Experiment with Calico BGP in the Comfort of Your Own Laptop!

Yes, you read that right – in the comfort of your own laptop, as in, the entire environment running inside your laptop! Why? Well, read on. It’s a bit of a long one, but there is a lot of my learning that I would like to share.

I often find that Calico Open Source users ask me about BGP, and whether they need to use it, with a little trepidation. BGP carries an air of mystique for many IT engineers, for two reasons. Firstly, before its renaissance as a data center protocol, BGP was seen to be the domain of ISPs and service provider networks. Secondly, many high-profile and high-impact Internet outages have been due to BGP misuse or misconfiguration.

The short answer to the question is that in public cloud Kubernetes deployments, it is almost never necessary to configure or use BGP to make best use of Calico Open Source. Even in on-premise Kubernetes deployments, it is only needed in certain scenarios; you shouldn’t configure BGP unless you know why you need it. It is even less common to require complex BGP setups involving route reflectors and the like.

If you’re unsure what you need, the best plan is Continue reading

That’s It for 2021

It’s hard to believe, but another year has swooshed by, and it’s time to shut down my virtual office and disappear until mid-January. Of course I’ll be around in case of urgent support problems – I will read my email, but won’t reply to 90% of the stuff coming in.

I hope you’ll be able to find a few days to disconnect from the crazy pace of networking world and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2022!

That’s It for 2021

It’s hard to believe, but another year has swooshed by, and it’s time to shut down my virtual office and disappear until mid-January. Of course I’ll be around in case of urgent support problems – I will read my email, but won’t reply to 90% of the stuff coming in.

I hope you’ll be able to find a few days to disconnect from the crazy pace of networking world and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2022!

Log4j flaw needs immediate remediation

After nearly two years of adopting major network and security changes wrought by COVID-19 and hybrid work, weary IT network and security teams didn’t need another big issue to take care of, but they have one: Stemming potential damage from the recently disclosed vulnerability in open source Java-logging Apache Log4j software.  Log4j or Log4Shell has been around a long time—it was released in January, 2001—and is widely used in all manner of enterprise and consumer services, websites, and applications. Experts describe the system as an easy-to-use common utility to support client/server application development.To read this article in full, please click here

Log4j flaw needs immediate remediation

After nearly two years of adopting major network and security changes wrought by COVID-19 and hybrid work, weary IT network and security teams didn’t need another big issue to take care of, but they have one: Stemming potential damage from the recently disclosed vulnerability in open source Java-logging Apache Log4j software.  Log4j or Log4Shell has been around a long time—it was released in January, 2001—and is widely used in all manner of enterprise and consumer services, websites, and applications. Experts describe the system as an easy-to-use common utility to support client/server application development.To read this article in full, please click here

IPv6 Buzz 91: Thanks For Listening To IPv6 Buzz In 2021!

In this episode we discuss presentations at the recent UK IPv6 Council meeting. More importantly, we say thanks to you, our listeners, for keeping IPv6 Buzz in your IT podcast playlist this tumultuous year---as well as for all the great listener questions and feedback. We'll see you again in 0x7e6 (2022, that is) for even more adventures in the 128-bit IPv6 wormhole!

IPv6 Buzz 91: Thanks For Listening To IPv6 Buzz In 2021!

In this episode we discuss presentations at the recent UK IPv6 Council meeting. More importantly, we say thanks to you, our listeners, for keeping IPv6 Buzz in your IT podcast playlist this tumultuous year---as well as for all the great listener questions and feedback. We'll see you again in 0x7e6 (2022, that is) for even more adventures in the 128-bit IPv6 wormhole!

The post IPv6 Buzz 91: Thanks For Listening To IPv6 Buzz In 2021! appeared first on Packet Pushers.

10 Criteria to Evaluate Your Cloud Network Security Solution

As organizations expand their cloud adoption and business-critical use cases, security of their cloud infrastructure often becomes more complex. For this reason, analysts and advisors recommend that organizations take a unified, multilayer approach to protect their cloud deployments and ensure a robust cloud security posture. Approaches like the one just mentioned have eased security concerns, as cited in a shared responsibility model, at the infrastructure layer (IaaS), cloud providers are responsible for securing their compute-network-storage infrastructure resources. This leaves cloud users responsible for protecting the data, apps and other assets deployed on the infrastructure. Cloud providers offer a number of tools and services to help users uphold their end of the shared responsibility model, and they are important elements Continue reading

What’s new: network automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1

A financial customer explained his first automation priority in the most visual and understandable way: “I want to paint all of my network devices with the color of the company.” What I like about that analogy is that it clearly describes the first rule for automation: customers must define their golden configurations (the color to paint) to be able to automate configurations and later assess compliance, and remediate any issues accordingly. 

