All right, let's get started. Hi, everyone. My name is Kamesh Pamaraju. I am the Senior Product Manager at Dell. Originally, I was supposed to give this talk. And as it turns out, fortunately for us, John Paul from UAB was going to be here at the summit. And I said, what a better opportunity for us to have the customer himself right here talking about their experience. So it's great for us to have John Paul with us here today. So I wanted to give you a very quick, brief overview of how we got engaged, Dell and UAB. So this was back in, I guess, 2013, John Paul? Early 2013. When we first started talking with John Paul and UAB around some of the challenges and problems that they were facing. So a little bit of a backgrounder. And then John Paul is really going to go deep into the kind of things that they were dealing with at UAB and how they overcome some of their challenges and what benefits they're seeing. So let me first get started off with a little bit of a background. So when we first started talking, I was, in fact, I was the first guy on the phone, if you remember, John Paul. We were on the phone with UAB talking to John, just trying to understand, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? What are some of your challenges? And this is kind of what emerged. So UAB does a lot of great work in cancer and genomics research. They get tons of funding. They had over 900 researchers. And one of the biggest challenges, it all started with storage, by the way.  And they had obviously growing data sets. And that was challenging them. And how many of you kind of run into this kind of issue where your data is distributed across USBs, laptops, USB drives, local servers, HPC clusters? How many of you kind of run into this data distribution issue? So this is what they were dealing with. And then they had this, they were using an HPC cluster. And they had to transfer data back and forth. It was just taking too much time. It was clogging their networks. And then, of course, as you can imagine, having distributed data management was a big problem. It was putting data at risk. It was causing productivity issues. So this was the problem they came to us with and said, hey, we have this problem. Data is growing like crazy. We've got all these researchers that have data spread all over the place. We need to get control over this stuff. How do we do it? So that's kind of how the conversation started. They said, we need a centralized data repository for researchers. They have compliance things that they have to take care of. And on top of that, when we started talking, we said, hey, at Dell, we also do OpenStack. We do OpenStack. We do data stuff. And they said, great. And we're also looking at OpenStack. And we want to try OpenStack out. And so at the end of the day, what UAB was looking for was a scale out, cost-effective solution on hardware that can be used for both compute and storage. That's how it all got started. And I know you guys sort of looked at other things before you came to us. They looked at traditional sand technologies. They looked at public cloud storage. They even looked at Hadoop clusters. And at the end of the day, after having the conversations with us, they chose us because we had a platform that gave them the best costs in terms of cost per gigabyte. And it also gave them a hardware where they can run both compute and storage. So it all came around Ink Tank Ceph, which you will hear from John Paul today, which is one of the things we had been working on like seven months or eight months before we started talking to them. So we were able to deploy Ceph. We were able to make it work with OpenStack. We had networking architectures, reference architectures Randy from Dell is here. He's been working very closely with UAB on the networking architectures because you need to tie everything together and have it deployed in an easy way so they can use it very quickly. So I will let kind of hand over the baton here to John. And he will talk really all about what the journey they went through and how our partnership really benefited from getting these solutions to their users. With that, John Paul, thanks for coming again. Thanks, Kinesh. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. So as Kinesh pointed out, we have an active community of data consumers. But we didn't really get here overnight. We're in the HPC space. We help our customers, our researchers on campus really do computation and analysis on their data. And one of the communities that started growing out and which was kind of starting to bring this data problem to us was this next gen sequencing community. But we'd been engaged in high performance computing. And if folks familiar with that domain might know the distribution called ROCS. It's based on a CentOS fabric. And basically, it kind of brings an easy to build HPC fabric to your center and supports really easy scale out. You can just add servers that get to text them. And so we were familiar with this model of scaling up. And that's the model we like. We are certainly heavily invested in virtual machines. We'd been doing that for the past decade for various services. And we'd been engaged over the last decade on the theme in the high performance computing community was grids. And I'm not sure how familiar you all might be with grids. But they were basically the same kind of ideas that we talk in terms of cloud computing but kind of geared around the high performance computing community. Ultimately, they focused more on job distribution across organizational boundaries. But the basic ideas