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EX3400 Disk Space and Upgrades

The Juniper EX3400 switch series is a decent access switch. But a Product Manager chose to save $0.50 on COGS by choosing a 2GB disk. That’s just not enough space to handle normal Junos upgrades. This has wasted untold engineer hours on busywork. I hope that person (A) got a bonus, and (B) is never allowed to under-spec hardware again.

Here’s some tips I’ve learnt for manual and automated upgrades for EX3400s.

Manual Upgrades

Search for “Juniper EX3400 disk space” and you’ll find plenty of people complaining about this, and some suggestions. Juniper KB31198 looks like a good place to start. But it starts with request system storage cleanup and request system snapshot delete snap*.

Those might work if you’re upgrading from 15.1X -> 18.2. Maybe if you’re lucky it will be enough for upgrades within the 18.4 train. But it almost certainly won’t work if you’re going from 18.4.x -> 20.2.x.

There have been PRs that are supposed to fix this, and they might help around the edges, but they don’t help a lot.

With certain version combinations, you could get away with copying the new verson to /mfs, and Continue reading

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Upleveling Network Strategy and Embracing an Automation Factory Model

Network managers turning automation to support new, advanced capabilities, but they need an overarching strategy to drive the most transformational change.

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Pluribus Networks 2021 Year In Review

Dear Pluribus customers, partners and employees:

At this same time last year, I posted about how impressed I was with the progress Pluribus Networks had made in spite of 2020 being a year unlike any we’d ever experienced. As we turn the page on 2021, while we still face challenges brought on by COVID-19, there is a sense that enterprises and economies are adapting to this new reality and finding their footing. I’m pleased to say that, despite all the constraints that make up this “new normal”, Pluribus excelled in 2021.

From a technical standpoint alone, Pluribus had a banner year. We released version 6.1 of our Linux Netvisor^® ONE network operating system (OS) and elevated our Adaptive Cloud Fabric to new heights to enable customers to build bigger, faster cloud networking fabrics with more services and even simpler operations. We also released version 6.2 of our UNUM Management Platform, which includes our powerful Fabric Manager GUI-based portal and Insight Analytics telemetry solution. The platform empowers NetOps teams with tools to provision services at cloud speed and resolve network performance issues in record time.

Additionally, we extended the Pluribus switch portfolio with support for multiple new Dell Continue reading

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Pluribus Networks 2021 Year In Review

As we turn the page on 2021, while we still face challenges brought on by COVID-19, there is a sense that enterprises and economies are adapting to this new reality and finding their footing. I’m pleased to say that, despite all the constraints that make up this “new normal”, Pluribus excelled in 2021.

The post Pluribus Networks 2021 Year In Review appeared first on Pluribus Networks.

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How to Get the Most Out of VMware NSX with Advanced Load Balancing

Switzerland never takes sides. Safeguarding its independence is one of the principal objectives of Swiss foreign policy. And Swiss neutrality, one of the main principles of this policy, dictates that Switzerland remain agnostic.

Hailed as the Switzerland of load balancers, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) doesn’t take sides either. It is environment-agnostic. Designed to save you from costly re-platforming, retooling, and retraining, Avi offers the same great user experience regardless of the number or types of underlying infrastructure that support your apps. So you get a consistent experience, across any cloud, every time. The Avi platform enables a fast, scalable, and secure application delivery experience.

Network Automation and Advanced Load Balancing: Better Together

Customers invest in VMware NSX to achieve network automation and deploy a software-defined data center (SDDC) or private cloud that is programmable. However, they have historically used either the native NSX load balancer or legacy load balancers such as F5 or Citrix. Neither solution is adequate for the level of automation — and the enterprise-grade load balancing functions — that customers hope to enjoy with NSX.

Customers deploying VMware NSX-T need an integrated, automation-driven, multi-cloud application services solution. Avi integrates with NSX-T, simplifies Day 0 deployments, Continue reading

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Zero Trust with Zero Visibility Can’t Stop Ransomware

The real goal of zero trust isn't necessarily to prevent every breach—it's to limit the movement of malware within the network and thus limit the damage it can do.

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In 2021, the Internet went for TikTok, space and beyond

The years come and go, Internet traffic continues to grow (at least so far and with some ‘help’ from the pandemic), and Internet applications, be they websites, IoT devices or mobile apps, continue to evolve throughout the year, depending on if they attract human beings.

We’ll have a more broad Internet traffic-related Year in Review 2021 in the next few days (you can check the 2020 one here), but for now, let’s focus on the most popular domains this year according to our data on Cloudflare Radar and those domains’ changes in our popularity ranking. With Alexa.com going away, if you need a domain ranking, you can get it from Cloudflare.

