Enterprise networking trends in 2021: Preparing for the new normal

A year into the coronavirus pandemic, IT continues to support remote employees. As organizations begin planning to bring workers back into the office, IT must now consider upgrading their networks to best support employees in a post-COVID world. IDC Senior Research Analyst for enterprise networking, Brandon Butler, joins Juliet to discuss what permanent changes IT should implement as workers prepare to return to the office, and how these changes differ from the temporary solutions put into place last year. From upgrading to Wi-Fi 6, to implementing SD-WAN, to shifting network management to the cloud, Brandon explains what steps IT teams can take to make the transition back to the office seamless for in-person and remote employees alike.To read this article in full, please click here

Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live Global 2021 – Anniversary

We made it through the year that was March 2020. Here were are on the other side trying to find out whatever this normal is supposed to look like. We’re not out of the woods yet but we do know that things aren’t going to be back to the way they were any time soon. That includes the events that we enjoyed traveling to and hanging out at.

Cisco Live has made the decision to go virtual again this year. One can’t blame them to be honest. Travel uncertainty and the potential liability of having a huge event just didn’t make sense. If you thought the old Conference Crud was bad you really don’t want this new-and-improved version! Cisco has also decided that one global event makes more sense than several events scattered across the calendar. That means that Cisco Live Europe and Cisco Live US are now global and happening at the end of March instead of January or June.

With the announcement that everything will be virtual again this year it also means that the social aspect of the event is going to be virtual as well. As much as we would have liked to hang out at Continue reading

Member News: Celebrating a Safer Internet

Safe learning: The Nigeria Chapter of the Internet Society celebrated Safer Internet Day with workshops about online safety at schools across the country. Chapter representatives talked to students about several topics, including fake news, online scams, phishing, and clickbait. The two-day workshops included in-person events that complied with COVID-19 social distancing rules, and an online discussion.

Internet to the village: The Kyrgyzstan Chapter has been working to bring Internet access to the village of Zardaly, in a remote and mountainous region of the southwest region of the country. The project has begun with a detailed study of the area, after which radio translators will be ordered and installed. The chapter has also posted an update about its Ilimbox project, an Internet-in-a-box device that, contains basic educational materials available without an Internet connection. The device has now been installed in 20 schools.

No registration required: The Hong Kong Chapter is among a coalition of groups opposing a proposal from the Chinese government that would require users of smartphones to register using their real names. Real-time registration won’t be effective in fighting crime and could hinder scientific research, the chapter said. “The real-name system cannot prevent crimes committed by using overseas calls Continue reading

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice
The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

My name is Alice Bracchi, and I’m the technical and UX writer for Cloudflare for Teams, Cloudflare's Zero Trust and Secure Web Gateway solution.

Today I want to talk about product voice — what it is, why it matters, and how I set out to find a product voice for Cloudflare for Teams.

On the Cloudflare for Teams Dashboard (or as we informally call it, “the Teams Dash”), our customers have full control over the security of their network. Administrators can replace their VPN with a solution that runs on Zero Trust rules, turning Cloudflare's network into their secure corporate network. Customers can secure all traffic by configuring L7 firewall rules and DNS filtering policies, and organizations have the ability to isolate web browsing to suspicious sites.

All in one place.

As you can see, a lot of action takes place on the Teams Dash. As an interface, it grows and changes at a rapid pace. This poses a lot of interesting challenges from a design point of view — in our early days, because we were focused on solving problems fast, many of our experiences ended up feeling a bit disjointed. Sure, users were able to Continue reading

Video: Path Discovery in Transparent Bridging and Routing

In the previous video in this series, I described how path discovery works in source routing and virtual circuit environments. I couldn’t squeeze the discussion of hop-by-hop forwarding into the same video (it would make the video way too long); you’ll find it in the next video in the same section.

The video is part of How Networks Really Work webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

Video: Path Discovery in Transparent Bridging and Routing

In the previous video in this series, I described how path discovery works in source routing and virtual circuit environments. I couldn’t squeeze the discussion of hop-by-hop forwarding into the same video (it would make the video way too long); you’ll find it in the next video in the same section.

