VIRTUAL Stories
Telecom Italia Halves Software Costs in vRAN Trials
Published on: 2019-09-25
MADRID -- 5G Core Summit 2019 -- Telecom Italia is considering a broader deployment of virtual and open radio access networks after trials with several partners led to major cost savings on the software side. The update comes after pilot projects with companies including Altiostar, a US software ...
China's Boffins Set Out Their 6G Vision
Published on: 2019-09-25
It's customary that as a new mobile technology rolls out, a few boffins start work on the next generation, ignored by everyone else. Well, that's not the case for 6G. With 5G a bone of geopolitical contention, the road to 6G is likely to capture a good deal of attention. So let's see what a ...
Rubrik, NetApp Catapult Data Management to the Cloud
Published on: 2019-09-24
Rubrik and NetApp have teamed up to integrate Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform with NetApp’s enterprise-grade storage platform, StorageGRID, bundling backup software and storage that is purpose-built for cloud. The partnership will offer NetApp customers protection of their ...
Cisco spreads ACI to Microsoft Azure, multicloud and SD-WAN environments
Published on: 2019-09-18
Cisco is significantly spreading its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology to help customers grow and control hybrid, multicloud and SD-WAN environments. ACI is Cisco’s flagship software-defined networking (SDN) data-center package, but it also delivers the company’s Intent-Based ...
Broadband goes galactic
Published on: 2019-09-16
Space may not be the final frontier – but it is certainly becoming the next frontier for communications services as both interest and investment in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is soaring to new heights. According to the Space Investment Quarterly published by Space Angels, $1.3 billion was ...
Entering a new era of openness and disaggregation
Published on: 2019-09-12
Networking has long relied on proprietary architecture, particularly on the transport layer. The thinking behind this is that while single-vendor solutions tend to be more expensive, they are also more reliable and easier to manage than a collection of interoperable boxes. But this attitude is ...
IDG Contributor Network: Software-defined perimeter – the essence of trust
Published on: 2019-08-26
Actions speak louder than words. Reliable actions build lasting trust in contrast to unreliable words. Imagine that you had a house with a guarded wall. You would feel safe in the house, correct? Now, what if that wall is dismantled? You might start to feel your security is under threat. Anyone ...
Best mesh Wi-Fi routers: Reviews and buying advice
Published on: 2019-05-10
A great wireless router is an essential element of tech life, whether you’re building out a smart home or you just want the best experience streaming music and video at home. If you’re suffering with low wireless throughput or dead spots in any area of your home, we heartily recommend deploying ...
What is infrastructure as code? A big step up from server scripting
Published on: 2019-03-07
If you have ever had to provision and configure a server, you know the pain it can bring. Take the process of configuring hardware connections, the software stack, and their interdependencies, and then multiply that across however many servers you are deploying—you are talking days and days of ...
Juniper NXTWORK Hack-a-Thon
Published on: 2019-09-23
Over the past couple of years, Juniper has hosted a Hackathon at start of NXTWORK. This event is a great way to meet new people, start to get in the groove of challenging technology and just have some fun. When you register for NXTWORK, there is an option to sign up for the Hackathon. In 2017 we ...
Top 3 AWS Critical Cloud Misconfigurations and How to Remediate
Published on: 2019-09-20
It’s no secret that cloud adoption yields tremendous business benefit — increased agility, reduced cost, flexibility, ease-of-use, the list goes on. The problem is, companies have adopted cloud faster than they’ve been able to adopt security processes and practices to support it. Developer teams ...
Juniper JNCIE-ENT Refresh
Published on: 2019-09-20
A few months ago Juniper announced that the JNCIE-ENT lab exam would be getting a much-needed refresh. On November 1st will be saying goodbye to JPR-943 and hello to JPR-944. This new lab exam is also a 6-hour hands-on lab instead of the previous 8-hour hands-on. I do plan to update my ...
Why is securing BGP just so damn hard?
Published on: 2019-09-19
Concur that BGP, at its core, depends entirely on trust between its participants. It is possible to identify and ostracize the untrustworthy, but this is a social solution rather than a technical one. I would observe that several of the leading hyperscalers are creating worldwide private ...
