IPv6 Buzz 078: IPv6 For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses

IPv6 isn't just for large enterprises. In today's IPv6 Buzz episode Ed, Scott, and Tom makes the case for small and medium-sized businesses embracing the protocol, and what they should consider for deployment and management.

IPv6 Buzz 078: IPv6 For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses

The post IPv6 Buzz 078: IPv6 For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Review: Logitech Ergo K860 Ergonomic Keyboard

As part of an ongoing effort to refine my work environment, several months ago I switched to a Logitech Ergo K860 ergonomic keyboard. While I’m not a “keyboard snob,” I am somewhat particular about the feel of my keyboard, so I wasn’t sure how I would like the K860. In this post, I’ll provide my feedback, and provide some information on how well the keyboard works with both Linux and macOS.

Setup

Setting up the K860 is remarkably easy. The first system I tried to pair it with was an older Mac Pro workstation, and apparently the Bluetooth hardware on that particular workstation wasn’t new enough to support the K860 (Logitech indicates that Bluetooth 5.0 is needed; more on that in a moment). Instead, I popped in the USB-A wireless receiver, and was up and running with the K860 less than a minute later. This was using macOS, but the Mac Pro also dual-booted Linux, so I rebooted into Linux and found that the K860 with the Logitech-supplied USB receiver continued to work without any issues.

Linux, macOS, and Dual Boot Support

The key takeaway regarding Linux is this: if you’re interested in getting the K860 for use with Continue reading

VPN Attacks Surged in First Quarter

But volume of malware, botnet, and other exploit activity declined because of the Emotet botnet takedown.

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sparking the next cycle of IT spending

Who, in the entire IT space, wouldn’t like to see an uptick in tech spending? Enterprises would see new purchases easier to make, vendors would make more money, and technologists in general would have a new sense of excitement and mission. It seems like we’ve been stuck in a do-more-for-less rut, but the past offers us some evidence of how we could get out of it.If you were to plot of the growth in enterprise IT spending versus GDP growth for the US over the entire life of information technology, you’d see not a hockey stick but a series of peaks and valleys. You would see that there are three clear periods or cycles where IT spending has significantly outstripped GDP growth, and that we’ve been in a trough ever since the last one ended in about 2000. We’ve never had two decades pass without another cycle, so what’s wrong? Answer: Nothing’s driving one now.To read this article in full, please click here

Zambia Needs the Internet More than Ever

My country, Zambia, has more than 18 million people. Our new Internet Society chapter wants all of them to be online. Why? Because we need the Internet now more than ever. Globally, UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimate that 1.3 billion children between the ages of 3 and 17 – or two thirds […]

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Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

Last October we released WARP for Desktop, bringing a safer and faster way to use the Internet to billions of devices for free. At the same time, we gave our enterprise customers the ability to use WARP with Cloudflare for Teams. By routing all an enterprise's traffic from devices anywhere on the planet through WARP, we’ve been able to seamlessly power advanced capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway and Browser Isolation and, in the future, our Data Loss Prevention platforms.

Today, we are excited to announce Cloudflare WARP for Linux and, across all desktop platforms, the ability to use WARP with single applications instead of your entire device.

What is WARP?

WARP was built on the philosophy that even people who don’t know what “VPN” stands for should be able to still easily get the protection a VPN offers. It was also built for those of us who are unfortunately all too familiar with traditional corporate VPNs, and need an innovative, seamless solution to meet the challenges of an always-connected world.

Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun.

The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no Continue reading

Getting started with Ansible security automation: Incident Response

Technological advancements are intended to bring more control, agility and velocity to organizations. However, adopting these new technologies and techniques, such as cloud computing and microservices, increases an organization’s security footprint, bringing greater risk of security breaches.

Cyberattacks potentially expose organizations to financial loss, reputational damage, legal liability, and business continuity risk. As a result, security teams are under increased pressure to help proactively protect organizations against cyberattacks and maintain a more consistent, rapid incident response framework to respond to security breaches.

In our previous blogs in this series, we explored how Ansible security automation enables security teams to automate and simplify investigation enrichment and threat hunting practices. We also discussed and provided our answer to the lack of integration across the IT security industry.

In this blog post, we’ll have a closer look at incident response and how Ansible security automation empowers security teams to respond effectively to security breaches.

What is an incident response, and why is it so difficult?

