Cisco targets WAN edge with new router family

Cisco has launched a family of core and branch routers that take aim at refining secure, cloud resource access distributed at the edge.Cisco Catalyst 8000 edge router family includes three models--the high-end 8500 for data-center or colocation customers, the 8300 for branch users, and the software-based 8000 for virtual environments and feature support for advanced routing, SD-WAN,  security and secure-access service edge (SASE)--depending on customer requirements.To read this article in full, please click here

Bot Attack trends for Jan-Jul 2020

Bot Attack trends for Jan-Jul 2020
Bot Attack trends for Jan-Jul 2020

Now that we’re a long way through 2020, let’s take a look at automated traffic, which makes up almost 40% of total Internet traffic.

This blog post is a high-level overview of bot traffic on Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare offers a comprehensive Bot Management tool for Enterprise customers, along with an effective free tool called Bot Fight Mode. Because of the tremendous amount of traffic that flows through our network each day, Cloudflare is in a unique position to analyze global bot trends.

In this post, we will cover the basics of bot traffic and distinguish between automated requests and other human requests (What Is A Bot?). Then, we’ll move on to a global overview of bot traffic around the world (A RoboBird’s Eye View, A Bot Day and Bots All Over The World), and dive into North American traffic (A Look into North American Traffic).  Lastly, we’ll finish with an overview of how the coronavirus pandemic affected global traffic, and we’ll take a deeper look at European traffic (Bots During COVID-19 In Europe).

On average, Cloudflare processes 18 million HTTP requests every second. This is a great opportunity to understand how bots shape the Continue reading

Going Postal

The Internet was not the first communications system constructed as compound service, where the end-to-end service was built using the services provided by many individual service providers. International telephony was constructed in a similar manner, and predating the telephone was the international postal service. In this article I’d like to look at the Universal Postal Union's track record of trying to construct a fair and efficient way to allow each service provider to be compensated for their part in the construction of the delivered end-to-end service. As with the Internet, it all comes down to the choice of the framework for settlement and peering between providers.

My Journey Towards the Cisco Certified DevNet Specialist – Service Provider by Nick Russo

On 14 October 2020, I took and passed the Automating Cisco Service Provider Solutions (SPAUTO) exam on my first attempt. This is the fifth DevNet exam I’ve passed and was a topic area in which I was already strong. Many people know me for my CCIE Service Provider Comprehensive Guide where I cover advanced SP technology. Others know me for my Pluralsight Ansible and Python network automation courses that implement an “infrastructure as code” solution to manage MPLS L3VPN route-targets. Suffice it to say that I’ve been doing SP stuff for a while.

Compared to the other concentration exams I’ve passed (ENAUTO and SAUTO), SPAUTO was about the same level of difficulty. The exam has a fair amount of carryover from DEVASC, DEVCOR, and ENAUTO, given the similarities of their blueprints, but is still quite heavy on SP products. Fortunately, there are only a few key products listed on the blueprint, making it narrower than SAUTO (which tested about 15 different APIs). Like ENAUTO, strong Python and network automation skills are important for this exam, and I’d strongly recommend having real-life SP design, implementation, and operations experience before attempting it.

Unlike DEVASC, DEVCOR, ENAUTO, and Continue reading

Docker at SnykCon 2020

We are excited to be a gold sponsor of the inaugural SnykCon virtual conference, a free online event from Snyk taking place this week on October 21-22, 2020. The conference will look at best practices and technologies for integrating development and security teams, tools, and processes, with a specific nod of the secure use of containers, from images used as a starting point to apps shared with teams and the public.

At Docker, we know that security is vital to successful app development projects, and automating app security early in the development process ensures teams start with the right foundation and ship apps that have vulnerability scanning and remediation included by default. This year we announced a broad partnership with Snyk to incorporate their leading vulnerability scanning across the entire Docker app development lifecycle. At Snykcon, attendees will learn how to successfully incorporate security scanning into their entire Docker app delivery pipeline.

Some of the highlights from Docker at this event include:

  • Docker CEO Scott Scott Johnston will join Snyk CEO Peter McKay in the keynote fireside chat on Thursday, October 22 at 8:30am PDT. Scot and Peter will talk about the partnership between Docker and Snyk and share Continue reading

Masergy teams with Fortinet for at-home SD-WAN

Working from home is becoming more of a permanent option with each passing day, but working from home means your network is provided not by your corporate enterprise but by carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast.Masergy this week introduced its SD-WAN Work From Anywhere portfolio that brings the benefits of SD-WAN networking to home and mobile users. The portfolio includes a home SD-WAN solution and a SASE-based mobile solution.The new offerings extend Masergy’s Managed SD-WAN Secure solutions to the remote workforce, supporting their network connections with built-in security, dual-link redundancy, load balancing, and dynamic traffic-steering capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here

