5 Ways to Save Costs on Microsoft Azure
To ensure costs remain at the desired level, organizations need to manage resource consumption. Azure offers a wide range of tools to help.Heavy Networking 568: Effective Technical Communication
Today's Heavy Networking explores how to communicate complex, nuanced technical topics to non-technical people. We examine how to balance finicky details with broader outcomes, discuss the value of editing and review, share writing tips, and more.Heavy Networking 568: Effective Technical Communication
Today's Heavy Networking explores how to communicate complex, nuanced technical topics to non-technical people. We examine how to balance finicky details with broader outcomes, discuss the value of editing and review, share writing tips, and more.
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HDMI Dummy Plug Success with VNC!
Spoiler alert, but I am pleased to report back that my experiment with adding an HDMI dummy plug to my Dell laptop has fixed my issues with VNC.
As I theorized in my post “VNC Cannot Currently Show the Desktop” and have since confirmed, when the laptop lid is closed, the laptop disconnects the monitor and Windows runs truly “headless”. Unfortunately VNC uses DirectX Desktop Duplication to grab a copy of what would be on the screen, and if there’s no screen there’s nothing for VNC to grab an duplicate copy of, so VNC is left doing a lot of hard work grabbing screen images using CPU rather than using the far more efficient DirectX shortcuts.
My proposed solution to this was to order an HDMI Dummy Plug, a little HDMI connector which pretends to be an HDMI monitor so that the laptop believes it has an active monitor connected. My other hope was that by having a fake external monitor for VNC to mirror, I might also be able to set it up with a higher resolution than the laptop’s own internal 1920×1080 screen, which might allow me to have a higher resolution remote session using VNC. Continue reading
Adding a MachineHealthCheck using Kustomize
MachineHealthChecks are a powerful feature in the Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI), and something I played around with not too long ago on TGIK 143. Recently, I was helping to document the use of kustomize with Cluster API for inclusion in the upstream CAPI documentation, and I learned a simple trick with kustomize that I’d apparently overlooked in the past. If you’ve used kustomize for any great length of time you probably already know and have used the functionality I’ll describe in this post, but if you’re new to kustomize or, like me, a user of kustomize that hasn’t had time to dig into all of its functionality, then read on and see how you can use kustomize to add a MachineHealthCheck to a CAPI workload cluster.
If you’re not familiar with kustomize, then reading my introduction to kustomize may be useful before continuing on with the rest of this article.
In this use case—adding a MachineHealthCheck to an workload cluster in CAPI—I’ll work from the assumption that you have a “base” CAPI workload cluster definition (perhaps one you’ve generated using clusterctl config cluster). In the directory where this workload cluster manifest exists, you’d need to add a kustomization. Continue reading
Cloud Networking With Alkira – A Packet Pushers Livestream Event
Join the Packet Pushers for our inaugural Livestream with cloud networking company Alkira on April 22nd. In this live, online event we’ll take a deep dive into Alkira’s Network Cloud platform, which lets you deploy and manage single and multi-cloud networks. The Packet Pushers will host the event, and interview Alkira executives and customers. We’ll […]
The post Cloud Networking With Alkira – A Packet Pushers Livestream Event appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Cloudflare and WordPress.com partner to Help Build a Better Internet
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We’ve been at it since 2009 and we’re making progress — with approximately 25 million Internet properties being secured and accelerated by our platform.
When we look at other companies that not only have the scale to impact the Internet, but who are also on a similar mission, it’s hard to ignore Automattic, maintainers of the ubiquitous open-source WordPress software and owner of one the web’s largest WordPress hosting platforms WordPress.com, where up to 409 million people read 20 billion pages every month.1
Privacy First Web Analytics
When we started brainstorming ways to combine our impact, one shared value stood out: privacy. We both share a vision for a more private Internet. Today we’re excited to announce a number of initiatives, starting with the integration of Cloudflare’s privacy-first web analytics into WordPress.com. This integration gives WordPress.com publishers choice in how they collect usage data and derive insights about their visitors.
Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress
This is not the first time Continue reading
Third Time’s the Cache, No More
Caching is a big part of how Cloudflare CDN makes the Internet faster and more reliable. When a visitor to a customer’s website requests an asset, we retrieve it from the customer’s origin server. After that first request, in many cases we cache that asset. Whenever anyone requests it again, we can serve it from one of our data centers close to them, dramatically speeding up load times.
Did you notice the small caveat? We cache after the first request in many cases, not all. One notable exception since 2010 up until now: requests with query strings. When a request came with a query string (think https://example.com/image.jpg?width=500; the ?width=500 is the query string), we needed to see it a whole three times before we would cache it on our default cache level. Weird!
This is a short tale of that strange exception, why we thought we needed it, and how, more than ten years later, we showed ourselves that we didn’t.
Two MISSes too many
To see the exception in action, here’s a command we ran a couple weeks ago. It requests an image hosted on example.com five times and prints each response’s CF-Cache-Status header. Continue reading
Interview: Is Networking Dead?
A few weeks ago I enjoyed a long-overdue chat with David Bombal. David published the first part of it under the click-bait headline Is Networking Dead (he renamed it Is There any Future for Networking Engineers in the meantime).