made what grids are or were, they were kind of the proto-cloud. And so we had been engaged in a variety of meta-schedulers and technology of how to spread workloads across different cluster boundaries. And one of those meta-schedulers was called Gridway. And the Gridway team ultimately kind of morphed their distribution model of jobs to actually being not just jobs but actual VMs and led to their development of OpenEvula. So we'd been having our fingers and toes in the water kind of keeping a pulse on the activity that was going on in that community. And a DevOps model was inherent in how we worked. So we were kind of primed for migrating to this environment. Nonetheless, there were still lots of questions and lots of decisions to be made. There's not just one hypervisor. There's not just one cloud technology. So there's lots of various things. And you need talent and skill and expertise. And so can we actually build from scratch an environment like this here? Of course, then we also have customers. And as we mentioned, our customers were saying, data, data. They had run into their problem, their big data problem. And we're realizing that this is kind of annoying to have to move this stuff around campus back and forth to the cluster. We didn't have any storage on our cluster that was designated for long term storage for large data sets. We had some scratch space available that was available for their compute jobs but not long term. And they didn't stop asking for computing. So we were well aware that even though we wanted to build out a data fabric, we needed to be able to also address the ongoing compute growth. So what this really is about is something called data intensive scientific computing. So with all these kind of ideas in mind, we essentially started off in August 2012 and bought another fabric for our HPC cluster that we were going to designate for some type of data intensive workflow that had computation attached to it. And so we bought a complement 10, 720 XDs. They were decked out with 36 terabytes of disk space, three terabyte disks, lots of RAM so that we could do computing and lots of cores so that we could do computing. And we were like, all right, let's do this, whatever this was going to be. And so we now had to integrate it. Well, quarter went by. We were busy doing some other stuff we had to deal with at the time but we were also realizing it's not easy to just, all right, how are we going to pass this through the organization and get adoption and get what we need in order to tie all these pieces together. And if you're like me, so Bob Cloud, Bob Cloud, I think the Cloud is a name in honor of him but he's my boss's boss or my boss, I'm not quite sure what the relationship is there but nonetheless, he went to Dell World back in December 2012 and sent me an email while he was there and telling me about some information that he was learning. And I don't know about y'all but when your bosses go to a conference it's a little bit concerning because they often come back with stuff and you're like, wait a minute, I was doing that right here, we've been talking about it. But this email was exciting because I read some words in there that were I like. He heard about OpenStack and I'd never really heard about staff but it didn't take me a little bit of Googling to learn what I needed to learn about staff and that was a little gem in this whole package. And so I said, wow, that's good to hear. I've been thinking a lot about Dell in this scenario and specifically around the fact that we need some sort of a vehicle to help bring this into place. We had the technology, we had the know-how, we just didn't have the capacity. And so that brought me to lesson one. Be sure to recognize when a partnership's gonna help you achieve your goals. And that was, it was an important lesson for me but it was really nice to be able to turn to a vendor space and see a vendor speaking the same language that we were speaking and wanted to be speaking. So we weren't running into that situation where your boss comes up with a great idea that is now 100% different from everything you've been doing for the last 10 years. It was very much in line with where we wanted to go. And so we moved forward with an implementation. It was a very easy decision to say technologically this is what we wanted. The implementation had of course the open stack components, it had a set component. It was built around an automatic deploy fabric. It had ganglion there, it had Nagia's in there. It was just, it was comfortable. It was just familiar. We knew what we were doing in that space. And so by March we had committed to the fabric and within about six weeks we had the team from Dell come on site with Randy and his team. And at the end of a week we had our fabric deployed. We had our proof of concept in place and we had a cloud on campus. It was great. It was nice to work with people who knew what they were doing to be engaged in the same kind of space and that kind of thing. So the next step was to really kind of build adoption for this. The, we had a couple of different ideas. We had the, of course, the storage model that we wanted to promote and build out for the campus researchers. And that's the CEPH component that brought that in but made it possible for us to really tie our servers together, our storage servers together. And the image component within, or let's say the RBD image component, the RADOS block device imaging component was a key component of that CEPH deploy that let us bring this stuff together. For those familiar with Hadoop, Hadoop is