Posts

Abstract “How much faster will my VM’s disks be if I upgrade my ZFS-based (Z File System) NAS to 10 GbE?” The disks will be faster, in some cases, much faster. Our experience is that sequential read throughput will be 1.4✕ faster, write throughput, 10✕ faster, and IOPS, 1.6✕ faster. We ran a three-hour benchmark on our NAS server before and after upgrading to 10 GbE. We ran the benchmark again after upgrading. The benchmark looped through write-read-iops tests continuously. ...

Abstract Smartphone authenticator apps such as Google Authenticator and Authy implement software tokens that are “two-step verification services using the Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) and HMAC-based One-time Password algorithm (HOTP)” Smartphone TOTP, a form of Two-factor authentication (2FA), displays a 6-digit code derived from a shared secret, updating every thirty seconds. The shared secret is presented only once to the user, typically with a QR (Quick Response) Code which is scanned by the authenticator app. ...

Abstract By using tcpdump to troubleshoot an elusive error, we uncovered a man-in-the-middle (MITM) ssh proxy installed by our information security (InfoSec) team to harden/protect a set of machines which were accessible from the internet. The ssh proxy in question was Palo Alto Network’s (PAN) Layer 7 (i.e. it worked on any port, not solely ssh’s port 22) proxy, and was discovered when we observed a failure to negotiate ciphers during the ssh key exchange. ...

When customers with vSphere+NSX-T-based foundations apply a stemcell update, update a tile, or upgrade PAS (Pivotal Application Service) from 2.2 to 2.3, their Cloud Foundry may become unreachable as their NSX-T static load balancer server pools have been emptied. This blog post describes a method to ensure availability during upgrades. We use a combination of customized Operations Manager resource configs and BOSH VM Extensions. The sample workflow in this post is for upgrading PAS 2.2 to PAS 2.3 with an Operations Manager upgrade; however, it can also be adapted to stemcell or tile upgrades as well. ...

The following section is the new Quickstart for installing a TLS certificate on vCenter 7 vCenter 7 Quickstart On your vCenter, navigate to Menu → Administration → Certificates → Certificate Management On the __MACHINE_CERT tile, click Actions, select Generate Certificate Signing Request (CSR). Enter the appropriate info; for inspiration, this is what we entered: ...