According to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer to his original headline is NO (and the second headline violates that law – there you go 🤷♂️). If you’re still interested in the details, watch the interview.
Interview: Is Networking Dead?
A few weeks ago I enjoyed a long-overdue chat with David Bombal. David published the first part of it under the click-bait headline Is Networking Dead (he renamed it Is There any Future for Networking Engineers in the meantime).
According to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer to his original headline is NO (and the second headline violates that law – there you go ?♂️). If you’re still interested in the details, watch the interview.
CIO Agenda for Right Now: Priorities a Year Into the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we do everything. Now it's time to assess the changes and refactor your operations and digital transformation plan.The Importance of Computer Network Security for Your Home
There is a computer in every home. Let that be your personal computer, your laptop or a family computer that everyone uses. The fact is that most of your information is on your computer and you carry it around without fear in the world, knowing that all your data is safe.
The fact is that most of your information, that is stored inside your computer at home is not protected. It is easy to get into and easy to use against you. So, what can you do? At our company, we ensure that we provide you with the right network security to protect your computer against any virus.
So, before you are told about the importance of computer network security for your home, you must first understand how you can make it secure. There are a couple of tips that will help you in the long run.
Make a Difficult Password
Most break-ins to your network happen because the Wi-Fi password that you have is weak. Yes, having a password that you can remember is essential, but having a long and complicated password protects your network system thoroughly, and it is harder to crack through it. By doing so, your Continue reading
Sponsored Post: Kinsta, 3T, Bridgecrew, Toptal, IP2Location, Ipdata, StackHawk, InterviewCamp.io, Educative, Triplebyte, Stream, Fauna
Who's Hiring?
- DevOps Engineer: At Kinsta, we set out to create the best managed hosting platform in the world. If you are an experienced DevOps Engineer who is constantly looking for ways to innovate and improve, we might just be the place for you! As Kinsta’s DevOps Engineer, you will be instrumental in making sure that our infrastructure is always on the bleeding edge of technology, remaining stable and high-performing at all times. If you love working with Linux, have a background in PHP, and have worked with cutting-edge technologies, such as Ansible and LXC, check us out and apply here.
- SysOps Engineer: As Kinsta’s SysOps Engineer, you’ll play a key role in caring for the health of our servers, preventing issues, and responding immediately to mitigate any problems in our infrastructure. If you have experience in hosting and with the WordPress stack, have worked with Ubuntu or Debian-based systems, and cutting-edge technologies, such Ansible and LXC, you should definitely check us out and apply here!
- JavaScript Developer: Kinsta’s Development Team aims to create truly effective solutions for our customers and our internal teams. We believe the only way to maintain and scale Continue reading
VMware to Help Customers Make Modern Apps More Secure with Acquisition of Mesh7
By Tom Gillis, SVP/GM, Networking and Security Business Unit, VMware
EDITORIAL UPDATE: On March 31, 2021 VMware officially closed its acquisition of Mesh7. The blog post originally appeared on March 18, 2021 below and has been amended to reflect that announcement.
With the VMware Virtual Cloud Network, we are delivering a modern network that understands the needs of applications and programmatically delivers connectivity and security services to meet those requirements. The ultimate result is a better experience for both users and applications. We are furthering our efforts to make modern applications more secure with our acquisition of Mesh7, which closed today. The Mesh7 technology will enable VMware to bring visibility, discovery, and better security to APIs.
So why is this important?
Customers are driving app modernization to shed the legacy of monolithic applications, to free IT and developers from single, rigid environments, and to make every service, every team, and every business more agile. Modern applications require reliable connectivity, dynamic service discovery, and the ability to automate changes quickly without disruption as they extend across multi-cloud environments. Security teams and operators need better visibility into application behavior and overall security posture, and the developer experience needs to lead to Continue reading
Docker Community All Hands Recap
We are sharing a recap of last week’s second quarterly Community All-Hands and the feedback we got from the community.
The Community All-Hands deepen our engagement with the Docker community and bring users, contributors and staff together on a quarterly basis. It is an opportunity for the community to get updates on what we’re working on and align on priorities for the year. It also provides a live forum for the community to engage and ask questions directly to Docker’s executive and community leadership.
In December, we wrote that we wanted to build on the feedback we got after our first Community All-Hands and that we are committed to providing more content, a longer format and make it more interactive for attendees. To this end, we chose to extend the event by 2 hours and include parallel tracks with more speakers and a mix of live keynotes, workshops, lightning talks and regional content. We also picked the Tulu.la video platform to host the event, leveraging their awesome innovative features (eg. integrated chat, multi-casting, WebRTC).
These improvements paid off in an impressive way: we had close to 3,000 unique attendees (including Youtube-live stream viewers), almost tripling the number of Continue reading
3D XPoint Memory At The Crossroads
Like many system architects the world over, we had high hopes for the 3D XPoint variant of phase change memory (PCM) when it launched with much fanfare back in July 2015 after being developed jointly by Intel and Micron Technology for many, many years. …
3D XPoint Memory At The Crossroads was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.