Can Video Game Systems Like PS5 Be Used for Workplace Team Collaboration?

Team collaboration has been an issue in the workplace for too long. Countless solutions have been proposed and tried. And here is a new idea. Can video game systems like PS5 be used for workplace team collaboration? The simple answer is yes. But how?

Video game systems have long had the option for multiplayer games. These also allow numerous people around the world to connect, create teams, and play against other teams. If you’re a true gamer, you would know how this works. However, what does this mean for offices? Video game systems like the PS5 have many features that can enable workplace team collaboration. Here are some of the ways this is encouraged.

3 Ways PS5 Will be Used for Workplace Team Collaboration

Delegation of Tasks

The option to play as teams helps develop skills in employees that contribute to the workplace. The more you work in a team, the better you adapt to it. In video game systems like PS5, you can choose your own game, which means having a story you like. This can engage the employees in multiple ways, but most importantly divide the tasks.

Playing as a team in a video game would not only Continue reading

Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors

Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors
Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors

Every day, all across the Internet, something bad but entirely normal happens: thousands of origin servers go down, resulting in connection errors and frustrated users. Cloudflare’s users collectively spend over four and a half years each day waiting for unreachable origin servers to respond with error messages. But visitors don’t want to see error pages, they want to see content!

Today is exciting for all those who want the Internet to be stronger, more resilient, and have important redundancies: Cloudflare is pleased to announce a partnership with the Internet Archive to bring new functionality to our Always Online service.

Always Online serves as insurance for our customers’ websites. Should a customer’s origin go offline, timeout, or otherwise break, Always Online is there to step in and serve archived copies of webpages to visitors. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine, a service which saves snapshots of billions of websites across the Internet. By partnering with the Internet Archive, Cloudflare is able to seamlessly deliver responses for unreachable websites from the Internet Archive, while the Internet Archive can continue their mission of archiving the web to provide access to all knowledge.

Enabling Always Online in the Continue reading

Are Business Needs Just Excuses for Vendor Shenanigans?

Every now and then I call someone’s baby ugly (or maybe it was their third cousin’s baby and they nonetheless feel offended). In such cases a common resort is to cite business or market needs to prove how ignorant and clueless I am. Here’s a sample LinkedIn comment talking about my ignorance about the need for smart NICs:

The rise of custom silicon by Presando [sic], Mellanox, Amazon, Intel and others confirms there is a real market need.

Now let’s get something straight: while there are good reasons to use tons of different things that might look inappropriate, irrelevant or plain stupid to an outsider, I don’t believe in real market need argument being used to justify anything without supporting technical facts (tell me why you need that stuff and prove to me that using it is the best way of solving a problem).

Read more …

Use Python to translate TCP/UDP port numbers to names

This short post shows how you can use Python to convert TCP/UDP port number to port name and vice versa.

Most of us know names of common TCP and UDP ports like 22/ssh, 23/telnet, 80/http or 443/https. We learn these early in our networking careers and many of them are so common that even when woken up middle of the night you'd know 53 is domain aka dns!

But there are also many not-so commonly used ports that have been given names. These ones sometimes show up in firewall logs or are mentioned in literature. Some vendors also try to replace numeric value with a human readable name in the configs and outputs of different commands.

One way or the other, I'd be good to have an easy method of getting port number given its name, and on occasion we might want to get name of particular port number.

There are many ways one could achieve that. We might search web, drop into documentation, or even check /etc/services if we have access to Linux box.

I decided to check if we can do some programmatic translation with Python, seeing as sometimes we could have hundreds of entries to process and Continue reading

Palo Alto beefs-up its SD-WAN menu with machine learning, analytics

With an eye toward adding intelligence and growing deployment options, Palo Alto Networks has rolled out analytics, machine learning, and  new hardware appliances for its recently acquired SD-WAN package.The company bought cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix earlier this year for $420 million and promised to integrate and augment CloudGenix's intelligent cloud-managed SD-WAN products and technology as well as integrate it with Palo Alto’s cloud-based security package Prisma.To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme unveils universal networking gear to simplify infrastructure decisions

Extreme Networks is unveiling a family of hardware and software that promises to let enterprise customers deploy wired or wireless platforms and manage security and other key resources from a cloud-based console.On the hardware side, the company is rolling out new core switches: the wired 5520 Series universal edge and aggregation switches, and the wireless, WiFi 6-based AP300C and AP400C Series universal access points.Upon linking to the company's flagship ExtremeCloud IQ cloud-based management platform (or manually through customized on-premises deployment), users of the new systems can pick and choose the Extreme operating system they need to support their particular infrastructure needs. Those options include ExtremeXOS and VSP Operating System (VOSS) with future support expected for the SLX Operating System under the 5520 switch and Aerohive IQ Engine and the Motorola WiNG for the wireless APs. To read this article in full, please click here

Check out the Azure CLI experience now available in Desktop Stable

Back in May we announced the partnership between Docker and Microsoft to make it easier to deploy containerized applications from the Desktop to the cloud with Azure Container Instances (ACI). Then in June we were able to share the first version of this as part of a Desktop Edge release, this allowed users to use existing Docker CLI commands straight against ACI making getting started running containers in the cloud simpler than ever. 

We are now pleased to announce that the Docker and ACI integration has moved into Docker Desktop stable 2.3.0.5 giving all Desktop users access to the simplest way to get containers running in the cloud. 

