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MANRS Fellowship 2021 Now Open

The MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) Fellowship Program 2021 is now accepting applications. If you are an emerging leader eager to improve the well-being of the Internet’s global routing system, apply now.

The program gives highly motivated individuals the chance to work alongside MANRS Ambassadors – industry leaders participating in the associated Ambassador Program that invited applications last month (details here).

Together, they will train diverse communities on good routing practices, analyze routing incidents, research into ways to secure routing, and survey the global policy landscape.

You can read about the 13 Fellows in last year’s inaugural program, which proved highly popular. The Internet Society supports this program as part of its work to reduce common routing threats and establish norms for network operations.

You can apply for a MANRS Fellowship in three different areas: training, research, and policy. Each Fellow will receive a stipend of $750 a month. The program will start in mid-April and run for up to eight months. You can apply for more than one category but will only be selected for one of them.

Online Training

Responsible for: Conducting MANRS online tutorial and virtual hands-on workshops, helping improve existing training and workshop Continue reading

Using the Python Rich library to display status indicators

I recently added a status indicator to my azruntime application. If users have a lot of VMs in their subscriptions, the azruntime application can take a long time to run. Users will appreciate seeing the status so they know the program is still running and is not hung up.

I used the Rich library to implement a status indicator. I had to learn more about Python context managers to understand how the Rich library’s progress bar and status indicators work. The Rich library’s documentation is aimed at intermediate-to-advanced programmers and the Rich tutorials I found on the web did not cover using the Rich library’s status update features.

In this post, I will share what I learned while adding a status indicator to my program and show you how to implement the same in your projects.

Rich library overview

The Rich library makes it easy to add color and style to terminal output. Rich can also render pretty tables, progress bars, markdown, syntax highlighted source code, tracebacks, and more.¹

This post focuses only on creating a status indicator. To learn more about what Rich can do for you, I encourage you to read one of the excellent Rich overviews Continue reading

John Deere invests $500k in private 5G licenses to support flexible factory networks

John Deere, the $35.5 billion maker of farm equipment, is planting the seeds of company-owned 5G cellular networking in some of its manufacturing plants after investing half-a-million dollars in wireless licenses at an FCC auction last year. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The company says that having a piece of wireless spectrum more or less to itself is key to updating certain of its production facilities. Deere bought citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) licenses in five Iowa and Illinois counties at that give it virtually unfettered use of the local CBRS bandwidth for private 5G.To read this article in full, please click here

John Deere invests $500k in private 5G licenses to support more flexible factory networks

Chasing Anycast IP Addresses

One of my readers sent me this question:

My job required me to determine if one IP address is unicast or anycast. Is it possible to get this information from the bgp dump?

TL&DR: Not with anything close to 100% reliability. An academic research paper (HT: Andrea di Donato) documents a false-positive rate of around 10%.

If you’re not familiar with IP anycast: it’s a brilliant idea of advertising the same prefix from multiple independent locations, or the same IP address from multiple servers. Works like a charm for UDP (that’s how all root DNS servers are built) and supposedly pretty well across distant-enough locations for TCP (with a long list of caveats when used within a data center).

Chasing Anycast IP Addresses

One of my readers sent me this question:

My job required me to determine if one IP address is unicast or anycast. Is it possible to get this information from the bgp dump?

TL&DR: Not with anything close to 100% reliability.

SEC 4. Complete guide for integrating Nokia, Arista, Cumulus, as well as CentOS and Raspberry PI Linux in your own PKI

Hello my friend,

In one of the previous blogposts we have share the details how you can build the containerised PKI relying Docker, Alpine Linux and OpenSSL. Today we’ll show how you can use it.


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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

How automation can increase the security?

In one of the recent articles dedicated to threats to the national security with respect to 5G caused by the current operation models in the big service providers, one the network automation were named as one of the key mitigation approaches. The reason is very simple: network automation allows you to keep (or even increase) the pace of the network changes with increasing the stability without increasing the size of your network operation teams.

We absolutely agree with this statement. We have observed ourselves that in many cases the key technical competence for service providers is being outsourced and in certain cases the service providers have to rely on the external parties to perform Continue reading

Comcast: Internet usage spiked in 2020 as working from home doubled

Overall Internet traffic on Comcast’s network spiked substantially at the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S. in March 2020, but normalized over the subsequent months, according to a report released today by the internet service provider.As the largest individual home ISP in the U.S., Comcast’s data on Internet usage represents a useful snapshot into overall home connectivity during the pandemic.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Nearly two-thirds of Americans--62%--reported working from home at some point during the current crisis, double the figures for the previous March, the report found. And 93% of households with school-age children reported that those children engaged in distance learning.To read this article in full, please click here

Tigera and Microsoft Extend the Power of Calico for Windows to AKS

Tigera, in collaboration with Microsoft, is thrilled to announce the public preview of Calico for Windows on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). While Calico has been available for self-managed Kubernetes workloads on Azure since 2018, many organizations are migrating their .NET and Windows workloads to the managed Kubernetes environment offered by AKS. Now the leading open-source Kubernetes network policy and security solution for Kubernetes enables Windows users to fulfill their policy and compliance requirements on Azure Kubernetes Service.

With the availability of Calico for Windows on AKS in public preview, enterprises can leverage the power and simplicity of Calico to enable a single solution that provides uniform Kubernetes network policy and security for their clusters across AKS, other clouds and on-premises, as well as across their choice of Windows, Linux, and mixed-node environments.