How to enforce password complexity on Linux

Deploying password-quality checking on your Debian-based Linux servers can help ensure that your users assign reasonably secure passwords to their accounts, but the settings themselves can be a bit misleading.For example, setting a minimum password length of 12 characters does not necessarily mean that all your users' passwords will actually have 12 or more characters.Let's stroll down Complexity Boulevard and see how the settings work and examine some that are worth considering.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The files that contain the settings we're going to look at will be:To read this article in full, please click here

How to enforce password complexity on Linux

Deploying password-quality checking on your Debian-based Linux servers can help ensure that your users assign reasonably secure passwords to their accounts, but the settings themselves can be a bit misleading.For example, setting a minimum password length of 12 characters does not necessarily mean that all your users' passwords will actually have 12 or more characters.Let's stroll down Complexity Boulevard and see how the settings work and examine some that are worth considering.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The files that contain the settings we're going to look at will be:To read this article in full, please click here

How to enforce password complexity on Linux

Deploying password-quality checking on your Debian-based Linux servers can help ensure that your users assign reasonably secure passwords to their accounts, but the settings themselves can be a bit misleading.For example, setting a minimum password length of 12 characters does not necessarily mean that all your users' passwords will actually have 12 or more characters.Let's stroll down Complexity Boulevard and see how the settings work and examine some that are worth considering.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The files that contain the settings we're going to look at will be:To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: Top strategic technology trends for 2021

Companies need to focus on architecting resilience and accept that disruptive change is the norm, says research firm Gartner, which unveiled its annual look at the top strategic technology trends that organizations need to prepare for in the coming year.Gartner unveiled this year's list at its flagship IT Symposium/Xpo Americas conference, which is being held virtually this year. READ MORE: VMware highlights security in COVID-era networking | Essential edge-computing use cases | How AI can boost data-center availability, efficiencyTo read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: Top strategic technology trends for 2021

Companies need to focus on architecting resilience and accept that disruptive change is the norm, says research firm Gartner, which unveiled its annual look at the top strategic technology trends that organizations need to prepare for in the coming year.Gartner unveiled this year's list at its flagship IT Symposium/Xpo Americas conference, which is being held virtually this year. READ MORE: VMware highlights security in COVID-era networking | Essential edge-computing use cases | How AI can boost data-center availability, efficiencyTo read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: Top strategic technology trends for 2021

Companies need to focus on architecting resilience and accept that disruptive change is the norm, says research firm Gartner, which unveiled its annual look at the top strategic technology trends that organizations need to prepare for in the coming year.Gartner unveiled this year's list at its flagship IT Symposium/Xpo Americas conference, which is being held virtually this year. READ MORE: VMware highlights security in COVID-era networking | Essential edge-computing use cases | How AI can boost data-center availability, efficiencyTo read this article in full, please click here

The case for a learned sorting algorithm

The case for a learned sorting algorithm, Kristo, Vaidya, et al., SIGMOD’20

We’ve watched machine learning thoroughly pervade the web giants, make serious headway in large consumer companies, and begin its push into the traditional enterprise. ML, then, is rapidly becoming an integral part of how we build applications of all shapes and sizes. But what about systems software? It’s earlier days there, but ‘The case for learned index structures’(Part 1 Part 2), SageDB and others are showing the way.

Today’s paper choice builds on the work done in SageDB, and focuses on a classic computer science problem: sorting. On a 1 billion item dataset, Learned Sort outperforms the next best competitor, RadixSort, by a factor of 1.49x. What really blew me away, is that this result includes the time taken to train the model used!

The big idea

Suppose you had a model that given a data item from a list, could predict its position in a sorted version of that list. 0.239806? That’s going to be at position 287! If the model had 100% accuracy, it would give us a completed sort just by running over the dataset and Continue reading

Hints and Principles: Applied to Networks

While software design is not the same as network design, there is enough overlap for network designers to learn from software designers. A recent paper published by Butler Lampson, updating a paper he wrote in 1983, is a perfect illustration of this principle. The paper is caleld Hints and Principles for Computer System Design. I’m not going to write a full review here–you should really go read the paper for yourself–but rather just point out some useful bits of the paper.

The first really useful point of this paper is Lampson breaks down the entire field of software design into three basic questions: What, How, and When (or who)? Each of these corresponds to the goals, techniques, and processes used to design and develop software. These same questions and answers apply to network design–if you are missing one of these three areas, then you are probably missing some important set of questions you have not answered yet. Each of these is also represented by an acronym: what? is STEADY, how? is AID, and when? is ART. Let’s look at a couple of these in a little more detail to see how Lampson’s system works.

STEADY stands for simple, timely, efficient, Continue reading

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