Do more with “the same”

To emphasis the effectiveness of a new tool, we always hear some people say it would make you “do more with less”. This is so attractive to Chief Officers. How would the other staffs think about this?

Dongshan River Water Park (冬山河親水公園).
The venue of  Yilan International Children's Folklore and Folkgame Festival (YICFFF, 宜蘭國際童玩藝術節). Yilan County, Taiwan. 

The problem of “do more with less”

With the word “less”, what does that mean? Does that imply we don’t need that much budgets anymore? Does that imply we don’t need more hardware? Does that imply the workforce would be cut down?

CCNA v3 Exam is cheaper than v2

I create this post just to remind you in case you did not notice it yet.

Shihmen Dam (石門水庫), Taoyuan City, Taiwan.  (Wikipedia)

Version 3 Exam costs $250

CCNA Routing Switching Version 3 exam cost is now US$ 250. This is a good news because in v2 the exam cost was US$ 295. That is, the new exam is US$ 45 less than before.

This is great! Isn’t it!

Diffie and Hellman Receive Turing Award 2015

When we study IPSec, we know Mr. Diffie and Mr. Hellman invented a method in year 1976 that is the core of Internet Key Exchange (IKE) to create mutually shared secret. We also have to specify and configure DH Group Number in ISAKMP policy sets (crypto-map in Cisco IOS).

A.M. Turing Award Logo. Captured on ACM Official Website.

I am not going to dig in the details about the mathematics behind Diffie-Hellman method. I just want you to know Mr. Diffie and Mr. Hellman receive Turing Award 2015 together.

Increase iPhones’ battery life by removing unnecessary IPv6 multicast Router Advertisements

I came across a new RFC 7772: “Reducing Energy Consumption of Router Advertisements”. I want to share my learnings after reading this RFC.

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Logo, captured on Wikipedia.

I intentionally mentioned “iPhone” at the subject to have your attention. Actually, the whole discussion applies to any mobile devices with limited battery capacity, such as smart phones and tablet computers.

It is quite obvious mobile devices will consume more power while awake than asleep. The question is how serious this problem is?

Update your Cisco ASA OS ASAP!

I just want to make sure you have known this news and updated your Cisco ASA OS already.

Cisco announced a "critical" vulnerability of Cisco ASA OS and released patched OS for them at the same time. Hackers could make use of this vulnerability to gain control of your Cisco ASA.

The first fixed version of ASA OS to fix this problem.
Screen captured on Cisco's web site.

Vulnerable Products

Cisco ASA Software is affected by this vulnerability if the system is configured to terminate IKEv1 or IKEv2 VPN connections.

This includes the following:

• LAN-to-LAN IPsec VPN
• Remote access VPN using the IPsec VPN client
• Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP)-over-IPsec VPN connections
• IKEv2 AnyConnect

Cisco ASA Software can be downloaded from the Software Center on Cisco.com by visitinghttp://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/navigator.html.

The full details about this vulnerability and patched OS is on Cisco's official web site:
Cisco ASA Software IKEv1 and IKEv2 Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (CVE-2016-1287)