In this lesson on using Ansible to automate network tasks, instructor Josh Vanderra covers the following topics: -Ansible origins -Inventory files -The Ansible playbook structure: Tasks Plays Playbooks Roles -Using the debug module Josh has created a GitHub repo to store additional material, including links and documentation: https://github.com/jvanderaa/AnsibleForNetworkAutomation You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ […]
The post Ansible For Network Automation Lesson 2: Getting To Know Ansible – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cloudflare is proud to announce the first 35,000 trees from our commitment to help clean up bad bots (and the climate) have been planted.

Working with our partners at One Tree Planted (OTP), Cloudflare was able to support the restoration of 20 hectares of land at Victoria Park in Nova Scotia, Canada. The 130-year-old natural woodland park is located in the heart of Truro, NS, and includes over 3,000 acres of hiking and biking trails through natural gorges, rivers, and waterfalls, as well as an old-growth eastern hemlock forest.
The planting projects added red spruce, black spruce, eastern white pine, eastern larch, northern red oak, sugar maple, yellow birch, and jack pine to two areas of the park. The first area was a section of the park that recently lost a number of old conifers due to insect attacks. The second was an area previously used as a municipal dump, which has since been covered by a clay cap and topsoil.

Our tree commitment began far from the Canadian woodlands. In 2019, we launched an ambitious tool called Bot Fight Mode, which for the first time fought back against bots, targeting scrapers and other automated actors.
Our Continue reading

With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 and the advent of automation execution environments, some behaviors are now different for. This blog explains the use case around using localhost and options for sharing data and persistent data storage, for VM-based Ansible Automation Platform 2 deployments.
With Ansible Automation Platform 2 and its containerised execution environments, the concept of localhost has altered. Before Ansible Automation Platform 2, you could run a job against localhost, which translated into running on the underlying tower host. You could use this to store data and persistent artifacts, although this was not always a good idea or best practice.
Now with Ansible Automation Platform 2, localhost means you’re running inside a container, which is ephemeral in nature. This means we must do things differently to achieve the same goal. If you consider this a backwards move, think again. In fact, localhost is now no longer tied to a particular host, and with portable execution environments, this means it can run anywhere, with the right environment and software prerequisites already embedded into the execution environment container.
So, if we now have a temporal runtime container and we want to use existing data or persistent data, Continue reading
Long long time ago, we built a multi-protocol WAN network for a large organization. Everything worked great, until we got the weirdest bug report I’ve seen thus far:
When trying to transfer a particular file with DECnet to the central location, the WAN link drops. That does not happen with any other file, or when transferring the same file with TCP/IP. The only way to recover is to power cycle the modem.
Try to figure out what was going on before reading any further ;)
Long long time ago, we built a multi-protocol WAN network for a large organization. Everything worked great, until we got the weirdest bug report I’ve seen thus far:
When trying to transfer a particular file with DECnet to the central location, the WAN link drops. That does not happen with any other file, or when transferring the same file with TCP/IP. The only way to recover is to power cycle the modem.
Try to figure out what was going on before reading any further ;)
The “Cirrus” Power10 processor from IBM, which we codenamed for Big Blue because it refused to do it publicly and because we understand the value of a synonym here at The Next Platform, shipped last September in the “Denali” Power E1080 big iron NUMA machine. …
Can IBM Get Back Into HPC With Power10? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Container-based web applications built on microservices architecture, whether public-facing or internal, are critical to businesses. This new class of applications is commonly referred to as cloud-native applications. Read on to find out why traditional WAFs are no longer enough to protect cloud-native applications and how Calico’s new workload-centric WAF solves this problem.
HTTP is the lingua franca for modern, RESTful APIs and microservices communication. Traditionally, organizations have deployed WAF at the perimeter level to protect web applications against external attacks. A WAF provides visibility and enforces security controls on external traffic that passes through it. However, for cloud-native applications, where the concept of a perimeter does not exist, the same visibility and control need to be provided at the workload level inside the cluster.
In a survey conducted by information security research center Ponemon Institute to probe the state of the WAF market, more than 600 respondents noted the following:
Source: Ponemon Institute – “The State of Web Application Continue reading