TrueNAS, a Linux Distro for Low Cost Network-Attached Storage

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a great way to build out storage for your business. Instead of relying solely on external drives, shared directories or expensive cloud storage, why not deploy a tool that was created specifically for scalable storage? That’s where TrueNAS comes into play. TrueNAS is a take on Linux that is purpose-built for storage and comes with all the NAS capabilities you can imagine. TrueNAS can be installed on off-the-shelf hardware (even small form-factor PCs or virtual machines), so your storage server can be tucked out of the way. This storage solution includes features like: User/group management Alerts SSH connectivity 2-Factor authentication Storage pools Snapshots Disks (and disk importing) Support for directory services such as Active Directory, LDAP, NIS, and Kerberos Sharing via Apple Shares, Block Shares, UNIX Shares, WebDAV, and SMB Service management Plugins Jails Virtual Machines Shell access The installation of TrueNAS is all text-based but is incredibly simple to take care of and takes very little time. With minimal configuration work for the installation, I had an instance of TrueNAS up and running within about 2 minutes. The only thing you need to do is set a root password during the installation, which is Continue reading

Running Cisco IOL Devices in Containerlab

Running Cisco IOL Devices in Containerlab

Containerlab v0.58.0 supports running Cisco IOL images, which is something I was very much looking forward to. IOL nodes are an implementation of Cisco IOS-XE that does not run as a full virtual machine. Therefore, the IOL nodes generally consume much less CPU and memory.

Containerlab already has great documentation on how to use Cisco IOL devices, but I'll cover it here as well for any of my readers who are interested. You can check out the official documentation for more info.

💡
Please note that IOL images are the property of Cisco, and redistribution is not permitted. This guide is intended for educational purposes only.

If you have Cisco CML (you may need version 2.7 or later), it should include the IOL images. You'll need to use vrnetlab to convert the binary file into a Docker container, which can then be used within Containerlab like any other container/image.

First, I have downloaded these two Cisco IOL files to the Downloads folder. One for L3 and another one for L2.

  • x86_64_crb_linux-adventerprisek9-ms
  • x86_64_crb_linux_l2-adventerprisek9-ms.bin

Next, clone the hellt/vrnetlab repository to your local machine. 

git clone https://github.com/hellt/vrnetlab.git

Then, copy these two images into the vrnetlab/cisco/iol directory Continue reading

Cerebras Trains Llama Models To Leap Over GPUs

It was only a few months ago when waferscale compute pioneer Cerebras Systems was bragging that a handful of its WSE-3 engines lashed together could run circles around Nvidia GPU instances based on Nvidia’s “Hopper” H100 GPUs when running the open source Llama 3.1 foundation model created by Meta Platforms. …

Cerebras Trains Llama Models To Leap Over GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AI Should Be Concise

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the rise of AI is that everything feels so wordy now. I’m sure it’s a byproduct of the popularity of ChatGPT and other LLMs that are designed for language. You’ve likely seen it too on websites that have paragraphs of text that feel unnecessary. Maybe you’re looking for an answer to a specific question. You could be trying to find a recipe or even a code block for a problem. What you find is a wall of text that feels pieced together by someone that doesn’t know how to write.

The Soul of Wit

I feel like the biggest issue with those overly word-filled answers comes down to the way that people feel about unnecessary exposition. AI is built to write things on a topic and fill out word count. Much like a student trying to pad out the page length for a required report, AI doesn’t know when to shut up. It specifically adds words that aren’t really required. I realize that there are modes of AI content creation that value being concise but those are the default.

I use AI quite a bit to summarize long articles, many of which Continue reading

Elephants in tunnels: how Hyperdrive connects to databases inside your VPC networks

With September’s announcement of Hyperdrive’s ability to send database traffic from Workers over Cloudflare Tunnels, we wanted to dive into the details of what it took to make this happen.

Hyper-who?

Accessing your data from anywhere in Region Earth can be hard. Traditional databases are powerful, familiar, and feature-rich, but your users can be thousands of miles away from your database. This can cause slower connection startup times, slower queries, and connection exhaustion as everything takes longer to accomplish.

Cloudflare Workers is an incredibly lightweight runtime, which enables our customers to deploy their applications globally by default and renders the cold start problem almost irrelevant. The trade-off for these light, ephemeral execution contexts is the lack of persistence for things like database connections. Database connections are also notoriously expensive to spin up, with many round trips required between client and server before any query or result bytes can be exchanged.

Hyperdrive is designed to make the centralized databases you already have feel like they’re global while keeping connections to those databases hot. We use our global network to get faster routes to your database, keep connection pools primed, and cache your most frequently run queries as close to users Continue reading

IBM’s Red Hat Acquisition Will Pay For Itself By Early Next Year

Big Blue has reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2024, and the thing that stands out most is not the System z16 mainframes and Power10 midrange and big iron are getting a little long in the tooth ahead of new product cycles expected to start in 2025. …

IBM’s Red Hat Acquisition Will Pay For Itself By Early Next Year was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

TL006: From Blame to Empowerment: Changing Team Culture in Tech

Leadership has a huge impact on an organization’s culture, including tech teams. On the positive side, leaders can foster healthy, productive environments. On the negative side, they can build hostile, blame-centric viper pits. Today’s episode of Technically Leadership examines how to strive for the positive by shielding teams from internal politics, developing empathetic leadership, distinguishing... Read more »

Build durable applications on Cloudflare Workers: you write the Workflows, we take care of the rest

Workflows, Cloudflare’s durable execution engine that allows you to build reliable, repeatable multi-step applications that scale for you, is now in open beta. Any developer with a free or paid Workers plan can build and deploy a Workflow right now: no waitlist, no sign-up form, no fake line around-the-block.

