Weekend Reads 020224


Everybody likes good news, especially at the beginning of the corporate year, and we are happy to report that TSMC’s revenues in the fourth quarter ended in December 2023 were only down 1.5 percent year on year to $19.62 billion, and were up 13.6 sequentially from the third quarter


HP CEO Enrique Lores admitted this week that the company’s long-term objective is “to make printing a subscription” when he was questioned about the company’s approach to third-party replacement ink suppliers.


The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.


What is cool about DNS over HTTPS is that, well, it uses HTTPS. Because HTTP clients are plentiful and well understood by many developers, it should make for a pretty simple implementation.


However, VPN is no longer good enough to secure remote work. For instance, VPN gives remote employees full network access to corporate resources when they login.


Universally, every person that I put the question to dismissed FWA wireless as a temporary technology with no real long-term legs.


Apple launched the original 128 kB Continue reading

Hedge 211: Learning About Learning

How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.

 

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Thanksgiving 2023 security incident

On Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2023, Cloudflare detected a threat actor on our self-hosted Atlassian server. Our security team immediately began an investigation, cut off the threat actor’s access, and on Sunday, November 26, we brought in CrowdStrike’s Forensic team to perform their own independent analysis.

Yesterday, CrowdStrike completed its investigation, and we are publishing this blog post to talk about the details of this security incident.

We want to emphasize to our customers that no Cloudflare customer data or systems were impacted by this event. Because of our access controls, firewall rules, and use of hard security keys enforced using our own Zero Trust tools, the threat actor’s ability to move laterally was limited. No services were implicated, and no changes were made to our global network systems or configuration. This is the promise of a Zero Trust architecture: it’s like bulkheads in a ship where a compromise in one system is limited from compromising the whole organization.

From November 14 to 17, a threat actor did reconnaissance and then accessed our internal wiki (which uses Atlassian Confluence) and our bug database (Atlassian Jira). On November 20 and 21, we saw additional access indicating they may have come back Continue reading

LangChain Support for Workers AI, Vectorize and D1

During Developer Week, we announced LangChain support for Cloudflare Workers. Langchain is an open-source framework that allows developers to create powerful AI workflows by combining different models, providers, and plugins using a declarative API — and it dovetails perfectly with Workers for creating full stack, AI-powered applications.

Since then, we’ve been working with the LangChain team on deeper integration of many tools across Cloudflare’s developer platform and are excited to share what we’ve been up to.

Today, we’re announcing five new key integrations with LangChain:

  1. Workers AI Chat Models: This allows you to use Workers AI text generation to power your chat model within your LangChain.js application.
  2. Workers AI Instruct Models: This allows you to use Workers AI models fine-tuned for instruct use-cases, such as Mistral and CodeLlama, inside your Langchain.js application.
  3. Text Embeddings Models: If you’re working with text embeddings, you can now use Workers AI text embeddings with LangChain.js.
  4. Vectorize Vector Store: When working with a Vector database and LangChain.js, you now have the option of using Vectorize, Cloudflare’s powerful vector database.
  5. Cloudflare D1-Backed Chat Memory: For longer-term persistence across chat sessions, you can swap out LangChain’s default Continue reading

Precedence of Ansible Extra Variables

I stay as far away from Ansible as possible these days and use it only as a workflow engine to generate device configurations from Jinja2 templates and push them to lab devices. Still, I manage to trigger unexpected behavior even in these simple scenarios.

Ansible has a complex system of variable (fact) precedence, which mostly makes sense considering the dozen places where a variable value might be specified (or overwritten). Ansible documentation also clearly states that the extra variables (specified on the command line with the -e keyword) have the highest precedence.

Now consider these simple playbooks. In the first one, we’ll set a fact (variable) and then print it out:

Read more …

NX-OS Forwarding Constructs For VXLAN/EVPN

In this post we will look at the forwarding constructs in NX-OS in the context of VXLAN and EVPN. Having knowledge of the forwarding constructs helps both with understanding of the protocols, but also to assist in troubleshooting. BRKDCN-3040 from Cisco Live has a nice overview of the components involved:

There are components that are platform independent (PI) and platform dependent (PD). Below I’ll explain what each component does:

  • ARP – Information from ARP requests/responses is needed to build adjacencies. The information learned from ARP is used to populate IP address field in RT2 and hence also to populate the ARP suppression cache.
  • IPv6 ND – ND fills the role of ARP, but for IPv6.
  • Adjacency Manager – Resolves directly attached hosts MAC addresses.
  • Host Mobility Manager – Tracks the endpoints and their movements.
  • L2FM – The Layer2 Forwarding Manager. A platform dependent component that programs ASICs for L2 forwarding. Keeps track of MAC addresses, their placement and moves, and synchronizes this information across ASICS, line cards, and vPC peers when vPC is in use.
  • MFDM – Multicast Forwarding Database Manager. A platform dependent component that programs ASICs with information to perform multicast forwarding.
  • L2RIB – The component that handles Continue reading

BGP Labs: Override Neighbor AS Number in AS Path

When I described the need to turn off the BGP AS-path loop prevention logic in scenarios where a Service Provider expects a customer to reuse the same AS number across multiple sites, someone quipped, “but that should be fixed by the Service Provider, not offloaded to the customer.”

Not surprisingly, there’s a nerd knob for that (AS override), and you can practice it in the next BGP lab exercise: Fix AS-Path in Environments Reusing BGP AS Numbers.

Explore the lab exercise
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