The Hub and Spoke!

Cisco introduced Catalyst 9600 switches, that let customers automate, set policy, provide security and gain assurance across wired and wireless networks. Read the article over at Network World over here . 

TLDR: MSTP is generally the right choice unless you know why you shouldn’t. “Most networks will never be touched by more then one person that understands spanning-tree in it’s operational life” – Anon Read the article over at EtherRealMind over here . 

    Your firewall is incredibly important when it comes to defending against hackers and other threats. However, many people mistakenly believe that firewalls are simply plug-and-play.  In fact, firewalls need to be optimised continuously for both security and performance to ensure that your systems are functioning efficiently.  They key way to manage this is ensuring that you have optimised the rules and policies that your firewall uses. Here are to ensure that your firewall is optimised to deal with any threats it may encounter.

  OpsWatch WiFi impact and vibration recorders allow you to improve the performance and safety of your equipment, extend its lifetime and avoid any unplanned downtime and maintenance. With real time monitoring of low frequency shock and vibration to monitor when changes occur to stationary equipment and also use to detect shipping damage before equipment is installed. Find out more about the product over here .

You can connect Azure Sentinel to any Fortinet appliance by saving the log files as Syslog CEF. The integration with Azure Sentinel enables you to easily run analytics and queries across the log file data from Fortinet. For more information on how Azure Sentinel ingests CEF data, see Connect CEF appliances . Read the article over at Microsoft here .

Install and setup the latest version of shinken Network Monitor for a home or small business.  At work, my team develops the software for more than 75 server classes, with over 300 instances in multiple data centers and points of presence. There is an experienced operational team that monitors and keeps these servers running 24x7. I don't have anything close to their knowledge or expertise. Besides myself, I have no one supporting my home network. And, I want to spend zero time monitoring and maintaining my home network. Read the article over at instructables  over here .

VPN servers are a great way to make sure your connection is secure and safe specially when you are connected to open or shared Wifi network. This tutorial will show you how you can set up your own VPN server at you home on Raspberry Pi, so all your connections on remote devices go through this server as if you were connected to your home Wifi.  The software that I am using – Softether – is a free and open source server that allows you to set up multiple VPN protocols. We will only be setting IPSec protocol that uses secure and encrypted connections for your VPN. Read the article over at {Curly Braces} over here .

Corner stone of the SD Maree building being laid by Mr Daniels in 1930.

In April of 1912, Captain E.J. Smith said, “Never in all history have we harnessed such formidable technology. Every scientific advancement known to man has been incorporated into its design. The operational controls are sound and foolproof!” This quote went on to become synonymous with one of history’s greatest failures to adequately assess risk: the sinking of the Titanic. A contemporary example of a poorly documented risk assessment process is the current water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa. With conversations into the longevity of Cape Town’s water beginning from as early as 2012, how is it possible that Cape Town has become the first city in the world to run out of water? The simple answer to an incredibly complex problem is this: The strategy to prevent such a crisis was insufficient and poorly documented. Read the blog post over at Nettsite over here .

Management guru Marcus Buckingham has a bone to pick with one of the prevailing trends in management wisdom — that companies need to get a lot better at giving tough, candid feedback, and need to do it a lot more often. As indicative of the trend, he points to recent popular books like Bridgewater Associates CEO Ray Dalio’s “Principles” and Kim Scott’s “Radical Candor” , the proliferation of employee survey tools and feedback apps like 15Five and news reports about tough internal cultures like the ones at Amazon or Netflix.  But in a new article in the Harvard Business Review called “ The Feedback Fallacy ”, which offers a preview of his book to be published in April, Buckingham and his co-author, Cisco executive Ashley Goodall, argue managers are getting it all wrong. Managers who focus so much on candid feedback are ignoring research that shows how hard it is for people to rate the performance of others, and how difficult it is to standardise and homogenise what “exc

Video that will help identify vCPU Over Provisioning with Uila

Fortinet today released a SoC4 SD-WAN ASIC, which will power the latest iteration of its FortiGate appliance, 100F. The company also updated its operating system and security fabric to power what it calls security-driven networking, including new features for SD-WAN and other edge and multi-cloud environments.   FortiGate is the firm’s next-generation firewall appliance, which is what it offers its SD-WAN features through. Fortinet began selling SD-WAN directly to its customers (through this appliance) last July. Read the article over at sdxcentral over here .

The long wait for the new RIPE Atlas probes is over. Here's a quick look at the new devices and the work that went in to getting distribution back on track. In March last year, we released an article about  delays in the distribution of RIPE Atlas probes . The short version - when the model we used for the current generation of probes went out of production, we hit inevitable delays in dealing with applications and informed the community accordingly. Reaf the blog post over at RIPE here .