When do You Quit Certifications?

I received a question on Twitter from my friend Fernando on feedback on when to give up on certifications:

First of all, not everyone will agree that you even need certifications. That’s another discussion and I think there are not many reasons to avoid them entirely, but let’s assume that you already have certifications, when do you give up on them?

That is going to be a choice each person has to make, and it will depend on a number of factors, I think. Here are some that immediately come to mind:

• How do you learn?
• Current role
• Bonus models
• Future role
• Number of years in the industry
• Body of work
• Are you well known in the industry?

What’s your method for learning a new skill? People use certifications differently but for me it’s about a guided learning path. I know roughly what to study to become decently skilled at a topic. For example, when I wanted to learn more about AWS and their networking, I decided to study for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate. For me, it’s motivating to Continue reading

Git Tip: Use Word Diff

Git is great (once you get beyond the basic recipes), and I love my new blog setup that allows me to keep track of all the changes I make with Git.

However, there’s a slight gotcha if you use Git with Markdown: whenever you change something, the whole line (and using tools like IA Writer a whole paragraph is a single line) is marked as changed, for example:

Helping with COVID-19 Projects: Cloudflare Workers now free through Project Galileo

The Internet has been vital to our response to the COVID-19 crisis: enabling researchers to communicate with the rest of the world, connecting resources with people who need them, and sharing data about the spread.

It’s been amazing to see some of the projects people have stood up on Cloudflare Workers to assist during this crisis. Workers allows you to get set up in minutes, it’s fast and scalable out of the box, and there’s no infrastructure to maintain or scale, which is great if you want to create a project quickly.

To support critical web projects that help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re giving free access to our Cloudflare Workers compute platform through Project Galileo. We believe sites, apps, APIs, and tools that can help people with COVID-19 are exactly the type of critically important projects that Project Galileo was designed to support.    

Free Cloudflare Workers

One of the earliest impacts of the COVID-19 crisis was the switch that many organizations made to a fully remote model. As that happened, and we realized that many organization’s VPNs were not up to the task of scaling to support this increased load, Cloudflare made Cloudflare for Continue reading

Riverbed Doubles Down on WAN Optimization

The company’s strategy centers on four “fundamental pillars,” made up of WAN optimization,...

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Interesting: Easy Analytics with Elastic Stack

Adrian Giacometti described how he used Elastic Stack (ELK) to build a dashboard for his integration tests and network logs.

Maybe it’s time to build our own network monitoring systems from open-source components instead of paying vendors big bucks for slick PowerPoint slides.

UPDATE 4-18: How enterprise networking is changing with a work-at-home workforce

As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!UPDATE 4.17AT&T reported that Email traffic is down 25% as more people opt for phone and video calls.  Video conferencing is on the rise with more than 470k Webex Meeting Calls on April 9, the highest during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It also stated instant messaging, including text traffic from messaging apps and platforms, has slightly declined since the week prior, but overall is up nearly 60%.To read this article in full, please click here

The New Stack Context: Stress, Resilience and the Network Effects of COVID-19

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with The New Stack correspondent Jennifer Riggins about all of the reporting she and others on the TNS team have been doing recently on the effects that the COVID-19 global pandemic is having on the tech industry. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson. Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn For this episode, we wanted to look at and not only discuss the changing patterns in network traffic that the global COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, due to factors such as people staying at home and working from home, and the sudden acceleration of e-learning. As Riggins writes in a recent post: For a lot of tech and infrastructure teams, they not only are going through the stress of the collective trauma we’re sharing in, but they are struggling to keep up with ever-scaling, extreme strains on their systems. Simply put, Continue reading

Daily Roundup: Nokia Faces a Hostile Takeover

Nokia faced a hostile takeover bid; COVID-19 related ransomware attacks spiked; and Red Hat stacked...

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Portworx Essentials: A Free Cloud Native Storage Engine for Kubernetes

If you deal with Kubernetes, you know that storage is one of the core building blocks of the cluster infrastructure. It is as important as the compute building block delivered by the worker nodes. Since the power of the cluster is always measured in terms of the number of worker nodes and their configuration, storage doesn’t get its share of attention. Imagine this: you configured a powerful bare-metal cluster and want to run a highly available and mission-critical workload on it. Without a solid storage engine, your cluster is only good for running stateless and ephemeral workloads that don’t need persistence. But any enterprise application is a combination of both — stateless and stateful services. You wouldn’t be able to justify the investment made in the brand new Kubernetes cluster if you are unable to run end-to-end applications on it. When you install the open source, up-steam Kubernetes distribution, it doesn’t come with a high-performance storage engine. Unlike managed Kubernetes services in the public cloud that come with default storage classes mapped to their respective block storage services, your cluster doesn’t have any storage class. A persistent volume is to storage what a node is to compute. Just like the Continue reading

IETF: Travel criteria for in-person/virtual IETF 108

Good list of things to think about on travel in post-lockdown

The post IETF: Travel criteria for in-person/virtual IETF 108 appeared first on EtherealMind.

Nokia Stares Down Hostile Takeover Bid

The hostile takeover bid follows a previous report that claimed the company was considering...

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Red Hat Stacks OpenStack Onto ZTE’s XCloud

The work is targeted at helping telecommunication operators deploy virtual network functions in...

