Mix Containers and VMs with netlab Release 1.5.0

Maybe it’s just me, but I always need a few extra devices in my virtual labs to have endpoints I could ping to/from or to have external routing information sources. We used VRF- and VLAN tricks in the days when we had to use physical devices to carve out a dozen hosts out of a single Cisco 2501, and life became much easier when you could spin up a few additional virtual machines in a virtual lab instead.

Unfortunately, those virtual machines eat precious resources. For example, netlab allocates 1GB to every Linux virtual machine when you only need bash and ping. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start that ping in a busybox container instead?

Read more …

Mix Containers and VMs with netlab Release 1.5.0

Maybe it’s just me, but I always need a few extra devices in my virtual labs to have endpoints I could ping to/from or to have external routing information sources. We used VRF- and VLAN tricks in the days when we had to use physical devices to carve out a dozen hosts out of a single Cisco 2501, and life became much easier when you could spin up a few additional virtual machines in a virtual lab instead.

Unfortunately, those virtual machines eat precious resources. For example, netlab allocates 1GB to every Linux virtual machine when you only need bash and ping. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start that ping in a busybox container instead?

Read more …

Azure Networking Fundamentals: Virtual WAN Part 1 – S2S VPN and VNet Connections

 This chapter introduces Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) service. It offers a single deployment, management, and monitoring pane for connectivity services such as Inter-VNet, Site-to-Site VPN, and Express Route. In this chapter, we are focusing on S2S VPN and VNet connections. The Site-to-Site VPN solutions in vWAN differ from the traditional model, where we create resources as an individual components. In this solution, we only deploy a vWAN resource and manage everything else through its management view. Figure 11-1 illustrates our example topology and deployment order. The first step is to implement a vWAN resource. Then we deploy a vHub. It is an Azure-managed VNet to which we assign a CIDR, just like we do with the traditional VNet. We can deploy a vHub as an empty VNet without associating any connection. A vHub deployment process launches a pair of redundant routers, which exchange reachability information with the VNet Gateway router and VGW instances using BGP. We intend to allow Inter-VNet data flows between vnet-swe1, vnet-swe2, and Branch-to-VNet traffic. For Site-to-Site VPN, we deploy VPN Gateway (VGW) into vHub. The VGW started in the vHub creates two instances, instance0, and instance1, in active/active mode. We don’t deploy a GatewaySubnet for VGW Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020323


Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, is not impressed by ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence technology that is making headlines daily.


German antitrust enforcers known for leveling charges against high-profile tech companies have a new target for accusations of dominant market position abuse: PayPal.


Data anonymization is an important tool for organizations to protect the personal data of individuals, while averting the onerous requirements of the EU and U.K.


Phishing is a big deal, with a State of Phishing report from security firm SlashNext claiming that there were more than 255 million phishing attacks in 2022, a 61% increase from the year before.


The goal of the CGA is to highlight and reduce damages done to all utilities when working underground.


More than 91% of malware utilizes DNS communication at some point during its attack lifecycle, making DNS an invaluable choke point in the fight against cyber threats.


When it comes to operating systems and now CPU instruction sets, there is proprietary, there is licensable and modifiable with a standard base of functionality with room for some originality, and there is true open source.


Since 2017, China has held at least seven of these competitions—called Robot Hacking Continue reading

High throughput Kubernetes cluster networking with the Calico/VPP dataplane and accelerated memif

 

This blog post was written in collaboration with:

Aloys Augustin, Nathan Skrzypczak, Hedi Bouattour, Onong Tayeng, and Jerome Tollet at Cisco. Aloys and Nathan are part of a team of external contributors to Calico Open Source that has been working on an integration between Calico Open Source and the FD.io VPP dataplane technology for the last couple of years.

Mrittika Ganguli, principal engineer and architect at Intel’s Network and Edge (NEX). Ganguli leads a team with Qian Q Xu, Ping Yu, and Xiaobing Qian to enhance the performance of Calico and VPP through software and hardware acceleration.

 

This blog will cover what the Calico/VPP dataplane is and demonstrate the performance and flexibility advantages of using the VPP dataplane through a benchmarking setup. By the end of this blog post, you will have a clear understanding of how Calico/VPP dataplane, with the help of DPDK and accelerated memif interfaces, can provide high throughput and low-latency Kubernetes cluster networking for your environment. Additionally, you will learn how these technologies can be used to reduce CPU utilization by transferring packets directly in memory between different hosts, making it an efficient solution for building distributed network functions with lightning-fast speeds.

What’s Continue reading

Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future?

Today's Heavy Networking is a forward-looking episode about semantic networking. Semantic networking aims to make decisions on how to route packets based on more than just the destination address and give network operators more routing choices based on considerations such as bandwidth, cost, performance, application type, and so on. But how do you add semantic information to IP headers? How do you program routers and networking hardware to consume semantics? Do we really need this? Guests Adrian Farrel and Hannes Gredler join Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks to discuss and debate.

Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future?