We’ll focus on space (NASA and SpaceX flew higher), e-commerce (Amazon and Taobao rule), and social media (TikTok ‘danced’ to take the crown from Facebook). We’ll also take a little ‘bite’ on video streaming wars. Netflix is a Squid Game of its own and January 2021 was at the highest in our ranking — probably lockdown and pandemic-related.

Chat domains (WhatsApp, what else) will also be present and, of course, the less established metaverse domains of sorts ( Continue reading

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How Fortinet Stitches Together An Intelligent LAN

Fortinet customers can leverage AI/ML and a simplified NAC solution to get a more performant and secure LAN at both the core and edge. Here's how.

The post How Fortinet Stitches Together An Intelligent LAN appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Network Modeling: Automating Mikrotik RouterOS CHR Containerlab images

Introduction

In a previous post, we talked about using Containerlab and ZeroTier to provide remote access to a lab instance. One of the things that was glossed over was creating the Containerlab images. As part of building the images, Containerlab ready Mikrotik RouterOS images are available on Docker Hub.

Containerlab images

Containerlab currently supports 2 different kinds of images: pre-built containers and VMs packaged as containers.

Presently, only a handful of NOS vendors provide pre-built containers (Nokia’s SR Linux, Juniper cRPD, Arista cEOS, Cumulus VX, and SONIC VS).

The other option utilizes vrnetlab and is essentially a QEMU VM packaged in a Docker container. The more traditional network operating systems are currently supported via this method. This includes operating systems like Mikrotik RouterOS, Juniper vMX, Nokia SROS, and many more.

Building Mikrotik RouterOS containers

Containerlab provides a nice and easy way to build Containerlab ready Docker images. The process is fairly simple.

Setting it up

Containerlab uses a custom fork of vrnetlab that sets things up so that the images built will work with Containerlab. That repository can be found on Github. The first step is to clone that repository.

The next step is to download the Continue reading

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BGP YANG Model and Configuration

The post BGP YANG Model and Configuration appeared first on Noction.

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Supply chain woes forcing more workloads to the cloud

Messaging services vendor Interop Technologies runs three data centers to provide services to customers and to run its own back-office systems. Interop also provides turnkey hardware/software solutions that run at customer sites. Pandemic-related hardware shortages, particularly those of servers and storage, have put a severe crimp in the way it does business."When you go to procurement, you get so much push-back," said Joshua Collazo, the company's director of infrastructure. "This is back ordered, that is back ordered."Before the pandemic, the company was able to jump on opportunities quickly. "That's gone away," he said. "Ad-hoc has gone the way of the dodo for us."To read this article in full, please click here

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Supply chain woes forcing more workloads to the cloud

Messaging services vendor Interop Technologies runs three data centers to provide services to customers and to run its own back-office systems. Interop also provides turnkey hardware/software solutions that run at customer sites. Pandemic-related hardware shortages, particularly those of servers and storage, have put a severe crimp in the way it does business."When you go to procurement, you get so much push-back," said Joshua Collazo, the company's director of infrastructure. "This is back ordered, that is back ordered."Before the pandemic, the company was able to jump on opportunities quickly. "That's gone away," he said. "Ad-hoc has gone the way of the dodo for us."To read this article in full, please click here

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Linux sound devices are a mess

It started with a pretty simple requirement: I just want to know which sound card is which.

Background about the setup

I sometimes play around with amateur radios. Very often I connect them to computers to play around. E.g. JS8Call, FT8, SSTV, AX.25, and some other things.

This normally works very well. I just connect radio control over a serial port, and the audio using a cheap USB audio dongle. Sometimes the radio has USB support and delivers both a serial control port and an audio interface over the same cable.

The problem

So what if I connect two radios at the same time? How do I know which sound card, and which serial port, is which?

Both serial ports (/dev/ttyUSB<n>) and audio device numbers and names depend on the order that the devices were detected, or plugged in, which is not stable.

The fix for serial ports

Serial ports are relatively easy. You just tell udev to create some consistent symlinks based on the serial number of the USB device.

For example here’s the setup for a raspberry pi that sees various radios at various times (with some serial numbers obscured) Continue reading

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Weekend Reads 121721

Unfortunately, when engineers are entrusted with the task of delivering smooth video streaming to our users, we face numerous challenges from ‘last-mile’ wireless connections.

Exploit code has been released for a serious code-execution vulnerability in Log4j, an open source logging utility that’s used in countless apps, including those used by large enterprise organizations, several websites reported last Thursday.

The Tuesday outage at an Amazon Web Services data center affected services from several collaboration software vendors, highlighting how reliant companies have become on cloud providers for a variety of workplace tools.

Amazon.com Inc.’s ubiquitous cloud-computing network, the spine for a lot of digital communications and transactions across the U.S., went dark for several hours on Tuesday.