Project Calico is the most widely adopted open-source solution for Kubernetes networking and security, used on more than 1 million nodes across 166 countries. However, thousands of our users want to be sure that choosing Calico is the right decision for many years to come. Calico is the only solution that offers a pluggable data plane supporting Windows, standard Linux and eBPF, thus future-proofing their decision Continue reading

Why AI is Eating Networking

Networking teams are just starting their AIOps journey. In the next five years, AI assistants will be considered integral members.

Betting On Virtual Events In A Post-Covid World

In-person events will return some day. In the meantime, a huge crop of tech companies and investors are betting that virtual events can thrive not just during a pandemic, but beyond.

The post Betting On Virtual Events In A Post-Covid World appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Expedient Way To Build An Enterprise Cloud

The promises of the cloud – from agility and scalability to reduced costs and easier access to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics – have been out there for more than a decade and enterprises are continuing to push more of their operations to such hyperscale providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. …

The Expedient Way To Build An Enterprise Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Cloudflare recognized as a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions

We’re thrilled to announce that Cloudflare has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q1 2021. You can download a complimentary copy of the report here.

According to the report, written by, Forrester Senior Analyst for Security and Risk, David Holmes, “Cloudflare protects against DDoS from the edge, and fast… customer references view Cloudflare’s edge network as a compelling way to protect and deliver applications.”

Unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for all

Cloudflare was founded with the mission to help build a better Internet — one where the impact of DDoS attacks is a thing of the past. Over the last 10 years, we have been unwavering in our efforts to protect our customers’ Internet properties from DDoS attacks of any size or kind. In 2017, we announced unmetered DDoS protection for free — as part of every Cloudflare service and plan including the Free plan — to make sure every organization can stay protected and available.

Thanks to our home-grown automated DDoS protection systems, we’re able to provide unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free. Our automated systems constantly analyze traffic samples asynchronously as to avoid impact to performance. They scan for Continue reading

Deploying a CNI Automatically with a ClusterResourceSet

Not too long ago I hosted an episode of TGIK8s, where I explored some features of Cluster API. One of the features I explored on the show was ClusterResourceSet, an experimental feature that allows users to automatically install additional components onto workload clusters when the workload clusters are provisioned. In this post, I’ll show how to deploy a CNI plugin automatically using a ClusterResourceSet.

A lot of this post is inspired by a similar post on installing Calico using a ClusterResourceSet. Although that post is for vSphere and this one focuses on AWS, much of the infrastructure differences are abstracted away by Kubernetes and Cluster API.

At a high level, using ClusterResourceSet to install a CNI plugin automatically looks like this:

Make sure experimental features are enabled on your CAPI management cluster.
Create a ConfigMap that contains the information to deploy the CNI plugin.
Create a ClusterResourceSet that references the ConfigMap.
Deploy one or more workload clusters that match the cluster selector specified in the ClusterResourceSet.

The sections below describe each of these steps in more detail.

Enabling Experimental Features

The preferred way to enable experimental features on your management cluster is to use a setting in the Continue reading

HTTP Protocol, Web Page Waterfalls and Complexity

One aspect of networking is that some understanding of the protocols using the network is required. As HTTPS replaces nearly all other protocols I would suggest that everyone needs a working understanding of how a web page is fetched by a web browser. WebPageTest is a community tool that reads web pages and then displays […]

How to Write a Great Talk Proposal for DockerCon LIVE 2021

First off, a big thank you to all those who have already submitted a talk proposal for DockerCon LIVE 2021. We’re seeing some really excellent proposals and we look forward to reviewing many more! We opened the CFP on February 8th and with a few more weeks to go before we close the CFP on March 15th there’s still lots of time to submit a talk.

If you’re toying with the idea of submitting a talk but you’re still not sure whether or not your topic is interesting enough, or how to approach your topic, or if you just need a little push in the right direction to write up your proposal and click on “Send”, below are a few resources we thought you might find interesting.

Amanda Sopkin wrote a great article a few years ago that has now become a reference for conference organizers sharing tips on how to get a technical talk accepted for a conference. We also like Todd Lewis’ 13 tips on how to write an awesome talk proposal for a tech conference. Other interesting articles include:

How to execute an object file: Part 1

Calling a simple function without linking

When we write software using a high-level compiled programming language, there are usually a number of steps involved in transforming our source code into the final executable binary:

How to execute an object file: Part 1

First, our source files are compiled by a compiler translating the high-level programming language into machine code. The output of the compiler is a number of object files. If the project contains multiple source files, we usually get as many object files. The next step is the linker: since the code in different object files may reference each other, the linker is responsible for assembling all these object files into one big program and binding these references together. The output of the linker is usually our target executable, so only one file.

However, at this point, our executable might still be incomplete. These days, most executables on Linux are dynamically linked: the executable itself does not have all the code it needs to run a program. Instead it expects to "borrow" part of the code at runtime from shared libraries for some of its functionality:

How to execute an object file: Part 1

This process is called runtime linking: when our executable is being started, the operating system will invoke the dynamic Continue reading

HPE debuts new Opportunity Engine for fast AI insights

HP Enterprise has announced what it calls the Software Defined Opportunity Engine (SDOE), a cloud-based machine-learning platform that enables partners that sell HPE gear to cut the time to create custom sales proposals from weeks to just 45 seconds.In a blog post announcing the service, HPE Storage senior vice president and general manager Tom Black said SDOE does away with an outdated IT infrastructure-buying process at a time when digital transformation has never been more critical.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE debuts new Opportunity Engine for fast AI insights

Impact of Azure Subnets on High Availability Designs

Now that you know all about regions and availability zones (AZ) and the ways AWS and Azure implement subnets, let’s get to the crux of the original question Daniel Dib sent me:

As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? You mentioned that it’s difficult to create application swimlanes that way. But does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?

It’s time I explain the concepts of application swimlanes and how they apply to availability zones in public clouds.