If you learn by doing, you can create your first Workflow via a single command (or visit the docs for the full guide):

npm create cloudflare@latest workflows-starter -- \
  --template "cloudflare/workflows-starter"

Open the src/index.ts file, poke around, start extending it, and deploy it with a quick wrangler deploy.

If you want to learn more about how Workflows works, how you can use it to build applications, and how we built it, read on.

Workflows? Durable Execution?

Workflows—which we announced back during Developer Week earlier this year—is our take on the concept of “Durable Execution”: the ability to build and execute applications that are durable in the face of errors, network issues, upstream API outages, rate limits, and (most importantly) infrastructure failure.

As over 2.4 million developers continue to build applications on top of Cloudflare Workers, R2, and Workers AI, we’ve noticed more developers building multi-step applications and workflows Continue reading

Billions and billions (of logs): scaling AI Gateway with the Cloudflare Developer Platform

With the rapid advancements occurring in the AI space, developers face significant challenges in keeping up with the ever-changing landscape. New models and providers are continuously emerging, and understandably, developers want to experiment and test these options to find the best fit for their use cases. This creates the need for a streamlined approach to managing multiple models and providers, as well as a centralized platform to efficiently monitor usage, implement controls, and gather data for optimization.

AI Gateway is specifically designed to address these pain points. Since its launch in September 2023, AI Gateway has empowered developers and organizations by successfully proxying over 2 billion requests in just one year, as we highlighted during September’s Birthday Week. With AI Gateway, developers can easily store, analyze, and optimize their AI inference requests and responses in real time.

With our initial architecture, AI Gateway faced a significant challenge: the logs, those critical trails of data interactions between applications and AI models, could only be retained for 30 minutes. This limitation was not just a minor inconvenience; it posed a substantial barrier for developers and businesses needing to analyze long-term patterns, ensure compliance, or simply debug over more extended periods.

In Continue reading

Durable Objects aren’t just durable, they’re fast: a 10x speedup for Cloudflare Queues

Cloudflare Queues let a developer decouple their Workers into event-driven services. Producer Workers write events to a Queue, and consumer Workers are invoked to take actions on the events. For example, you can use a Queue to decouple an e-commerce website from a service which sends purchase confirmation emails to users. During 2024’s Birthday Week, we announced that Cloudflare Queues is now Generally Available, with significant performance improvements that enable larger workloads. To accomplish this, we switched to a new architecture for Queues that enabled the following improvements:

  • Median latency for sending messages has dropped from ~200ms to ~60ms

  • Maximum throughput for each Queue has increased over 10x, from 400 to 5000 messages per second

  • Maximum Consumer concurrency for each Queue has increased from 20 to 250 concurrent invocations

Median latency drops from ~200ms to ~60ms as Queues are migrated to the new architecture

In this blog post, we'll share details about how we built Queues using Durable Objects and the Cloudflare Developer Platform, and how we migrated from an initial Beta architecture to a geographically-distributed, horizontally-scalable architecture for General Availability.

v1 Beta architecture

When initially designing Cloudflare Queues, we decided to build something simple that we could get Continue reading

How Does Netlab Deal with Server Reboots?

Now and then, someone asks how netlab deals with reboots (or power failures or crashes) of the server it’s running on.

TL&DR: It doesn’t. However…

netlab is a CLI command that acts as an umbrella orchestration layer for Vagrant and Containerlab. It does not run as a cron job, init script, or service and thus cannot be invoked when a server is booted.

Read more …

NAN077: Network Observability: Tools, Automation, and Insights

Network optimization starts with observing, but how are networks observed and what tools are used? Joining the podcast today are the authors behind the book “Modern Network Observability.” Eric Chou welcomes David Flores, Christian Adell, and Josh VanDeraa to help uncover practical strategies and real-world case studies for network observability. Episode Guests: David Flores, Christian... Read more »

D2DO254: Intelligent Data Infrastructure: How NetApp Builds for Performance, Security, and Visibility across Clouds (Sponsored)

Enterprise data is everywhere: on prem, at the edge, and across the public cloud. Storing and managing that data involves more than just SSDs and spinning disks; it’s about building and operating a data infrastructure. On today’s Day Two DevOps podcast, host Ned Bellavance explores the idea of data infrastructure with Jeff Baxter, VP of... Read more »

Management Toolkit: SMART Goals

In the last post we discussed Management vs Leadership, now let’s start getting into some useful tools, traits, and behaviors for both managers and leaders. Starting us off will be SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time-based. Once you hear about SMART goals and what SMART goals represent it […]

Training a million models per day to save customers of all sizes from DDoS attacks

Our always-on DDoS protection runs inside every server across our global network.  It constantly analyzes incoming traffic, looking for signals associated with previously identified DDoS attacks. We dynamically create fingerprints to flag malicious traffic, which is dropped when detected in high enough volume — so it never reaches its destination — keeping customer websites online.

In many cases, flagging bad traffic can be straightforward. For example, if we see too many requests to a destination with the same protocol violation, we can be fairly sure this is an automated script, rather than a surge of requests from a legitimate web browser.

Our DDoS systems are great at detecting attacks, but there’s a minor catch. Much like the human immune system, they are great at spotting attacks similar to things they have seen before. But for new and novel threats, they need a little help knowing what to look for, which is an expensive and time-consuming human endeavor.

Cloudflare protects millions of Internet properties, and we serve over 60 million HTTP requests per second on average, so trying to find unmitigated attacks in such a huge volume of traffic is a daunting task. In order to protect the smallest of companies, Continue reading

1 … 96 97 98 99 100 … 3,840