0

Installing the Prerelease Pulumi Provider for Talos

Normally, installing a Pulumi provider is pretty easy; you run pulumi up and the provider gets installed automatically. Worst case scenario, you can install the provider using pulumi plugin install. However, when dealing with prerelease providers, sometimes things have to be done manually. Such is the case with the prerelease Pulumi provider for Talos Linux. In this post, I’ll show you what the manual process looks like for installing a prerelease provider.

The GitHub repository for the prerelease Pulumi provider for Talos can be found here. As of this writing, the latest release was v0.1.0-beta.0. Currently, the prerelease provider for Talos Linux can’t be installed automatically when running pulumi up, and pulumi plugin install doesn’t work either.

The manual process for installing this provider looks like this:

1. Download the latest release of the Talos provider from the GitHub Releases page. This will download a tarred and gzipped archive.
2. The plugin files need to go into a specific subdirectory under ~/.pulumi/plugins. Navigate to that directory, and create a subdirectory whose name corresponds to the version of the Talos provider. For example, if the version downloaded is v0.1.0-beta.0, then the name of the new Continue reading

0

Learning to use Python classes

This tutorial demonstrates object-oriented programming and Python classes.

I think that most people learn best when working on a practical project, so I will show readers how to build a simple program that they can share with their friends and family. While building the program, I demonstrate the types of problems solved by using Python classes and I use Python classes to build and manage multiple game elements.

NOTE: I realize this is off-topic for my blog. I used the Pyxel game framework as an tool to introduce Python programming to my child. After using Pyxel to build a game, I thought that it provided a good example of using Python classes in an easy-to-understand way.

I assume the reader has already learned the basics of Python programming.

Python Classes

A Python class is a type of Python object used in object-oriented programming. Programmers create new objects by instantiating, or calling, classes. They may then use or modify those instances’ attributes in their programs.

Each instance of a class is a unique object that may contain variables, called data attributes, and functions, called methods.

Each class also contains an initialization function, called a constructor, that runs when a new Continue reading

0

Fortinet Announces A New System on Chip (SoC) For Its Firewall Appliances

Fortinet has announced new chip hardware, the SP5, to power FortiGate firewall appliances for entry-level and medium-size customers that need firewalls at campus, branch, and edge locations. Fortinet is positioning this chip as a high-performance, energy-efficient option compared to security devices using off-the-shelf CPUs. Fortinet has long developed its own ASICs and has three hardware […]

The post Fortinet Announces A New System on Chip (SoC) For Its Firewall Appliances appeared first on Packet Pushers.

0

Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

0

Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

The post Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code appeared first on Packet Pushers.

0

Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare

The Fediverse has been a hot topic of discussion lately, with thousands, if not millions, of new users creating accounts on platforms like Mastodon to either move entirely to "the other side" or experiment and learn about this new social network.

Today we're introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare's Supercloud. If you want to run your own spot in the Fediverse you can now do it entirely on Cloudflare.

The Fediverse, built on Cloudflare

Today you're left with two options if you want to join the Mastodon federated network: either you join one of the existing servers (servers are also called communities, and each one has its own infrastructure and rules), or you can run your self-hosted server.

There are a few reasons why you'd want to run your own server:

• You want to create a new community and attract other users over a common theme and usage rules.
• You don't want to have to trust third-party servers or abide by their policies and want your server, under your domain, for your personal account.
• You want complete control over your data, personal information, and content and visibility over what Continue reading

0

Extreme adds network fabric support to its SD-WAN

Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”To read this article in full, please click here

0

Extreme adds network fabric support to its SD-WAN

Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”To read this article in full, please click here

0

Lessons Learned From the Top Cloud Outages of 2022

IT pros need to choose their cloud providers carefully but also ensure network resiliency and visibility are in place to recover from the problem as quickly as possible.

0

Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

0

Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

0

Cisco adds services, hardware to better support industrial IoT

Cisco has added new visibility and security software to its cloud-based dashboard for managing configuration and applications for IoT devices in industrial settings.The company has upgraded its IoT Operations Dashboard with Cisco Cyber Vision, software that automatically builds a detailed inventory of all operational technology (OT) devices and identifies vulnerabilities.Cyber Vision can share its inventories with SecureX, Cisco’s enterprise Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to provide a combined inventory of both IT and OT assets, and that can make threat investigations easier and build remediation workflows, according to Vikas Butaney, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud connectivity and industrial IOT networking.To read this article in full, please click here

0

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

0

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

0

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

0

Will Your Company Be Fined in the New Data Privacy Landscape?

The return of Data Privacy Week late last month sees momentum continue for scrutiny on how data is collected, used, and controlled as regulators and the public sharpen their focus.

0

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

0

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

0

Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: January, 2023

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of January, 2023.

The post Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: January, 2023 appeared first on Noction.

0

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