One Article to Understand the Cloud Computing, Virtualization, and Containers
Published on: 2019-09-17
The word “cloud computing” is believed to be very familiar to everyone. As a mainstream trend in the development of information technology, it frequently appears in front of us. Along with it, there are also these conceptual terms – OpenStack, Hypervisor, KVM, Docker, K8S, etc. These concepts ...
Network Break 252: Big Tech Backlash Hits Google; Activist Investor Tells AT&T To Slash And Burn
Published on: 2019-09-16
Take a Network Break! It’s an extra-long episode today so pack some extra virtual donuts. We start with follow-ups on AMD, CRL support, and more. On the news front, Microsoft partners with three satellite broadband providers on ExpressRoute, a pair of pen-testers were jailed after breaking in to ...
Quick VPN Installation Guide on Your Router
Published on: 2019-09-04
Having your own VPN, or virtual private network is growing in popularity. With so many hacks and data breaches taking place every day, maintaining certain levels of security is important. That’s why having a VPN is key. What is so important about a VPN? A VPN provides total privacy because your ...
Positioning Policy Properly
Published on: 2019-08-30
Who owns the network policy for your organization? How about the security policy?Identity policy? Sound like easy questions, don’t they? The first two are pretty standard. The last generally comes down to one or two different teams depending upon how much Active Directory you have deployed. But ...
Connecting ASA to Umbrella SIG with PBR
Published on: 2019-07-31
This article explores the specific configuration of Cisco ASA when using it to establish a tunnel for Umbrella SIG. The first question many may have is, “What exactly is SIG?” The answer to that is quite simple–SIG is an acronym for Secure Internet Gateway and in the Umbrella implementation it ...
3 Tools for Getting VMs From Your Datacenter to the AWS Cloud
Published on: 2019-07-23
Here’s a simple scenario: you have some Virtual Machines (VMs) in your on-premises environment, likely in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. You want to either fully migrate some or all of those VMs to the AWS Cloud or you want to copy a gold image to the AWS Cloud so you can launch compute ...
Patch! Patch! Patch!
Published on: 2019-07-04
Bob Plankers, Technical Marketing Architect for vSphere at VMware, has a very simple but important message for all of us, and it isn’t really limited to VMware itself: “Patch! Patch! Patch! Did I say… patch?”. That was his starting message when I visited VMware during Security Field Day 2, and ...
Response to “Certifications Are Not A Big Deal. Stop Being a Princess About It.”
Published on: 2019-06-30
In a post which now appears to have been deleted, Greg Ferro got right to the point in his article Response: Certifications Are Not A Big Deal. Stop Being a Princess About It. The majority of this (my) response was written while Greg’s post was still active, but I had to come back and inject ...
Cranky Old Network Engineer Complains About The Youth Of Today
Published on: 2019-06-20
If you’re very old (like me) you’ll likely remember the halcyon days when IP routing was not enabled by default on Cisco routers. Younger gamers may find this hard to believe, which makes it even stranger when I keep bumping into an apparently common misconception about how routers work. Let’s ...
A10 Networks ACOS Root Privilege Escalation
Published on: 2019-06-13
The following summarizes a root privilege escalation vulnerability that I identified in A10 ACOS ADC software. This was disclosed to A10 Networks in June 2016 and mitigations have been put in place to limit exposure to the vulnerability. Any user assigned sufficient privilege to upload an ...
StackWise Virtual on Catalyst 9500
Published on: 2019-06-12
During the Cisco Live 2016 in Las Vegas, Cisco presented the new feature named “StackWise virtual” supported by the IOS XE Denali in the 3850 switch series and later, in the new Cisco Catalyst 9500 family. Similarly to the old Virtual Switching System (VSS), the stackwise virtual allows the ...
Certification Exam Questions That I Hate
Published on: 2019-03-12
In my 11 year career as an IT instructor, I’ve had to pass a lot of certification exams. In many cases not on the first try. Sometimes for fair reasons, and sometimes, it feels, for unfair reasons. Recently I had to take the venerable Cisco CCNA R&S exam again. For various reasons I’d allowed it ...
