MIRA Project to Provide Overview of Internet’s Resiliency in Africa

Internet resilience is the ability of a network to maintain an acceptable level of service at all times. The Internet  plays a critical role in society and the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of reliable and stable Internet connectivity. However, not all countries have Internet infrastructure that is robust enough to provide an acceptable […]

The post MIRA Project to Provide Overview of Internet’s Resiliency in Africa appeared first on Internet Society.

Born In The Cloud Enterprise Case Study With Tekion – Packet Pushers LiveStream With Alkira (Video 2)

Tekion builds cloud-based applications for the automotive retail industry. The company uses Alkira’s cloud networking product to connect a network of automobile dealerships to an array of cloud-hosted services. In this video, the Packet Pushers’ Ethan Banks talks to Tekion’s Jamie Fox. They discuss how the Alkira platform enables Tekion to leverage multiple clouds with […]

The post Born In The Cloud Enterprise Case Study With Tekion – Packet Pushers LiveStream With Alkira (Video 2) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Using Gimp to modify PDF files

If you’ve never used Gimp—a free image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and other operating systems—you might be quite surprised by its capabilitiesI use it for everything from Facebook posts when the available backgrounds don’t work well for what I want to say to political buttons that I design and press out using a button-making machine.Converting and manipulating image files with Linux commands Gimp can do everything from resizing and cropping images to adding text, changing colors or distorting images in artistic ways. You can use it to draw with its pencil or paintbrush and layer additional images. It’s quite a versatile tool. Yet I only recently noticed that it can also be used to manipulate PDF files, not just the many types of image files that most people use it to create, modify or enhance.To read this article in full, please click here

The timeline for quantum computing is getting shorter

Financial traders rely heavily on computer financial simulations for making buying and selling decisions. Specifically, “Monte Carlo” simulations are used to assess risk and simulate prices for a wide range of financial instruments. These simulations also can be used in corporate finance and for portfolio management.But in a digital world where other industries routinely leverage real-time data, financial traders are working with the digital equivalent of the Pony Express. That’s because Monte Carlo simulations involve such an insanely large number of complex calculations that they consume more time and computational resources than a 14-team, two-quarterback online fantasy football league with Superflex position.To read this article in full, please click here

Using Gimp to modify PDF files

If you’ve never used Gimp—a free image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and other operating systems—you might be quite surprised by its capabilitiesI use it for everything from Facebook posts when the available backgrounds don’t work well for what I want to say to political buttons that I design and press out using a button-making machine.Converting and manipulating image files with Linux commands Gimp can do everything from resizing and cropping images to adding text, changing colors or distorting images in artistic ways. You can use it to draw with its pencil or paintbrush and layer additional images. It’s quite a versatile tool. Yet I only recently noticed that it can also be used to manipulate PDF files, not just the many types of image files that most people use it to create, modify or enhance.To read this article in full, please click here

The timeline for quantum computing is getting shorter

Financial traders rely heavily on computer financial simulations for making buying and selling decisions. Specifically, “Monte Carlo” simulations are used to assess risk and simulate prices for a wide range of financial instruments. These simulations also can be used in corporate finance and for portfolio management.But in a digital world where other industries routinely leverage real-time data, financial traders are working with the digital equivalent of the Pony Express. That’s because Monte Carlo simulations involve such an insanely large number of complex calculations that they consume more time and computational resources than a 14-team, two-quarterback online fantasy football league with Superflex position.To read this article in full, please click here

Packet Bursts in Data Center Fabrics

When I wrote about the (non)impact of switching latency, I was (also) thinking about packet bursts jamming core data center fabric links when I mentioned the elephants in the room… but when I started writing about them, I realized they might be yet another red herring (together with the supposed need for large buffers in data center switches).

Here’s how it looks like from my ignorant perspective when considering a simple leaf-and-spine network like the one in the following diagram. Please feel free to set me straight, I honestly can’t figure out where I went astray.

Read more …

Packet Bursts in Data Center Fabrics

When I wrote about the (non)impact of switching latency, I was (also) thinking about packet bursts jamming core data center fabric links when I mentioned the elephants in the room… but when I started writing about them, I realized they might be yet another red herring (together with the supposed need for large buffers in data center switches).

Here’s how it looks like from my ignorant perspective when considering a simple leaf-and-spine network like the one in the following diagram. Please feel free to set me straight, I honestly can’t figure out where I went astray.