This is the hoarder’s mentality. “I can’t use this right now, but maybe I will some other time.”

More than 35,000 Java packages, amounting to over 8% of the Maven Central repository (the most significant Java package repository), have been impacted by the recently disclosed log4j vulnerabilities

So much for a quiet holiday season: CVE-2021-44228 (aka Log4Shell) may well be the most impactful vulnerability we’ve seen in years.

Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new attack technique that makes it possible Continue reading

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Drawing a Concise Road Map for Enterprise Edge Computing Deployments

Edge computing is quickly transitioning from a theoretical concept to a realistic deployment option in the enterprise. What’s been missing, however, is a detailed technical framework that IT architects can use as a guide.

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Supporting Remix with full stack Cloudflare Pages

We announced the open beta of full stack Cloudflare Pages in November and have since seen widespread uptake from developers looking to add dynamic functionality to their applications. Today, we're excited to announce Pages' support for Remix applications, powered by our full stack platform.

The new kid on the block: Remix

Remix is a new framework that is focused on fully utilizing the power of the web. Like Cloudflare Workers, it uses modern JavaScript APIs, and it places emphasis on web fundamentals such as meaningful HTTP status codes, caching and optimizing for both usability and performance. One of the biggest features of Remix is its transportability: Remix provides a platform-agnostic interface and adapters allowing it to be deployed to a growing number of providers. Cloudflare Workers was available at Remix's launch, but what makes Workers different in this case, is the native compatibility that Workers can offer.

One of the main inspirations for Remix was the way Cloudflare Workers uses native web APIs for handling HTTP requests and responses. It's a brilliant decision because developers are able to reuse knowledge on the server that they gained building apps in the browser! Remix runs natively on Cloudflare Workers, and the results Continue reading

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A Recipe for Presentation Success

When I was a kid, I loved to help my mother bake. My absolute favorite thing to make was a pecan pie. I made sure I was always the one that got to do the work to fix it during the holidays. When I was first starting out I made sure I followed the recipe to the letter. I mixed everything in the order that it was listed. One of the first times I made the pie I melted the butter and poured it into the mixture which also had an egg. To my horror I saw the egg starting to cook and scramble in the bowl due to the hot butter. When I asked my mom she chuckled and said, “Now you get to learn about why the recipe isn’t always right.”

Throughout my career in IT and in presentations, I’ve also had to learn about why even if the recipe for success is written down properly there are other things you need to take into account before you put everything together. Just like tempering a mixture or properly creaming butter and sugar together, you may find that you need to do some things in a different order Continue reading

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When Supply-Chain Attacks Meet CI/CD Infrastructures

Supply-chain attacks can be so destructive that they are often considered black-swan events. Often, the most upsetting aspect of the attack is that it manages to compromise what is normally deemed to be safe by definition — whether that’s a software component or an MSP (managed service provider). The result is that our understanding of perimeters, security boundaries, and/or best practices is often flipped upside down.

Consider, for example, the SolarWinds attack back in December 2020: disguised as a normal software update, attackers managed to implant a pre-crafted backdoor on thousands of customers, which led many frantic security teams to discover that their network perimeter had already been breached several months before. Another (and even more destructive) attack took place in July 2021: by exploiting a vulnerability in Kaseya VSA servers, attackers managed to infect hundreds of MSPs, which in turn deployed the REvil ransomware to thousands of customers, breaking the assumption of a safe boundary between different IT infrastructures.

Fast forward to October 2021. An innocent bug report alerted the entire NPM developer community that a core open-source library had been hacked. Fortunately, the community quickly handled and fixed the issue. But, had it not been detected, the potential Continue reading

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Heavy Networking 611: Data Center Networking And Observability In 2022 (Sponsored)

As we approach the end of 2021, it's informative to look back at how much change has gone on in the industry. One of the biggest transitions we've seen in enterprise networking has taken place in the data center. Software-defined approaches that emerged over the past decade have matured and are being deployed in production. On today's Heavy Networking, we talk with Juniper Networks in a sponsored episode about its Apstra Intent-Based Networking (IBN) platform and how Apstra is transforming the enterprise data center.

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Heavy Networking 611: Data Center Networking And Observability In 2022 (Sponsored)

As we approach the end of 2021, it's informative to look back at how much change has gone on in the industry. One of the biggest transitions we've seen in enterprise networking has taken place in the data center. Software-defined approaches that emerged over the past decade have matured and are being deployed in production. On today's Heavy Networking, we talk with Juniper Networks in a sponsored episode about its Apstra Intent-Based Networking (IBN) platform and how Apstra is transforming the enterprise data center.

The post Heavy Networking 611: Data Center Networking And Observability In 2022 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.