ComputerWeekly: Ansible’s secret agentless route to IT automation

ComputerWeekly recently posted a great breakdown of Ansible's role in IT automation.

Ansible Inc (upper case) is a company that makes "agentless" orchestration and configuration management tools in the form of an automation engine designed to help deploy both applications and the wider software systems that they exist within.

The core technology proposition here is a developer play yes -- but it's also an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation because Ansible avoids the need to write custom scripts or code to manage applications.

Read the full atricle on ComputerWeekly

 

Open Source Networking

We’ve heard a lot of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Open Networking, APIs, and policy models over the past few months (and years).  There are days where it’s sickening to hear the term SDN, but even on those darkest days, the reality is that the network industry has a bright and open future.  In this post, I’m going to share a list of networking projects that I’m aware of that are not only open, but also open source.  It is definitely eye opening and extremely positive to see so much open source activity in the network industry.
Picture
From the movie Daylight starring Sly Stallone ++ Source: Flickfacts.com
OpenDaylight (ODL) – established in April 2013 is an open source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller platform(s).  There are different controller platforms for different use cases.

OpenFlow (OF) – established in the late 2000s, the OpenFlow 1.0 release launched in December 2009.  The Open Networking Foundation took over the development (not actually coding) of OpenFlow when ONF formed in late March / early April in 2010.

Open vSwitch (OVS) – established in mid to late 2009 by the Nicira team to replace the standard Linux bridge.  It’s Continue reading

SDN start-up says it is best funded in industry

Pluribus Networks, an SDN start-up developing converged compute, network, storage and virtualization systems, said it raised $50 million in a Series D round of funding led by Temasek, an investment company based in Singapore with a net portfolio value of $177 billion.Temasek is an investor in Chinese search engine company Alibaba.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:SDN market could hit $18 billion by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP in 2014

The Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, has been holding the Internet together, for more than two decades and nothing seems to be falling off the edge so far. As far as we can tell everyone can still see everyone else, assuming that they want to be seen, and the distributed routing system appears to be working smoothly. All appears to be working within reasonable parameters, and there is no imminent danger of some routing catastrophe, as far as we can tell. For a protocol designed some 25 years ago, when the Internet of that time contained some 10,000 constituent networks, its done well to scale fifty-fold, to carry in excess of half a million routed elements by the end of 2014.

Open Source Networking

We’ve heard a lot of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Open Networking, APIs, and policy models over the past few months (and years). There are days where it’s sickening to hear the term SDN, but even on those darkest days, the reality is that the network industry has a bright and open future. In this post, I’m going to share a list of networking projects that I’m aware of that are not only open, but also open source. It is definitely eye opening and extremely positive to see so much open source activity in the network industry.

Stallone-Daylight

Edit/Note: updated list can be found here on GitHub. Feel free to issue a pull request to add or modify the list.

OpenDaylight (ODL) – established in April 2013 is an open source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller platform(s). There are different controller platforms for different use cases.

OpenFlow (OF) – established in the late 2000s, the OpenFlow 1.0 release launched in December 2009. The Open Networking Foundation took over the development (not actually coding) of OpenFlow when ONF formed in late March / early April in 2010.

Open vSwitch (OVS) – established in mid to late 2009 by the Nicira team to Continue reading

OSPF Authentication – Part 1

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
There are three types of OSPF authentication. Type 1 – no authentication Type 2 – clear text Type 3 – cryptographic (MD5 or SHA) Lets explore each type in a lot more detail and then look at the router configuration for some real world examples. Authentication can be configured on a per area or per... [Read More]

Other pages of interest:

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post OSPF Authentication – Part 1

Cisco Reveals New Products – The Time of Multigigabit is Here

Wireless networks are becoming faster and faster. With 802.11ac Wave 2, wireless networks will be capable of achieving speeds up to 6.8 Gbps. This creates challenges when connecting APs to switches which normally run Ethernet at 1GE or 10GE. To meet these evolving demands, Cisco has as of today revealed some new products.

Cisco is releasing a new compact switch supporting multigigabit technology, the Cisco Catalyst 3560-CX. The most compelling new features are support for multigigabit interfaces, more power available for PoE, support for 10GE on the uplinks and being able to be deployed as an Instant Access switch. It also support PoE pass through which can help save on long cable runs. The Catalyst 3560-CX supports two multigigabit interfaces.

3560-CX-1

This device is fanless, so it can be deployed in cubicles to decrease the need for a wiring closet. It also has the support for role based security. Cisco’s goal is to provide for a better working environment, which they call “Next Generation Workspace”.

