netlab: VRF Instantiation on Lab Devices

In the previous blog post on this topic, I described how node and global VRFs work in netlab.

TL&DR: If you use the same VRF on multiple devices, it’s better to define it globally.

However, you might not need every VRF on every lab device in a more complex lab topology. Considering that, netlab tries to minimize the number of VRFs configured on lab devices using a simple rule: a VRF is configured on a lab device only if the device has at least one interface in that VRF.

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Treasury and PNNL threat data now available for Financial sector customers to secure applications

Following the White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy, which underscores the importance of fostering public-private partnerships to enhance the security of critical sectors, Cloudflare is happy to announce a strategic partnership with the United States Department of the Treasury and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to create Custom Indicator Feeds that enable customers to integrate approved threat intelligence feeds directly into Cloudflare's platform.

Our partnership with the Department of the Treasury and PNNL offers approved financial services institutions privileged access to threat data that was previously exclusive to the government. The feed, exposed as a Custom Indicator Feed, collects advanced insights from the Department of the Treasury and the federal government's exclusive sources. Starting today, financial institutions can create DNS filtering policies through Cloudflare’s Gateway product that leverage threat data directly from these government bodies. These policies are crucial for protecting organizations from malicious links and phishing attempts specifically targeting the financial sector.

This initiative not only supports the federal effort to strengthen cybersecurity within critical infrastructure including the financial sector, for which the Treasury is the designated lead agency, but also contributes directly to the ongoing improvement of our shared security capabilities.

Why we partnered Continue reading

Greasing The Skids To Move AI From InfiniBand To Ethernet

Just about everybody, including Nvidia, thinks that in the long run, most people running most AI training and inference workloads at any appreciable scale – hundreds to millions of datacenter devices – will want a cheaper alternative for networking AI accelerators than InfiniBand. …

Greasing The Skids To Move AI From InfiniBand To Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hedge 225: The CCNA

The CCNA has a long history as an important certification for network engineers. While the CCST has been created by Cisco “below” the CCNA, or as a different starting point, many network engineers begin their career with the CCNA. Join Jason Gooley, Wendell Odom, Tom, and Russ as we discuss the most recent updates to the CCNA, the way updates to the program are changing, and Jason’s and Wendell’s updated book on the CCNA.

download

MLAG Deep Dive: Dealing with LAG Member Failures

Craig Weinhold pointed me to a complex topic I managed to ignore in my MLAG Deep Dive series: how does an MLAG cluster reroute around a failure of a LAG member link?

In this blog post, we’ll focus on traditional MLAG cluster implementations using a peer link; another blog post will explore the implications of using VXLAN and EVPN to implement MLAG clusters.

We’ll also ignore the interesting question of “how is the LAG member link failure detected?”1 and focus on “what happens next?” using the sample MLAG topology:

Read more …

Deploying and Analyze EVPN Instances: Deployment Scenarios

In the previous section, we built a Single-AS EVPN Fabric with OSPF-enabled Underlay Unicast routing and PIM-SM for Multicast routing using Any Source Multicast service. In this section, we configure two L2-Only EVPN Instances (L2-EVI) and two L2/L3 EVPN Instances (L2/3-EVI) in the EVPN Fabric. We examine their operations in six scenarios depicted in Figure 3-1.

Scenario 1 (L2-Only EVI, Intra-VN): 

In the Deployment section, we configure an L2-Only EVI with a Layer 2 VXLAN Network Identifier (L2VNI) of 10010. The Default Gateway for the VLAN associated with the EVI is a firewall. In the Analyze section, we observe the Control Plane and Data Plane operation when a) connecting Tenant Systems TS1 and TS2 to the segment, and b) TS1 communicates with TS2 (Intra-VN Communication).

Scenario 2 (L2-Only EVI, Inter-VN): 

In the Deployment section, we configure another L2-Only EVI with L2VNI 10020, to which we attach TS3 and TS4. In the Analyze section, we examine EVPN Fabric's Control Plane and Data Plane operations when TS2 (L2VNI 10010) sends data to TS3 (L2VNI 10020), Inter-VN Communication.

Scenario 3 (L2/L3 EVI, Intra-VN): 

In the Deployment section, we configure a Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) Instance named VRF-NWKT with L3VNI 10077. Next, Continue reading

Worth Exploring: LibreQoS

Erik Auerswald pointed me to an interesting open-source project. LibreQoS implements decent QoS using software switching on many-core x86 platforms. It’s implemented as a bump-in-the-wire software solution, so you should be able to plug it into your network just before a major congestion point and let it handle the packet dropping and prioritization.

Obviously, the concept is nothing new. I wrote about a similar problem in xDSL networks in 2009.

Introducing Cloudflare for Unified Risk Posture

Managing risk posture — how your business assesses, prioritizes, and mitigates risks — has never been easy. But as attack surfaces continue to expand rapidly, doing that job has become increasingly complex and inefficient. (One global survey found that SOC team members spend, on average, one-third of their workday on incidents that pose no threat).  

But what if you could mitigate risk with less effort and less noise?