Read more …

Chip shortage will hit IT-hardware buyers for months to years

A shortage of all sorts of processors and other components could affect the availability and price of IT hardware for the next 12 to 18 months, according to CEOs of major tech companies including Intel, IBM, Extreme, Cisco and Juniper.COVID-19 triggered an explosion of the global remote workforce, which created an extraordinary demand for new tech gear. It also forced the shutdown of processor plants, and restarting them and renewing supply chains to their pre-pandemic state will be a lengthy process, according to industry executives and analysts. Beyond the pandemic, a recent fire at a large chip plant in Japan didn’t help.To read this article in full, please click here

Chip shortage will hit IT-hardware buyers for months to years

A shortage of all sorts of processors and other components could affect the availability and price of IT hardware for the next 12 to 18 months, according to CEOs of major tech companies including Intel, IBM, Extreme, Cisco and Juniper.COVID-19 triggered an explosion of the global remote workforce, which created an extraordinary demand for new tech gear. It also forced the shutdown of processor plants, and restarting them and renewing supply chains to their pre-pandemic state will be a lengthy process, according to industry executives and analysts. Beyond the pandemic, a recent fire at a large chip plant in Japan didn’t help.To read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: Automating Network Troubleshooting With PathSolutions (Sponsored)

Today we’re talking about automating network troubleshooting. We’re sponsored by PathSolutions, maker of the TotalView network monitoring software. TotalView pulls in network and device data and then runs it through a heuristics engine to identify problems such as cabling faults, QoS misconfigurations, VLAN tagging faults, and others. The engine can surface up issues automatically to help network engineers identify and resolve problems. Our guest is Tim Titus, CTO at PathSolutions.

Tech Bytes: Automating Network Troubleshooting With PathSolutions (Sponsored)

Today we’re talking about automating network troubleshooting. We’re sponsored by PathSolutions, maker of the TotalView network monitoring software. TotalView pulls in network and device data and then runs it through a heuristics engine to identify problems such as cabling faults, QoS misconfigurations, VLAN tagging faults, and others. The engine can surface up issues automatically to help network engineers identify and resolve problems. Our guest is Tim Titus, CTO at PathSolutions.

The post Tech Bytes: Automating Network Troubleshooting With PathSolutions (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 333: Cisco Acquires Optical Controller Software; DarkSide Gang Gets The Spotlight

This week's Network Break covers a pair of Cisco acquisitions, new path analysis capabilities from NetBeez, how the DarkSide ransomware gang is getting the spotlight, sleazy behavior from US broadband companies, and other tech news.

The post Network Break 333: Cisco Acquires Optical Controller Software; DarkSide Gang Gets The Spotlight appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Effectiveness of AS Path Prepending (2)

Last week I began discussing why AS Path Prepend doesn’t always affect traffic the way we think it will. Two other observations from the research paper I’m working off of are:

  • Adding two prepends will move more traffic than adding a single prepend
  • It’s not possible to move traffic incrementally by prepending; when it works, prepending will end up moving most of the traffic from one inbound path to another

A slightly more complex network will help explain these two observations.

Assume AS65000 would like to control the inbound path for 100::/64. I’ve added a link between AS65001 and 65002 here, but we will still find prepending a single AS to the path won’t make much difference in the path used to reach 100::/64. Why?

Because most providers will have a local policy configured—using local preference—that causes them to choose any available customer connection over other paths. AS65001, on receiving the route to 100::/64 from AS65000, will set the local preference so it will prefer this route over any other route, including the one learned from AS65002. So while the cause is a little different in this case than the situation covered in the first post, the result is the Continue reading

VMware Wins 2021 Global InfoSec Award as Market Leader in Firewall 

Today at RSA Conference 2021, we’re excited to announce that VMware is a winner of the CyberDefense Magazine 2021 Global InfoSec Award as Market Leader in Firewall.  One of VMware’s core beliefs is that we need structural and architectural changes to how organizations approach security. This means taking a fresh look at how we approach issues such as internal data center security. This is exactly what led us to deliver the VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall.

The NSX Service-defined Firewall is one of the foundations of VMware Security. This solution is a unique distributed, scale-out internal firewall that protects all east-west traffic across all workloads without network changes. This radically simplifies the security deployment model. It includes a distributed firewall, advanced threat protection, and network traffic analytics. With the VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall, security teams can protect their organizations from cyberattacks that make it past the traditional network perimeter and attempt to move laterally. Its key differentiating capabilities include:

  • Distributed, granular enforcement: The NSX Service-defined Firewall provides distributed and granular enforcement of security policies to deliver protection down to the workload level, eliminating the need for network changes.
  • Scalability and throughput: Because it is distributed, the Service-defined Firewall is elastic, Continue reading

Pure Storage inches toward a cloud business model

Pure Storage is upgrading to its Portworx Enterprise software that improves the scale of Kubernetes while simplifying the process of supporting multiple platforms.Portworx Enterprise 2.8 features new integrations across Pure’s line of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, VMware’s container-orchestration software. It comes with dynamic storage provisioning on Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade hardware and offers unified visibility and support via Pure1, Pure’s AI-drive operations software. Read about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space This allows volumes and file systems to be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. That means containerized workloads can run seamlessly across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and even storage solutions from other vendors.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Storage inches toward a cloud business model

Pure Storage is upgrading to its Portworx Enterprise software that improves the scale of Kubernetes while simplifying the process of supporting multiple platforms.Portworx Enterprise 2.8 features new integrations across Pure’s line of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, VMware’s container-orchestration software. It comes with dynamic storage provisioning on Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade hardware and offers unified visibility and support via Pure1, Pure’s AI-drive operations software. Read about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space This allows volumes and file systems to be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. That means containerized workloads can run seamlessly across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and even storage solutions from other vendors.To read this article in full, please click here

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