Incident response is the approach and techniques that security departments implement to neutralize and mitigate cyberattacks, and is a core responsibility of the security team. Recent news headlines are rife with high-profile security breaches and Continue reading

Questions about BGP in the Data Center (with a Whiff of SRv6)

Henk Smit left numerous questions in a comment referring to the Rethinking BGP in the Data Center presentation by Russ White:

In Russ White’s presentation, he listed a few requirements to compare BGP, IS-IS and OSPF. Prefix distribution, filtering, TE, tagging, vendor-support, autoconfig and topology visibility. The one thing I was missing was: scalability.

I noticed the same thing. We kept hearing how BGP scales better than link-state protocols (no doubt about that) and how you couldn’t possibly build a large data center fabric with a link-state protocol… and yet this aspect wasn’t even mentioned.

Questions about BGP in the Data Center (with a Whiff of SRv6)

Henk Smit left numerous questions in a comment referring to the Rethinking BGP in the Data Center presentation by Russ White:

In Russ White’s presentation, he listed a few requirements to compare BGP, IS-IS and OSPF. Prefix distribution, filtering, TE, tagging, vendor-support, autoconfig and topology visibility. The one thing I was missing was: scalability.

DNSSEC with EdDSA

The world of cryptographic algorithms is one that constantly evolves and increasing key sizes in the venerable RSA crypto algorithm is a source of concern for DNSSEC. The response to this escalation in key sizes is to look at alternative forms of public-key algorithms which have a higher cryptographic “density”, using elliptic curve cryptography. Here we will look at the level of Internet support provided for a recent crypto offering, the Edwards curve algorithm Ed25519.

The Hedge 88: Todd Palino and Getting Things Done

I often feel like I’m “behind” on what I need to get done. Being a bit metacognitive, however, I often find this feeling is more related to not organizing things well, which means I often feel like I have so much to do “right now” that I just don’t know what to do next—hence “processor thrashing on process scheduler.” Todd Palino joins this episode of the Hedge to talk about the “Getting Things Done” technique (or system) of, well … getting things done.

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Second Round of Grant Funding Awarded to Researchers Studying the Future of the Internet

From the environment to the economy, the Internet is reshaping several sectors of our society. What might future patterns of disruption look like? How will these changes affect all of us? At the Internet Society Foundation, we believe the answers to these questions and many others can be found in research. That’s why in September […]

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Day Two Cloud 102: Edge Cloud Isn’t Magic

Today we're talking Edge Cloud. Guest Alex Marcham has written a book on the subject and we'll get his take on edge infrastructure, what edge cloud is all about, real-world use cases, and how it differs from typical colo facilities or centralized public cloud data centers. We also look at requirements for edge deployments including networking and 5G, and the workloads driving edge infrastructure.

Day Two Cloud 102: Edge Cloud Isn’t Magic

The post Day Two Cloud 102: Edge Cloud Isn’t Magic appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Simplifying Device Provisioning On Private Mobile Networks

Embedded SIMs promise to radically simplify enterprise migration to 4G/5G private mobile networks.

Building Waiting Room on Workers and Durable Objects

In January, we announced the Cloudflare Waiting Room, which has been available to select customers through Project Fair Shot to help COVID-19 vaccination web applications handle demand. Back then, we mentioned that our system was built on top of Cloudflare Workers and the then brand new Durable Objects. In the coming days, we are making Waiting Room available to customers on our Business and Enterprise plans. As we are expanding availability, we are taking this opportunity to share how we came up with this design.

What does the Waiting Room do?

You may have seen lines of people queueing in front of stores or other buildings during sales for a new sneaker or phone. That is because stores have restrictions on how many people can be inside at the same time. Every store has its own limit based on the size of the building and other factors. If more people want to get inside than the store can hold, there will be too many people in the store.

The same situation applies to web applications. When you build a web application, you have to budget for the infrastructure to run it. You make that decision according to how many Continue reading

Deploying Plug-and-Pray Software in Large-Scale Networks

One of my readers sent me a sad story describing how Chromium service discovery broke a large multicast-enabled network.

The last couple of weeks found me helping a customer trying to find and resolve a very hard to find “network performance” issue. In the end it turned out to be a combination of ill conceived application nonsense and a setup with a too large blast radius/failure domain/fate sharing. The latter most probably based upon very valid decisions in the past (business needs, uniformity of configuration and management).