The video is part of How Networks Really Work webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

What Is Technical Marketing??? – Video

Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing at Morpheus Data, joins the Day Two Cloud podcast for a discussion. To hear this entire conversation, GO HERE. And hey, have a great day. You’re doing an outstanding job. ? You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as they are published. It’s a […]

The post What Is Technical Marketing??? – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

5 Key Takeaways from IstioCon 2021

Lin Sun Lin is the Director of Open-Source at Solo.io. She has worked on Istio service mesh since 2017 and serves on the Istio Technical Oversight Committee. Previously, she served on the Istio Steering Committee for three years and was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book Istio Explained and has more than 200 patents to her name. This year’s first-ever Istio service mesh connects microservices. As the conference program co-chair, I had the incredible honor to work with the rest of the program committee to select conference submissions from a diverse range of world-class speakers. I wanted to share my five key takeaways from the show: 2020: A Year of Istio Innovation I have heard repeatedly from users that Istio is much easier to use thanks to the consolidation of all control plane components into Istiod. The removal of Mixer and the introduction of Web Assembly extensibility capabilities has also been widely lauded by the community. A complete list Continue reading

The Hedge #73: Daniel Teycheney and Open Source in Networking

Combining, or stitching together, open source projects to build something unique for your network is becoming more common. What does this look like in the real world? What are some of the positive and negative aspects of building things this way? How do open source projects interact with the commercial world? Daniel Teycheney joins Tom Ammon, Jett Tantsura, and Russ White to discuss open source software in networking, particularly around network monitoring and management.

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Join Us Next Week for Docker’s Community All-Hands

Next week, on Thursday March 11th, 2021 (8am PST/5pm CET) we’ll be hosting our next quarterly Docker Community All-Hands. This free virtual event, open to everyone, is a unique opportunity for Docker staff and the broader Docker community to come together for company and product updates, live demos, community presentations and a live Q&A. 

As luck would have it, this All-Hands will coincide almost to the day with Docker’s 8th birthday (yay!). To mark the occasion, we’re going to make this event extra special by introducing : 

  • a longer format (ie. 3 hours instead of 1 hour)
  • lots more content (ie. demos, community lightning talks and workshops)
  • regional content in French, Spanish and Portuguese! 

We’re also really excited about the new video platform we’ll be using that makes it much easier for attendees to engage/connect/share with each other.

Who will be presenting

  • Members of Docker’s leadership team including Scott Johnston (CEO), Justin Cormack (CTO), Donnie Berkholz (VP of Products) and Jean-Laurent de Morlhon (VP of Engineering)
  • Members of Docker’s product, engineering and community team
  • Docker Captains and Community Leaders

What we’ll cover

  • Company vision and product roadmap for 2021 and beyond
  • High-level overview of Docker’s technology strategy 
  • Continue reading

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs

Intro

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs

We have been working with conntrack, the connection tracking layer in the Linux kernel, for years. And yet, despite the collected know-how, questions about its inner workings occasionally come up. When they do, it is hard to resist the temptation to go digging for answers.

One such question popped up while writing the previous blog post on conntrack:

“Why are there no entries in the conntrack table for SYN packets dropped by the firewall?”

Ready for a deep dive into the network stack? Let’s find out.

Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs
Image by chulmin park from Pixabay

We already know from last time that conntrack is in charge of tracking incoming and outgoing network traffic. By running conntrack -L we can inspect existing network flows, or as conntrack calls them, connections.

So if we spin up a toy VM, connect to it over SSH, and inspect the contents of the conntrack table, we will see…

$ vagrant init fedora/33-cloud-base
$ vagrant up
…
$ vagrant ssh
Last login: Sun Jan 31 15:08:02 2021 from 192.168.122.1
[vagrant@ct-vm ~]$ sudo conntrack -L
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 0 flow entries have been shown.

… nothing!

Even though the conntrack kernel Continue reading

New Ansible Data Validation Module(s)

A few months ago I described how you could use JSON Schema to validate your automation data models, host/group variable files, or even Ansible inventory file.

I had to use a weird toolchain to get it done – either ansible-inventory to build a complete data model from various inventory sources, or yq to convert YAML to JSON… and just for the giggles jsonschema CLI command requires the JSON input to reside in a file, so you have to use a temporary file to get the job done.