Cannot connect the virtual device ... because no corresponding device is available on the host
Published on: 2019-01-21
Recently I've been building some VM templates on my MacBook and launching instances of them in VMware. Each time it produced following error:Cannot connect the virtual device sata0:1 because no corresponding device is available on the host.Either button caused the guest to boot up. The "No" ...
Sharkfest 2018 EU
Published on: 2018-11-07
I’m back from Sharkfest EU 2018 and once again it was a great conference. This time, many core developers and instructors brought their families along, so it felt even more like a family gathering than ever before. I have written a number of Sharkfest Recaps before, and I felt I needed to do ...
Juniper RADIUS-delivered switching filters
Published on: 2018-11-06
I’ve been experimenting with getting RADIUS to deploy switching filters to Juniper switches recently, as part of a reference architecture demo. The concept is called REACH2020 and combines network virtualisation with the ability to identify network users and devices so that categories of user ...
Installing Moloch on Debian 9 Stretch
Published on: 2018-10-31
Moloch is a tool that builds on Elasticsearch to process large numbers of network packets, either from a live network or from imported PCAP files. This is how I installed it on a Debian 9 server. Installing Moloch turned out not to be exactly easy when I prepared my Sharkfest 2018 Talk “The ...
“Thirteen hundred APs, no open support tickets” – achieving quality in wireless networks
Published on: 2018-10-08
“Thirteen hundred APs, no open support tickets,” Sudheer Matta, VP of Products for Mist Systems, boldly stated during his MFD3 presentation. At the time, he was referencing one of their largest customers specifically, but the company’s desire to prevent bugs, create high quality customer ...
Intro into Fortinet WLAN configuration
Published on: 2018-09-30
Simple, secure, sensible – Koroush Saraf, Fortiner VP of Product Management, emphasized these words in his recent MFD3 presentations. While any vendor can claim their products share these attributes, it’s usually the complexity of workflow that reveals the betrayal of one or all of these ...
SDN Lesson #2 – Introducing Faucet as an OpenFlow Controller
Published on: 2017-03-07
Welcome back to a new article about SDN - this time introducing an OpenFlow controller called Faucet, developed as a RYU application by New Zeeland Research and Education (REANNZ), Waikato University and Victoria University. In this article, I am not going to write about Faucet's architecture ...
The Overlay Problem: Getting In and Out
Published on: 2016-09-30
I've been researching overlay network strategies recently. There are plenty of competing implementations available, employing various encapsulations and control plane designs. But every design I've encountered seems ultimately hampered by the same issue: scalability at the edge. Imagine a ...
Classic DC and M-LAG
Published on: 2016-08-29
In the pervious post we talked about BGP in Data Center and how it is a topic of discussion in between the DC and the SP arenas. In this post I will start explaining some classic DC design and laying its shortage which will engage the SP gurus with us, as well it will make sure that we all on ...
MACsec Implementation on Linux
Published on: 2016-08-01
As you noticed from the previous articles, lately I have been playing with some various tunnelling techniques and today I am presenting MACsec. Most of the documentation resources about MACsec implementation on the web at this moment, are the ones showing various vendors implementation, ...
Overlay Tunneling with Open vSwitch - GRETAP, VXLAN, Geneve, GREoIPsec
Published on: 2016-07-07
Building overlay networks using tunnels was always done to achieve connectivity between isolated networks that needed to share the same policies, VLANs or security domains. In particular, they represent a strong use-case in the data center, where tunnels are created between the hypervisors in ...
Configuring Macvlan and Ipvlan Linux Networking
Published on: 2016-03-28
Macvlan and Ipvlan are both Linux type networking interfaces that are both supported by the Linux kernel. They are unique for a few different reasons. One thing that makes them both very attractive is they do not use bridges in their implementation and natively namespace aware. It solves some ...
Docker on Google Compute Engine Using Docker Machine
Published on: 2015-06-13
Next up in Using Docker Machine across private and public clouds, is Google Compute Engine (GCE). As with the other posts, a diagram of how I view the importance of a Docker Machine abstraction. First, if you don’t already have an account you can get $300 credit expiring after 60-days towards ...