Getting started 

As a new starter, to get going all you will need to do is upgrade your existing Docker Desktop to the latest stable version (2.3.0.5), store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here) and then lastly you will need to create an ACI context to deploy it to. For a simple example of getting started with ACI you can see our initial blog post on the edge experience.

More CLI commands

We Continue reading

What Will the Internet Look Like in 2030? New Grants Program for Researchers Studying the Future of the Internet

From the environment to the economy, the Internet is reshaping and disrupting several sectors of our society. What might future patterns of disruption look like? How will these changes affect all of us, particularly those on the margins of society? What new solutions can we generate today, to address the challenges of tomorrow?

At the Internet Society Foundation, we believe the answers to these questions and many others lies in research. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce a new grants program supporting researchers worldwide who are studying the future and sustainability of the Internet. Grants of up to US$200,000 are available for research lasting up to two years and focused in one of two categories:

  • Greening the Internet: How the Internet affects and is affected by the environment
  • The Internet Economy: How digital technologies are transforming our economic landscape

Learn more about the program

Established in 2019 to support the positive difference the Internet can make to people everywhere, the Internet Society Foundation awards grants to Internet Society Chapters/Special Interest Groups (SIGs) as well as nonprofit organizations and individuals dedicated to providing meaningful access to an open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet for everyone.

Learn more about future calls for Continue reading

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

On July 3, Cloudflare’s global DDoS protection system, Gatebot, automatically detected and mitigated a UDP-based DDoS attack that peaked at 654 Gbps. The attack was part of a ten-day multi-vector DDoS campaign targeting a Magic Transit customer and was mitigated without any human intervention. The DDoS campaign is believed to have been generated by Moobot, a Mirai-based botnet. No downtime, service degradation, or false positives were reported by the customer.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Moobot Targets 654 Gbps towards a Magic Transit Customer

Over those ten days, our systems automatically detected and mitigated over 5,000 DDoS attacks against this one customer, mainly UDP floods, SYN floods, ACK floods, and GRE floods. The largest DDoS attack was a UDP flood and lasted a mere 2 minutes. This attack targeted only one IP address but hit multiple ports. The attack originated from 18,705 unique IP addresses, each believed to be a Moobot-infected IoT device.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Attack Distribution by Country - From 100 countries

The attack was observed in Cloudflare’s data centers in 100 countries around the world. Approximately 89% of the attack traffic originated from just 10 countries with the US leading at 41%, followed by South Korea and Japan in second place (12% each), Continue reading

Restoring data to Netbox Docker

Having just shot myself in the foot by deleting docker and losing a container I had been working on, here is the command to restore data to netbox-docker’s Postgres database:

sudo docker exec -i netbox-docker_postgres_1 psql --username netbox netbox < /path/to/backup/file.sql

Phew…

IDC reports jump in server sales, decline in storage revenue

IDC released two surveys last week with seemingly contradictory results, but there is an underlying pattern: For now, on-premises hardware sales are dipping, while cloud sales are booming.In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8% year over year in the second calendar quarter of 2020 to $24.0 billion, while worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% to nearly 3.2 million units in the same time period. READ MORE: IT employment takes a hit but overall remains healthyTo read this article in full, please click here

How to consolidate network management tools

Network executives are making strides in their ongoing efforts to reduce network management tool sprawl, but there's still plenty of room for improvement on the road to a consolidated, platform-based toolset.Nearly two-thirds of enterprises (64%) in EMA's Network Management Megatrends 2020 report indicated they use between four and 10 tools, and another 17% use more than 10 tools. And that's just the tools that companies will admit to.To read this article in full, please click here

IDC reports jump in server sales, decline in storage revenue

IDC released two surveys last week with seemingly contradictory results, but there is an underlying pattern: For now, on-premises hardware sales are dipping, while cloud sales are booming.In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8% year over year in the second calendar quarter of 2020 to $24.0 billion, while worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% to nearly 3.2 million units in the same time period. READ MORE: IT employment takes a hit but overall remains healthyTo read this article in full, please click here

Why Don’t We Have Dynamic Firewall Policies

One of the readers of the Considerations for Host-Based Firewalls blog post wrote this interesting comment:

Perhaps a paradigm shift is due for firewalls in general? I’m thinking quickly here but wondering if we perhaps just had a protocol by which a host could request upstream firewall(s) to open access inbound on their behalf dynamically, the hosts themselves would then automatically inform the security device what ports they need/want opened upstream.

Well, we have at least two protocols that could fit the bill: Universal Plug and Play and Port Control Protocol (RFC 6887).

Read more …

ICYMI: From Docker Straight to AWS Built-in

In July we announced a new strategic partnership with Amazon to integrate the Docker experience you already know and love with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate. Over the last couple of months we have worked with the community on the beta experience in Docker Desktop Edge. Today we are excited to bring this experience to our entire community in Docker Desktop stable, version 2.3.0.5.

You can watch Carmen Puccio (Amazon) and myself (Docker) and view the original demo in the recording of our latest webinar here.

What started off in the beta as a Docker plugin experience docker ecs has been pulled into Docker directly as a familiar docker compose flow.  This is just the beginning, and we could use your input so head over to the Docker Roadmap and let us know what you want to see as part of this integration. 

There is no better time to try it.  Grab the latest Docker Desktop Stable. Then check out my example application which will walk you through everything you need to know to deploy a Python application locally in development and then again directly to Amazon ECS in minutes not Continue reading

1 … 962 963 964 965 966 … 3,913