Network Wizkid's Technical Knowledge Base

In this article, I will go over the basics of what is required to get Ansible up and running so that you can create and run your own playbooks. I assume those that are reading this have at least some knowledge of what Ansible is, what languages it uses and the benefits of using Ansible. As somebody that has always been more focused on networking rather than coding, automation and orchestration, I feel that the IT industry has now reached a point where Network Engineers now need to know how to make tasks easier by using things such as Ansible, Python etc. Almost every day I hear the now common buzzwords ‘automation’ ‘orchestration’ and now I am being faced with projects where tools such as ansible code save me a lot of time. This is all well and good but if you’re like me and have never really done any coding or worked with Linux, it could be a little daunting when first starting out but don’t worry, there are tones of information out on the world wide web and more so the Ansible websit...

As part of my on-going studying for the CCNA Security 210 – 260 certification I have been exploring different types of network attacks, one of which is CAM table overflow attacks. In this article I would like to share what I have learnt and provide a demonstration of the attack carried out in a lab environment. To understand my demonstration, you first need to understand how a CAM table overflow attack works and what happens as a result of the attack.   Switches build Content Addressable Memory (CAM) tables based on mac-addresses and port numbers. When a switch receives a frame it checks the table to see if the source mac-address is already known, if the source mac-address is unknown the switch will add the mac-address to the table along with the port number. The switch then checks the destination layer two frame and if no entry exists the switch broadcasts the frame out of all ports except the port in which the frame was received. Presuming the destination mac-address wants to res...