Check Cisco ASA Connections with Nagios

Night time trafficOnce you’ve setup your Cisco ASA, you will want to monitor it to ensure that it’s operating normally. The plugin nm_check_asa_connections for Nagios, and compatible products, can warn your if the number of current connections gets too high. A very high connection count might indicate that there’s an attack under way on one of your servers, you have some hosts on your inside which are part of a botnet and is attacking someone else, or perhaps you’re just about to grow out of your current firewall and need an upgrade to a more powerful box.
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Key questions to consider when evaluating hybrid cloud

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Hybrid cloud is the talk of IT, but to avoid costly, labor-intensive megaprojects you cannot escape, pay particular attention to minimizing implementation and management complexity. These questions will help you identify the best hybrid cloud architecture for your environment:

1. What are the top ways we will use our hybrid cloud in the next 12 to 18 months? 

In the midmarket, the No. 1 answer is disaster recovery (DR). A secondary data center for DR is a luxury most companies can not afford. Now, public cloud services have put DR within reach of virtually all organizations. The key is to identify the enabling technology that minimizes complexity, maximizes automation and does not overtax the IT staff. Easy cloud DR solutions exist today for midsized shops; don’t be lead into a heavy professional services project.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Debunking the myths about scale-up architectures

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

When growing capacity and power in the data center, the architectural trade-offs between server scale-up vs. scale-out continue to be debated. Both approaches are valid: scale-out adds multiple, smaller servers running in a distributed computing model, while scale-up adds fewer, more powerful servers that are capable of running larger workloads.

Today, much of the buzz is around scale-out architectures, which have been made popular by companies like Facebook and Google, because this architecture is commonly viewed as more cost-effective and “infinitely” scalable.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Networking Field Day 9 Is Almost Here!

Networking Field Day Logo

Confession: I fly out to San Jose, CA for Networking Field Day 9 tomorrow morning and I have yet to pack a single thing.

This last minute preparation thing seems to have become a habit. I’d like to tell you that it’s because I’m a seasoned traveller and I can calmly pack for a two week vacation in under 15 minutes, but really it’s just procrastination. It’s not even that I dislike travel; I quite enjoy going places and I definitely enjoy Networking Field Day so I know there’s something amazing waiting for me when I get there. I conclude then that my lackadaisical approach to travel packing is laziness in its purest form.

Networking Field Day 9

Any idea of being lazy at NFD9 though is laughable. As ever, we have a packed schedule meeting some really interesting vendors. There are some old faces and some new ones both in the attendees and the vendors!

Wednesday 10th February

  • VeloCloud – “Cloud-Delivered Software Defined WAN”. If they give prizes for buzz-word density, VeloCloud just won. The only thing missing is “as a Service”. Humor aside, VeloCloud seem to have an interesting product; it sounds almost like Cisco Continue reading

Get Started with CloudFlare ServerShield for Plesk

alt ServerShield makes it easy to activate CloudFlare and StopTheHacker.

CloudFlare has partnered with Parallels, the leading hosting solutions provider, to make server protection, content acceleration and malware removal easier than ever. We recently launched CloudFlare ServerShield® to all Plesk 12 users as an extension. ServerShield combines the performance and security features of CloudFlare with the malware scanning and removal solution of StopTheHacker. Whether you are a hosting provider looking to offer additional services to your customers, or a Plesk server user, you can access ServerShield with two easy clicks.

Already, a number of hosters and agencies have found ServerShield a key addition to their tools to help their customer sites’ security and performance. Rafal Kukla of Kukla Studio, a UK based design agency, has this to say:

“ServerShield made it straightforward to give my customers industry leading security and performance as well as reputation monitoring. Running a busy agency, I am focused on my customers' site design, ServerShield allows me to do that without sacrificing the fundamentals of site functionality. With one single click I can enable CloudFlare among all my customers instead of spending time configuring each site separately.”

We believe that this extension is incredibly timely Continue reading

AnsibleFest London Presentations

AnsibleFest_(1)-1

We had our biggest and best AnsibleFest last week in London! This was our 1st Ansible event outside of the United States and due to the amazing turnout and great crowd we will definitely include at least one stop overseas in 2016.

If you were not able to attend, or just wanted to see the presentations, we’ve compiled all of them here:

How to automate Big Data with Ansible - Marius Boeru, BigStep

Ansible and Vagrant - Sebastian Göttschkes, wogibtswas.at

The Devs Are Opsing (And It Isn’t Painful) - Ali Asad Lotia, Blue Newt

Ansible, Windows, and Powershell - Jon Hawkesworth, M Modal

How Rackspace Is Deploying OpenStack With Ansible - Walter Bentley, Rackspace

What's New in V2 - James Cammarata, Ansible

Ansible Internals - Brian Coca, Ansible


We’ll be announcing the next stop in the AnsibleFest tour soon (hint: It is New York City) so follow us on Twitter to find out all of the details first!

View our Ansible Tower Video here to learn all about the great features available in Ansible Tower.