This post explores how Cloudflare can help customers do that, thanks to a new suite that converges capabilities across our Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) and web application and API (WAAP) security portfolios. We’ll explain:

  • Why this approach helps protect more of your attack surface, while also reducing SecOps effort
  • Three key use cases — including enforcing Zero Trust with our expanded CrowdStrike partnership
  • Other new projects we’re exploring based on these capabilities

Cloudflare for Unified Risk Posture

Today, we’re announcing Cloudflare for Unified Risk Posture, a new suite of cybersecurity risk management capabilities that can help enterprises with automated and dynamic risk posture enforcement across their expanding attack surface. Today, one unified platform enables organizations to:

  • Evaluate risk across people and applications: Cloudflare evaluates risk posed by people via Continue reading

Using Fortran on Cloudflare Workers

In April 2020, we blogged about how to get COBOL running on Cloudflare Workers by compiling to WebAssembly. The ecosystem around WebAssembly has grown significantly since then, and it has become a solid foundation for all types of projects, be they client-side or server-side.

As WebAssembly support has grown, more and more languages are able to compile to WebAssembly for execution on servers and in browsers. As Cloudflare Workers uses the V8 engine and supports WebAssembly natively, we’re able to support languages that compile to WebAssembly on the platform.

Recently, work on LLVM has enabled Fortran to compile to WebAssembly. So, today, we’re writing about running Fortran code on Cloudflare Workers.

Before we dive into how to do this, here’s a little demonstration of number recognition in Fortran. Draw a number from 0 to 9 and Fortran code running somewhere on Cloudflare’s network will predict the number you drew.

Try yourself on handwritten-digit-classifier.fortran.demos.cloudflare.com.

This is taken from the wonderful Fortran on WebAssembly post but instead of running client-side, the Fortran code is running on Cloudflare Workers. Read on to find out how you can use Fortran on Cloudflare Workers and how that demonstration works.

Wait, Fortran? Continue reading

Cisco vPC in VXLAN/EVPN Network – Part 3 – Verifying Connectivity

The following topology is used:

We want to verify connectivity and traffic flow towards:

  • Gateway of Server3.
  • Server1.
  • Server2.
  • Server4.

Let’s start with the gateway. The gateway is at 10.0.0.1 and has a MAC address of 0001.0001.0001:

server3:~$ ip neighbor | grep 10.0.0.1
10.0.0.1 dev bond0 lladdr 00:01:00:01:00:01 STALE

This is an anycast gateway MAC. When initiating a ping towards 10.0.0.1, it can go to either Leaf1 or Leaf2. I will run Ethanalyzer on the switches to confirm which one is receiving the ICMP Echo Request:

Leaf1# ethanalyzer local interface inband display-filter "icmp" limit-captured-frames 0
Capturing on 'ps-inb'

Leaf2# ethanalyzer local interface inband display-filter "icmp" limit-captured-frames 0
Capturing on 'ps-inb'

Then initiate ping from Server3:

server3:~$ ping 10.0.0.1
PING 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=1.19 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=1.29 ms
^C
--- 10.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.192/1.242/1.292/0.050 ms

Continue reading

Repost: State of Lisp Implementations (2024)

You might remember Béla Várkonyi’s use of LISP to build resilient ground-to-airplane networks from last week’s repost. It seems he’s not exactly happy with the current level of LISP support, at least based on what he wrote as a response to Jeff McLaughlin’s claim that “I can tell you that our support for EVPN does not, in any way, indicate the retirement of LISP for SD-Access.”:

Nice to hear the Cisco intends to support LISP. However, it is removed from IOS XR already. So it is not that clear…

If Cisco will stop supporting LISP, then we will be forced to create our own LISP routers, since we need it for extreme mobility environments.

Read more …

Running Palo Alto Firewall in Containerlab

Running Palo Alto Firewall in Containerlab

Hi all, in this quick blog post, let's look at how to run Palo Alto firewalls in Containerlab. If you've been following me for a while, you might know that I've started using Containerlab more often in my projects. If you're new to Containerlab or need a quick recap, check out my other introductory post below. Now, let's dive in.

Containerlab - Creating Network Labs Can’t be Any Easier
What if I tell you that all you need is just a YAML file with just a bunch of lines to create a Network Lab that can run easily on your laptop? I’ll walk you through what Containerlab is
Running Palo Alto Firewall in ContainerlabPacketswitchSuresh Vina
Running Palo Alto Firewall in Containerlab

boxen or vrnetlab

Palo Alto doesn't provide a containerized VM image (not CN-Series), it only has a VM-based image. You can create a container from this VM image using two methods. The official documentation recommends using 'boxen' to generate a container image from the VM. However, I chose to use the vrnetlab project instead.

Creating a containerized image using vrnetlab

First things first, download the VM image (qcow2) from the Palo Alto support portal. You might need a valid support contract to access this image. For this Continue reading

NB477: Arista Assembles Switch-Based Microperimeters; FCC Wants More Money for Telcos Dumping Huawei Gear

Take a Network Break! This week we cover a new microsegmentation offering from Arista, new GenAI assistants from Fortinet, and a GenAI firewall from Versa Networks to monitor and report on how organizations are using generative AI tools and applications. AWS will stop selling VMware Cloud on AWS (but you can still get it through... Read more »
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