Ansible For Network Automation Lesson 2: Getting To Know Ansible – Video

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.

BrandPost: Creating a Consistent User Experience Across the Network

By: Tom Hollingsworth, Networking Expert.Crucial to any user experience is consistency. After all, users can be fickle. They want things now. They might even want it to be fun, but more importantly, they require a consistent experience. Between increased speed or consistency, users most always pick consistency. No matter where they log in or on what device they happen to be using, especially when it comes to real-time communications experiences on an app, they want the same treatment time and time again. It’s crucial to their success.That consistent experience requirement also extends to aspects they may not see or even realize is vital to the capabilities they rely upon. Chief among them is security policy. Policy enforcement should not be predicated or determined by whether they are using a company-issued laptop inside the proverbial corporate firewall or not.To read this article in full, please click here

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

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.

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

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.

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

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

When localhost isn’t what it seems in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2

localhost blog

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

Twilight Zone: File Transfer Causes Link Drop

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 ;)

Read more …

Twilight Zone: File Transfer Causes Link Drop

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 ;)

Read more …

The ‘Cisco’ gear you bought from these companies could be counterfeit

Business entities in Florida and New Jersey, plus 25 storefronts on Amazon and eBay, sold old Cisco gear that had been cosmetically altered to seem like new, more advanced models, part of a conspiracy going back eight years.The counterfeit-distribution operation was selling the networking devices for a tenth what it would cost if they were legitimate, according to the US Department of Justice. It estimated the conspiracy took in more than $100 million in revenue, and that—if the equipment had been what it was purported to be—would have retailed for more than $1 billion. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

Calico workload-centric web application firewall (WAF): A better way to secure cloud-native applications

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.

Background

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:

  • 86% of organizations experienced application-layer attacks that bypassed their WAF in the last 12 months.
  • While 66% of respondents consider WAF to be an important security tool, over 40% use their WAFs only to generate alerts (not to block attacks).

Source: Ponemon Institute – “The State of Web Application Continue reading

AWS WAN service aims to simplify global network deployments

A new managed WAN service from AWS promises to make it faster and easier for enterprises to build, manage, and monitor a global network that seamlessly connects cloud and on-premises environments.AWS Cloud WAN, which the company previewed in December, lets customers link cloud resources in on-premises data centers, branch offices or colocation sites and manage that environment through a single dashboard. Using the dashboard, networking teams can apply policies, automate configuration and security tasks across their entire network.To read this article in full, please click here

The average US 5G connection is getting faster

T-Mobile is still the fastest 5G provider in the US by some distance, but all three of the major national mobile service providers recorded major increases in their average connection speed between March and June of this year, according to a report released today by Opensignal.Much of the across-the-board increase, the report said, is due to the carriers beginning to use the mid-band 5G spectrum that was auctioned off recently by the FCC. Opensignal said that areas where C-band spectrum is available have seen noticeable improvements to average connection speeds.Other areas of mid-band spectrum, however, are the reason why T-Mobile continues to boast a substantial lead over both AT&T and Verizon in Opensignal’s speed tests. T-Mobile averages 171Mbps over a 5G connection, compared to 72Mbps for Verizon and 53Mbps for AT&T, thanks in large part to its early acquisition of 2.5GHz spectrum, the researchers said.To read this article in full, please click here

Ansible For Network Automation Lesson 1: Why Ansible? – Video

Welcome to Ansible For Networking! There are ten video lessons in this course. This course provides a detailed overview of how Ansible works, how to create playbooks and modules, the importance of idempotency, and a walk-through using Ansible to automate tasks in a Meraki WLAN. It’s intended for network administrators and engineers who want to […]

The post Ansible For Network Automation Lesson 1: Why Ansible? – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Waiting Room Event Scheduling protects your site during online events

Waiting Room Event Scheduling protects your site during online events
Waiting Room Event Scheduling protects your site during online events

You've got big plans for your ecommerce strategy in the form of online events — seasonal sales, open registration periods, product drops, ticket sales, and more. With all the hype you've generated, you'll get a lot of site traffic, and that's a good thing! With Waiting Room Event Scheduling, you can protect your servers from being overloaded during your event while delivering a user experience that is unique to the occasion and consistent with your brand. Available now to enterprise customers with an advanced Waiting Room subscription, Event Scheduling allows you to plan changes to your waiting room’s settings and custom queueing page ahead of time, ensuring flawless execution of your online event.

More than always-on protection

We launched Waiting Room to protect our customers' servers during traffic spikes. Waiting Room sends excess visitors to a virtual queue during traffic surges, letting visitors in dynamically as spots become available on your site. By automatically queuing traffic that exceeds your site's capacity, Waiting Room protects your origin servers and your customer experience. Additionally, the Waiting Room's queuing page can be customized to match the look and feel of your site so that your users never feel as though they have left Continue reading

1 … 482 483 484 485 486 … 3,852