Next-gen-workspace-1

If you are a technical person, you are probably wonder about the multigigabit ports. IEEE only has 1GE, 10GE and so on. Cisco started the NBASE-T Alliance with Aquantia, Freescale, and Xilinx. Other members Continue reading

Making Your Wireless Guest Friendly

Wireless

During the recent Virtualization Field Day 4, I was located at a vendor building and jumped on their guest wireless network. There are a few things that I need to get accomplished before the magic happens at a Tech Field Day event, so I’m always on the guest network quickly. It’s only after I take care of a few website related items that I settle down into a routine of catching up on email and other items. That’s when I discovered that this particular location blocked access to IMAP on their guest network. My mail client stalled out when trying to fetch messages and clear my outbox. I could log into Gmail just fine and send and receive while I was on-site. But my workflow depends on my mail client. That made me think about guest WiFi and usability.

Be Our (Limited) Guest

Guest WiFi is a huge deal for visitors to an office. We live in a society where ever-present connectivity is necessary. Email notifications, social media updates, and the capability to look up necessary information instantly have pervaded our lives. For those of us fortunate enough to still have an unlimited cellular data plan, our connectivity craving Continue reading

DDoS Attacks in the Wake of French Anti-terror Demonstrations

On January 15th, France’s chief information systems defense official, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, announced a sharp rise in online attacks against French web sites:

“Calling it an unprecedented surge, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, said about 19,000 French websites had faced cyberattacks in recent days, …” [1].

As we’ve done in the recent past for North Korea [2], Hong-Kong [3], and Israel [4], we can leverage Arbor’s ATLAS initiative to observe how real world conflict is reflected in the digital realm. ATLAS receives anonymized Internet traffic and DDoS event data from over 330 participating Internet Service Providers worldwide. In particular, we are interested in DDoS attacks before and after Sunday, January 11th. As reported in [1],

“Coustilliere called the attacks a response to the massive demonstrations against terrorism that drew 3.7 million people into the streets Sunday across France.”

In order to gauge this response, we compare the DDoS attacks that took place between January 3rd and January 10th to the DDoS attacks that took place between January 11th and January 18th inclusive.

Attack Frequency

Between January 3rd and January 18th, a total of 11,342 Continue reading

That HP SDN App Store

HP SDN App Store Logo

December 2014 found me in Barcelona as a guest of HP at the “HP Discover” event. Nominally I went to see what was up in the world of networking, but as you can imagine with the breadth of products that HP produces, I found myself looking at all sorts of things. I’ll cover a few fun things in other posts, but I’ll start with a bit of networking because, well, this is MovingPackets after all.

HP SDN App Store

I mentioned the HP SDN App Store in a previous post about HP Openflow. One of the fears I raised was how an App Store would work in terms of support. Talking to a contact at HP made things a little clearer, and there’s actually quite a nice – and perhaps obvious – support plan for the Apps you can download. Effectively, there are three tiers of supported applications as I understand it, and a glance at the App Store shows that these are now called “Apps Circles”:

  1. App Circle 1: Apps that HP develops. These have full support direct from HP, as they are HP products, effectively.
  2. App Circle 2: Apps that are developed by HP AllianceOne partners Continue reading

Field Trip: Networking Field Day

Very excited to announce I was invited to participate in Networking Field Day #9. The first question is: What is Networking Day? Well it is an event where we (networkers) get to participate, listen, and interact with various different vendors. And I’ll be joining a great group, a few of which I’ve met at the […]

Brocade offering free SDN for one year

Brocade this week said it is shipping its SDN controller and offering it free for one year.Brocade’s Vyatta Controller was announced last September. It is based on the OpenDaylight open source “Helium” release.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Why SDN All-Stars are heading to Brocade +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Drums of cyberwar: North Korea’s cyber-WMDs

People ask me if today's NYTimes story changes my opinion that North Korea didn't do the Sony hack. Of course it doesn't. Any rational person can tell that the story is bogus. Indeed, such stories hint the government is hiding something.

The story claims the NSA has thoroughly hacked North Korea since 2010, and that's what enabled the US government to tell who was responsible for the Sony hack. But if this were true, then we hacked first, and the Sony hack is retaliation -- meaning we had no justification for Obama's sanctions. But, if the story is false, then again sanctions against North Korea aren't justified, because we don't have the proof our government claims. True or false, this story means the U.S. sanctions against North Korea aren't justified.

The reason this story is nonsense is that it's not journalism. It relies almost entirely on anonymous sources in the government. These aren't anonymous whistle-blowers who fear retaliation, but government propagandists who don't want to be held accountable. The government exploits the New York Times, promising them exclusive breaking news in exchange for them publishing propaganda. This allows government to have a story that is simultaneous true and false, Continue reading
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