web-based ones.IBM has designed its latest Power servers for social networking, search engines and cloud storage, as computing moves from PCs to mobile devices. Beyond the cloud, the new servers with Power8 chips also have the horsepower to handle more complex applications like databases and analytics.The multipurpose servers include the four-socket Power E850, which can handle private, public and hybrid clouds, and in-memory database applications. The more powerful Power E880 is for large-scale database and cloud implementations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple focuses on making supply chain in China more green

Apple plans to make its supply chain in China greener as a way to cutdown on carbon emissions from its product manufacturing, the company announced on Monday.The U.S. tech giant has already been making its offices and data centers more environmentally friendly, but wants to extend those efforts to its suppliers in China, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. Although the transition to more greener manufacturing will take years, Cook said it is important work that needs to be done.In China, Many Apple products, including the iPhone and iPad, are assembled in large factories run by Foxconn Technology Group and by other large contract manufacturers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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