This article explores each of these advanced networking capabilities, explaining their benefits, configurations, and practical use cases.

Having an offsite backup in your RV is great, and after a year of use,I've discovered some ways to make it even better.

How to install and minimally configure Knotto act as your home lab's local domain master and slave servers.If you were a regular viewer of the original Saturday Night Live era, youwill remember the Festrunks, two lewd but naïve Czech brothers who wereself-described "wild and crazy guys!" For me, Gyorg and Yortuk(plus having my binomial handed to me by tests designed by a brilliant Czechprofessor at the local university's high-school mathematics contests) werethe extent of my knowledge of the Czech Republic.

Use the Python Netmiko module to automate switches, routers and firewallsfrom multiple vendors.

Who needs a custom NAS OS or a web-based GUI when command-lineNAS software is so easy to configure?

Ubuntu changed networking. Embrace the YAML.

NFS clients and servers push file traffic over clear-text connections in the default configuration, which is incompatible withsensitive data. TLS can wrap this traffic, finally bringing protocol security. Before you use your cloud provider's NFS tools, reviewall of your NFS usage and secure it where necessary.

What better way to add a geeky touch to #vanlife than with aLinux server in your RV?

When I learned that our new sister company, Private InternetAccess (PIA), was opening its source code, I immediately wanted toknow the backstory, especially since privacy is the theme of this month'sLinux Journal. So I contacted Andrew Lee, who founded PIA, and an interviewensued. Here it is.DS: What made you start PIA in the first place? Did you have a particularpopulation or use case—or set of use cases—in mind?

Imre Palik tried to speed up some of Linux's networking code but was met with stubbornopposition. Essentially, he wanted networking packets to bypass thenetfilter codeunless absolutely necessary. Netfilter, he said, was designed for flexibility atthe expense of speed. According to his tests, bypassing it could speed up thesystem by as much as 15%.

DPDK is a fully open-source project that operates in userspace.It's a multi-vendor and multi-architecture project, and it aims at achieving high I/O performance and reaching high packet processing rates, which aresome of the most important features in the networking arena. It was created byIntel in 2010 and moved to the Linux Foundationin April 2017. This move positioned it as one of the most dominant and mostimportant open-source Linux projects.

Networking is one of Linux's strengths and a popular topic for our subscribers. For your weekend reading, we've curated some of Linux Journal's most popular networking articles.  NTPsec: a Secure, Hardened NTP Implementationby Eric S. Raymond

Reuven explores different types of multiprocessing and looks at the advantages and disadvantages of each.

In the September 2016 issue, I wrote an article called "Papa's Got a Brand NewNAS"where I described how I replaced my rackmounted gear with a small,low-powered ARM device—the Odroid XU4.

Through the years, I've used all sorts of router and firewall solutions athome and at work. For home networks, I usually recommend something likeDD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato on an off-the-shelf router. For business,my recommendations typically are something like a Ubiquiti router or arouter/firewall solution like Untangled or ClearOS.

More than ever, small to mid-sized businesses demand and rely ontheir networks to carry out mission-critical business activities. Asalways, however, budgets and expertise constrain these companies fromusing complex managed switches to run their networks.

I've been installing a lot of POE devices recently, and thedifferent methods for providing power over Ethernet cables can be veryconfusing. There are a few standards in place, and then there's a method thatisn't a standard, but is widely used.802.3af or Active PoE:

In a previous article, I explained the process for setting up Cacti, which is agreat program for graphing just about anything.One of the main things Igraph is my internet usage. And, it's great information to have, until thereis internet activity you can't explain.

Instead of relying on servers concentrated in one large data center, the newKubermesh is designed to simplify data-center architectures for smart factories byelegantly and cost effectively leveraging a distributed network of computing nodesspread across the enterprise.

In my "Hodge Podge" article in the October 2016 issue, I mentioned how much I love theSynology NAS I have in my server closet (Figure 1).