Have you ever heard someone say "I'm not a coder" at work? The IT industry is changing again. Our humble origins began as polymaths moved from adjacent industries and created a new world from scratch. The pioneering phase led to unique opportunities, creating our transport protocols, programming languages, …

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Not every application is designed to leverage a load balancer. Early load balancing solutions capitalized on this fact - which may seem odd. The solution to the supportability issue creates new opportunity; we'll look at some examples here. Adjusting application behaviors quickly becomes a powerful tool when enhancing …

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CI/CD tools aren't just for automatically deploying apps! Jenkins excels at enabling an engineer to automatically execute and test code - but, it has a hidden super-power: Automating boring and intensive IT tasks(removing toil). Let's take a common and relatable IT problem - it doesn't matter if you're a DevOps …

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Reliably executing repetitive tasks with automation is easy (after the work is done) Given enough work, self-built automation can be easy to consume. Non-consumers (engineers) need to focus on reliability and repeatability, but occasionally there's an opportunity to save time and simplify lives directly. Information …

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Rapidly deploying Linux servers to meet a whim represents the essence of home lab activities, but we spend a great deal of time spinning/configuring machines to meet our specs. Worse, we lose a great deal of time keeping them properly configured and up to date, and none have the privilege of unlimited lab time. Let's …

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It's not a matter of if you will be the victim of a breach, but when. Wired is starting to track breaches by halves (as a general tech publication), and security vendors are moving to monthly reporting due to the volume. It's 2022, and it seems everyone loves to over-share on social media. This may feel good but …

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NSX 4 is now available, and it was a surprisingly sparse release in terms of new capabilities. NSX 4.0 appears to be a "clean house" initiative, so while it's missing "whizz-bang" new data plane features it does address a variety of issues I am happy to say are now closed: Numerous documented API …

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The principles that define the information security field are decades older than computing, and we'd do well to learn from the lessons that precede our industry. We as security professionals naively construct an "our stuff versus them" model when attempting to defend our networks in our early career. As we …

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VMware introduced the ability to double-encapsulate layer 2 frames in via the "Access VLAN" option for VRF instances in NSX Data Center: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T-Data-Center/3.2/administration/GUID-4CB5796A-1CED-4F0E-ADE0-72BF7B3F762C.html Q-in-VNI provides a capable infrastructure engineer the …

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VMware's vDS is a bit of a misnomer In a previous post, I covered the concept of transitivity in networking - but in Layer 2 (Ethernet) land, transitivity is critically important to understanding how VMware's Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) works. The statement "VMware's Virtual Distributed Switch is not a …

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