Let’s Meet in Zurich or Heidelberg

I’ll be speaking at two conferences in March: SDN event in Zurich organized by fantastic Gabi Gerber, and the best boutique security conference – Troopers 15 in Heidelberg. If you’ll be attending one of these events, just grab me, drag me to the nearest coffee table, and throw some interesting questions my way ;) … and if you happen to be near one of these locations, let me know and we might figure out how to meet somewhere.

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Blessay: Enterprise IT Comes Last In Technology Innovation

There was a time when Enterprise IT defined the future of computing. Laptops were designed for corporate consumption first and the best software was sold to enterprise for business use. The other markets for computers was “home users” who were offered cheap, low quality and low performance versions of corporate computers. IT was critical to the […]


The post Blessay: Enterprise IT Comes Last In Technology Innovation appeared first on EtherealMind.

Friends May Come and Go…

We overuse the word “friend” in our world — especially the technical world. We tend to call anyone we’ve ever met a friend. In this environment, friends come and go almost constantly, flowing through our lives like the leaves in a brisk fall wind. The depth to which Facebook and LinkedIn dive into our personal relationships — reminding us of birthdays, telling us who’s having a work anniversary, telling us when we should say the right thing at the right time to keep the “friendship” alive and current. But this somehow robs the concept of friendship out of, well, friendship. There’s no sacrifice, not even any effort — you have to question the value of “friendship” on these terms. It almost seems that social networking has made us less social, and less attuned to real friendship.

How do we live in this world?

I would first suggest reviving the concept of being intentional about friendship. Rather than just letting people fall into and out of our lives, we need, particularly as engineers, to decide to hold on to some friends, to intentionally make these people a fixture in our lives. We need to be careful not to make these choices Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Dark fiber should fill residential broadband holes

With broadband speeds newly defined as starting at 25 Mbps, as opposed to the archaic 4 Mbps definition, what happens if you now no longer have residential broadband? And what do you do if, to add insult to injury, your ISP ups its prices?Well, the answer is that you pretty much do nothing. There isn't anything you can do. The ISP, in most cases, has a monopoly — a duopoly at best. If you want uncapped Internet, however jerky the video, you've got to use that hard-wired ISP.But that might soon be changing. The reason: dark fiber.Dark fiber is the term coined for private fiber networks often used for financial transactions. They're usually networks that are not owned by telcos and cable companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why the SteelApp sale is a win-win for Brocade and Riverbed

Last week, Brocade announced its intent to purchase the SteelApp product line from Riverbed for an undisclosed amount of cash. SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller and competes most often with the likes of F5 and Citrix. Formerly known as Stingray, SteelApp came to Riverbed in the acquisition of UK-based Zeus, who pioneered the virtual ADC market. On paper, the acquisition made sense for Riverbed, as Zeus had solutions that optimized the performance of applications with a data center solution and Riverbed was a vendor that optimizes application performance over the wide area network.However, although the business unit had some early success when it was dropped into the Riverbed channel, it never really became a meaningful part of Riverbed's revenue stream. Now, after almost four years, SteelApp will become part of Brocade's business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How network admins can survive SDN

With the advent of SDN, there’s been a lot of speculation about the future of the network administrator.Some doomsayers predict the network admin will be obsolete as network virtualization becomes the responsibility of the server or systems admin already in charge of server virtualization. Or that as SDN applications take on more network intelligence in order to program what network resources they need, the application developers might take over the role of network admin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Installing Golang IDE Support in Intellij

I have always preferred Intellij Community Edition IDE for Java, Bash, Python, Node and anything else I have needed, including recently C/C++ which is pretty slick. The plus is I can hang on to key-mappings, syntax color and general workflow all in a ubiquitous dev environment. There are some good IDE options for Go and of course support for the ... The post Installing Golang IDE Support in Intellij appeared first on NetworkStatic | Brent Salisbury's Blog.

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Nested Virtualization

A typical Network Virtualization demo is difficult as you need quite some hypervisor hosts to run some VMs on and interconnect them using Overlays. I solve this using nested virtualization. This means that I run a hypervisor running on another. This gives me the flexibility that my physical nodes, or “hypervisor underlay” if you will, can scale easily and I’m independent of them.

My physical cluster consists of 2 nodes running ESXi with vCenter. On top of that I’m running 4 other ESXi hosts divided in 2 “virtual” clusters and 4 KVM hosts as Contrail Compute Nodes.

How does this work?

This technology works using Intel’s VT-x (which is hardware assisted virtualization) and EPT (to virtualise memory allocations). This combination works since the “Nehalem” archnested1itecture (released 2008). The technology is ported to the more “Desktop” oriented CPU’s as well, so there is a good chance your notebook supports it as well. Since the Haswell architecture the nested virtualization works even better as Intel now supports VMCS Shadowing for nested VMs, which creates a data structure in memory per VM (and now supports nested VMs as well, which used to be a software effort).

Memory is the biggest burden in these Continue reading

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