VMware Distributed Virtual Switch Version Upgrade via Side-by-Side Migration (vSwitch 6.0.0 to 6.5.0 or 6.6.0)

VMware have recommended that upgrading from Distributed vSwitch version: 6.0.0 to 6.5.0 or 6.6.0 should be done as a side by side migration rather than an in place upgrade due to the risk of outage when performing the upgrade in place, this is detailed in the following VMware article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc/GUID-330A0689-574A-4589-9462-14CA03F3F2F4.html. It is understood that vDS […]

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Separation of Duties, Two-Person Control, (Principle of) Least Privilege and Need to Know

Information Security has a number of foundational concepts, such as the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of information, information assets and services. In this article we’ll explore four key concepts that are good to understand to assist you in building and configuring secure systems and therefore protecting and improving the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of your […]

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AWS with Python3 using Boto3 Quickstart (Linux)

Following on from the https://www.geekmungus.co.uk/aws-cli-quick-start-linux guide, let’s see about how you can connect to your AWS from Python3 using Boto3. If you’ve not already done it, and if you’re not using the “default” credentials, you can specify a particular profile to use by adding it to an environment variable for example the below; where the […]

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Moving to Full Fibre (Dude, where’s my ‘phone?)

So, finally BT Openreach had got round to installing fibre optic cabling to the local area to provide fibre optic based Internet. If you’re interested to know if you can get (or if not register your interest) by using the https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband site. You might ask, what do you mean fibre Internet? I already have fibre […]

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Monitoring Interface Status on Palo Alto Firewall

In this scenario I had a pair of Palo Alto Firewalls that were providing firewall services as a perimeter pair of firewalls acting in an active/passive cluster. Due to our internal network configuration, use of OSPF etc. the interfaces (ports) on the passive firewall were set to be down/disabled when that firewall was not active. […]

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