A “golden configuration” usually refers to a Day 1 configuration, and covers the minimal settings needed for a network device to be configured after a fresh network operating system installation. This usually includes common services such as NTP, DNS, AAA, Syslog, SNMP, and ACLs for management connectivity. 

As part of this blog, I will provide an overview for new automation capabilities available to achieve some of these Day 1 configuration activities. In addition to the enhancements for network configuration management, I will cover new Ansible Automation Platform capabilities that are frequently required by our network customers, such as:

  • Detailing common operational benefits of Ansible Automation Platform.

  • Measuring the value of automation use cases.

  • Leveraging execution environments and automation mesh.

Certified Collections available in Ansible automation hub

Continue reading

From 0 to 20 billion – How We Built Crawler Hints

From 0 to 20 billion - How We Built Crawler Hints
From 0 to 20 billion - How We Built Crawler Hints

In July 2021, as part of Impact Innovation Week, we announced our intention to launch Crawler Hints as a means to reduce the environmental impact of web searches. We spent the weeks following the announcement hard at work, and in October 2021, we announced General Availability for the first iteration of the product. This post explains how we built it, some of the interesting engineering problems we had to solve, and shares some metrics on how it's going so far.

Before We Begin...

Search indexers crawl sites periodically to check for new content. Algorithms vary by search provider, but are often based on either a regular interval or cadence of past updates, and these crawls are often not aligned with real world content changes. This naive crawling approach may harm customer page rank and also works to the detriment of search engines with respect to their operational costs and environmental impact. To make the Internet greener and more energy efficient, the goal of Crawler Hints is to help search indexers make more informed decisions on when content has changed, saving valuable compute cycles/bandwidth and having a net positive environmental impact.

Cloudflare is in an advantageous position to help inform Continue reading

Enterprise networking, 2022: Applying remote-work lessons as employees return to the office

As employees return to the office, IT teams can apply the lessons they learned supporting remote workers to transform their networks.Technologies such as SD-WAN and secure-access service edge (SASE) could continue to be useful. Network-as-a-service, (NaaS), is still in its early stages but could provide agility when it comes to acquiring network equipment. But, as the chip shortage and broader supply-chain issues continue to plague the tech industry, IT must be prepared to make compromises and prioritize needs in order to complete essential network projects.Brandon Butler, a research manager at IDC covering enterprise networking, joins Juliet to discuss what enterprise networking trends he predicts to see in 2022.To read this article in full, please click here

Marvell’s Silicon Strategy: Optimized Components For Different Workloads

Marvell has been rapidly building itself into a diversified supplier of IT infrastructure components. Through a combination of organic growth and recent acquisitions, Marvell has expanded its quarterly revenue by almost 70 percent over the past two years to more than $3.9 billion over the last four quarters. 2021 sales were greatly aided by two […]

The post Marvell’s Silicon Strategy: Optimized Components For Different Workloads appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Protection against CVE-2021-45046, the additional Log4j RCE vulnerability

Protection against CVE-2021-45046, the additional Log4j RCE vulnerability
Protection against CVE-2021-45046, the additional Log4j RCE vulnerability

Hot on the heels of CVE-2021-44228 a second Log4J CVE has been filed CVE-2021-45046. The rules that we previously released for CVE-2021-44228 give the same level of protection for this new CVE.

This vulnerability is actively being exploited and anyone using Log4J should update to version 2.16.0 as soon as possible, even if you have previously updated to 2.15.0. The latest version can be found on the Log4J download page.

Customers using the Cloudflare WAF have three rules to help mitigate any exploit attempts:

Rule ID Description Default Action
100514 (legacy WAF)
6b1cc72dff9746469d4695a474430f12 (new WAF)		 Log4J Headers BLOCK
100515 (legacy WAF)
0c054d4e4dd5455c9ff8f01efe5abb10 (new WAF)		 Log4J Body BLOCK
100516 (legacy WAF)
5f6744fa026a4638bda5b3d7d5e015dd (new WAF)		 Log4J URL BLOCK

The mitigation has been split across three rules inspecting HTTP headers, body and URL respectively.

In addition to the above rules we have also released a fourth rule that will protect against a much wider range of attacks at the cost of a higher false positive rate. For that reason we have made it available but not set it to BLOCK by default:

Rule ID Description Default Action
100517 (legacy WAF)
2c5413e155db4365befe0df160ba67d7 (new WAF)		 Log4J Advanced URI, Headers DISABLED

Who Continue reading

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