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AMD introduces high-performance EPYC processors

AMD has introduced three new processors in its second-generation EPYC 7Fx2 series, which is optimized for frequency and delivers what AMD claims is the fastest per-core performance in the x86 server market.In the server space, AMD is besting Intel when it comes to core count. AMD has the 64-core EPYC line. Intel, which currently tops out at 28 cores, has 38- and 48-core parts due later this year. But it's the individual core performances that matter, and in some benchmarks, Intel wins. READ MORE: How to dispose of IT hardware without hurting the environmentTo read this article in full, please click here

Ransomware Attacks Spike 148% Amid COVID-19 Scams

“Notable spikes in attacks can also be correlated to key days in the COVID-19 news cycle,”...

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Is BGP Safe Yet? No. But we are tracking it carefully

BGP leaks and hijacks have been accepted as an unavoidable part of the Internet for far too long. We relied on protection at the upper layers like TLS and DNSSEC to ensure an untampered delivery of packets, but a hijacked route often results in an unreachable IP address. Which results in an Internet outage.

The Internet is too vital to allow this known problem to continue any longer. It's time networks prevented leaks and hijacks from having any impact. It's time to make BGP safe. No more excuses.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a protocol to exchange routes has existed and evolved since the 1980s. Over the years it has had security features. The most notable security addition is Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), a security framework for routing. It has been the subject of a few blog posts following our deployment in mid-2018.

Today, the industry considers RPKI mature enough for widespread use, with a sufficient ecosystem of software and tools, including tools we've written and open sourced. We have fully deployed Origin Validation on all our BGP sessions with our peers and signed our prefixes.

However, the Internet can only be safe if the major network operators deploy Continue reading

Member News: Internet Society Chapters Focus on Connecting People During Pandemic

Staying connected: Several Internet Society Chapters are focusing on ways to help people stay connected while living under stay-at-home orders or following social-distancing guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Netherlands Chapter has released a toolbox of open source tools to help people work from home.

Resources for the people: Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic Chapter has released a list of COVID-related resources for residents. The list includes information on virtual private networks, on teleworking, and on the country’s cybersecurity resources. The Chapter also released a set of recommendations for the government, for Internet service providers, and for other companies. For example, the Chapter recommends that ISPs offer flexible or low-cost service plans to customers during the pandemic.

Pandemic privacy: One of the many concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic is a loss of privacy as governments and private organizations track mobile phones as a way to monitor the spread of the virus and the effectiveness of social-distancing programs. The Canada Chapter notes that the pandemic has raised fears about the surveillance state. In Canada, the prime minister has ruled against cell phone surveillance for tracking the spread of the virus, but “if the virus rapidly spreads further, no doubt device tracking Continue reading

Creating Conspicuously Compelling Content

It’s funny how little things change in the middle of big, world changing experiences. I’ve noticed that my daily blog viewership has gone down, as have many other folks I’ve talked to. The number of people reading has been reduced for some reason. However the number of video views of content on other platforms like Youtube has gone up dramatically. It’s almost like the people that were reading because they wanted to get a quick digest now have the free time to watch a whole video on a topic.

I got on the bandwagon too, recently publishing my first episode of Tomversations this week. I’ve also talked to several friends that are either starting or restarting a podcast. The gold mine for content creation has opened for business. However, I still hear the same refrains about content that I’ve heard for years when I talk about writing:

• “I don’t have anything to say!”
• “It’s hard to write things down!”
• “Isn’t it easier to just talk about stuff?”

These are all valid questions, no matter what medium you’re developing for. But let me give you a roadmap to take those objections, turn them on their heads, and be Continue reading

How to Utilize Your Networking Capability for Business Relationships

Building a solid relationship is essential for success between parties involved in a business. A good relationship is the bedrock that determines the outcome of the business itself, because everything comes down to communication, understanding, and mutual agreement. Therefore, it’s worth every effort put into it.

Your networking capability can be of great benefit in building a good business relationship if properly utilized. But first, what does the term “networking capability” mean? Networking capability can be defined as the ability to build, sustain, and put to beneficial use the relationships built with external organizations and/or individual partners.

The main purpose and effect of utilizing your networking capability for business relationships become much clearer when you understand that business relationships are in three stages. You know when and how to get to each stage as a result of your networking capability. These three stages include:

• Relationship initiation capability
• Relationship developing/building capability
• Relationship termination capability

These three networking capabilities (skills) are a must-have in the relationship aspect of your business. Let’s take a look at them more closely.

3 Networking Capability Skills

Relationship Initiation Capability

Under this stage, there are two things you should do first.

·       Select highly valued Continue reading

Waiting for a Rainy Day to Do Security Training? It’s Pouring

The FortiGuard Labs team as recently as April 4 reported seeing an average of about 600 new...

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Time-Based One-Time Passwords for Phone Support

As part of Cloudflare’s support offering, we provide phone support to Enterprise customers who are experiencing critical business issues.

For account security, specific account settings and sensitive details are not discussed via phone. From today, we are providing Enterprise customers with the ability to configure phone authentication to allow for greater support to be offered over the phone without need to perform validation through support tickets.

After providing your email address to a Cloudflare Support representative, you can now provide a token generated from the Cloudflare dashboard or via a 2FA app like Google Authenticator. So, a customer is able to prove over the phone that they are who they say they are.

Configuring Phone Authentication

If you are an existing Enterprise customer interested in phone support, please contact your Customer Success Manager for eligibility information and set-up. If you are interested in our Enterprise offering, please get in contact via our Enterprise plan page.

If you already have phone support eligibility, you can generate single-use tokens from the Cloudflare dashboard or configure an authenticator app to do the same remotely.

On the support page, you will see a card called “Emergency Phone Support Hotline – Authentication”. From here you Continue reading