Today's Heavy Networking is a forward-looking episode about semantic networking. Semantic networking aims to make decisions on how to route packets based on more than just the destination address and give network operators more routing choices based on considerations such as bandwidth, cost, performance, application type, and so on. But how do you add semantic information to IP headers? How do you program routers and networking hardware to consume semantics? Do we really need this? Guests Adrian Farrel and Hannes Gredler join Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks to discuss and debate.

The post Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Supermicro Aspires To Be A $10 Billion Server Maker

Supermicro has always been an interesting IT supplier for the datacenter, and it is getting more interesting by the year as it continues to grow very fast and has set itself a goal of break $10 billion in annual sales, which would put Supermicro behind only Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, on par with Inspur, and ahead of

Since the advent of the X86 server market thirty years ago, Supermicro has been unique among its server making peers in a number of ways. …

Supermicro Aspires To Be A $10 Billion Server Maker was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Closed Loop Automation With Anuta Networks’ Active Service Assurance

As a network operator, I want to describe in plain language what I need a network to do, and the network is configured accordingly. Then I want the network to monitor itself, and when things aren’t going well, the network will repair itself with no involvement from me. Hey, daydreaming is fun.

In the real world, plain language describing my network requirements isn’t going to conjure a relevant network. I must perform hard work to create a network design that’s useful for a business. I have to think through issues like capacity needs under peak load, redundancy to survive a network failure, and resiliency to support business operations in the face of a catastrophic outage. I need to understand individual application requirements, and be sure the network can support those requirements. I have to consider modularity, repeatability, and supportability. I must work within a budget.

My design will translate into an arcane collection of devices, interfaces, interconnections, protocols, and topologies. I’ll rely on education, experience, and experimentation to fine-tune the design, and then I’ll put it into production. Depending on your personality, this arduous task likely falls somewhere between “fun” and “frightening” for you. But no matter who you are, Continue reading

Monitoring Other People’s Problems

It’s Always the Network is a refrain that causes operations teams to shudder. No matter what your flavor of networking might be it’s always your fault. Even if the actual problem is DNS, a global BGP outage, or even some issue with the SaaS provider. Why do we always get blamed? And how can you prevent this from happening to you?

User Utopia

Users don’t know about the world outside of their devices. As soon as they click on something in a browser window they expect it to work. It’s a lot like ordering a package and having it delivered. It’s expected that the package arrives. You don’t concern yourself with the details of how it needs to be shipped, what routes it will take, and how factors that exist half a world away could cause disruptions to your schedule at home.

The network is the same to the users. If something doesn’t work with a website or a remote application it must be the “network” that is at fault. Because your users believe that everything not inside of their computer is the network. Networking is the way that stuff happens everywhere else. As professionals we know the differences between Continue reading

Manage and control the use of dedicated egress IPs with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Manage and control the use of dedicated egress IPs with Cloudflare Zero Trust
Manage and control the use of dedicated egress IPs with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Before identity-driven Zero Trust rules, some SaaS applications on the public Internet relied on the IP address of a connecting user as a security model. Users would connect from known office locations, with fixed IP address ranges, and the SaaS application would check their address in addition to their login credentials.

Many systems still offer that second factor method. Customers of Cloudflare One can use a dedicated egress IP for this purpose as part of their journey to a Zero Trust model. Unlike other solutions, customers using this option do not need to deploy any infrastructure of their own. However, not all traffic needs to use those dedicated egress IPs.

Today, we are announcing policies that give administrators control over when Cloudflare uses their dedicated egress IPs. Specifically, administrators can use a rule builder in the Cloudflare dashboard to determine which egress IP is used and when, based on attributes like identity, application, IP address, and geolocation. This capability is available to any enterprise-contracted customer that adds on dedicated egress IPs to their Zero Trust subscription.

Why did we build this?

In today’s hybrid work environment, organizations aspire for more consistent security and IT experiences to manage their employees’ traffic Continue reading

Get notified about the most relevant events with Advanced HTTP Alerts

Get notified about the most relevant events with Advanced HTTP Alerts
Get notified about the most relevant events with Advanced HTTP Alerts

Today we’re excited to be announcing more flexibility to HTTP alerting, enabling customers to customize the types of activity they’re alerted on and how those alerts are organized.

Prior to today, HTTP alerts at Cloudflare have been very generic. You could choose which Internet properties you wanted and what sensitivity you wanted to be alerted on, but you couldn’t choose anything else. You couldn’t, for example, exclude  the IP addresses you use to test things. You couldn’t choose to monitor only a specific path. You couldn’t choose which HTTP statuses you wanted to be alerted on. You couldn’t even choose to monitor your entire account instead of specific zones.

Our customers leverage the Cloudflare network for a myriad of use cases ranging from decreasing bandwidth costs and accelerating asset delivery with Cloudflare CDN to protecting their applications against brute force attacks with Cloudflare Bot Management. Whether the reasons for routing traffic through the Cloudflare network are simple or complex, one powerful capability that comes for free is observability.

With traffic flowing through the network, we can monitor and alert customers about anomalous events such as spikes in origin error rates, enabling them to investigate further and mitigate any issues as Continue reading

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