this nice, wonderful way to aggregate storage in kind of a similar fashion and tie in computing. What we had in our space was we had a very traditional file system based user community that really needed to still have that file system abstraction on top of their storage fabric. And so that's something that CEPH was really geared towards providing for us. We could take, manifest an image across this 36, 360 terabytes of storage and just basically pull it together, slap a file system on top of it and access it via NFS. And that's what we ultimately get to. I'll have a slide about that in a minute. More generally, we were focused on also promoting cloud adoption with an IT and with the research community and then demonstrating its utility with application. And I think that's a really important component. Once you have a cloud in place is the joy and pleasure of being able to build applications on it. Along with researchers' demands for data, they could also express a desire for a better backup solution. One of the things that we say on the cluster is that there are no backups on the cluster. If you're not managing a data backup solution, you don't have backups. The reason for it isn't a disrespect to their data. It's more about the fact that the data owner knows what's valuable and a platform provider can't guess what's really valuable to the user. Everything looks valuable. And these people are dealing with terabyte data set sizes. And if we don't have enough storage to store their primary data sets, we certainly don't have enough storage to duplicate that and just make a backup out of the blue for it. And just to maintain backups for it. So we worked with a product called Crash Plan, which is a nice user-end user-oriented solution and started deploying that. It was a really easy couple of hours to deploy the required fabrics. You just kind of read through the specs and say, okay, I need one of these, one of these, one of these, and you put it in place. And then the vendor came on site, helped us get the dual bootstrap series and had that in place within an afternoon. There was nothing like, oh well, we have to go jigger with this or mess with this or we just kind of were sitting at our web interface and clicking through and taking care of the network requirements at the long and the same way as we were deploying the fabric. Another example that I deployed somewhat recently was GitLab. I don't know if you all know GitLab, but you certainly know GitHub. GitLab's like your own GitHub built out of some of the same models for, oops, excuse me, built out of some of the same models for basically a web page or website-based repository where you can engage and do issue management and bug fixing. That was really easy. I just went to the GitLab site and said, oh okay, so a server about this size, I need an X amount of storage. And just kind of hooked that up into the VM space and was up and running. As a side effect, a beautiful side effect or just a coincidence, it also used the omnibus installer and that has a Chef component for the automation component inside of the GitLab deploy. And that was a nice synergistic thing because the underlying automation fabric for our OpenStack fabric deployed by Dell also uses Chef currently. And so that was just, it was kind of a nice little cool factor. It's like, oh okay, so now I get to actually have that layer deployed that you see in the cloud.  You're gonna have some collection of infrastructure that you need to manage. And so now you have tools available and there's potential synergies if you're the same person doing the both ends of the equation or you can go your own way as a cloud consumer. But the storage component again is really nice in this. I mentioned that on the crash plan, we just kind of needed 10 more terabytes for backup storage. And so I just went to my cloud interface, I clicked the button, said create myself a volume, attach it to this machine and then I went inside the machine and said, you know, mount it and add it to the crash plan configuration. And that's all thin provisioned right outside of the OpenStack stack which is hooked into Chef. And so I'm just pulling my storage in from across these commodity servers and making it available to applications in my fabric. So big wins from my perspective. Our bigger or more effort-filled solution was the research storage solution. And that was, I say effort-filled because it was some in-house programming that we did to develop this. But it's mainly the concept is pretty easy to understand. We create image containers much like sand lungs inside of Chef. And then we attach them to a server which is gonna NFS export them to the client and we lay down a file system on top of the container and that lets the end user consumer really deal with their native file manipulation operations on the cluster and maintain this container with their data sets inside of it. And then the benefit of course is that those containers can grow to any size. We started off with this model of your first terabyte free kind of as a teaser to get people engaged in thinking and also as out of respect of the growth of data and research that a terabyte is really a thinking man's amount of storage nowadays inside the research space. You need to give people enough room to move their elbows and do some stuff. The basic architecture is kind of familiar to those of us who do NFS servers. The experience of course is a lot of fun with Chef and these kind of components. So we did some scripting to provision our storage and it was real quick. We did the deployment very quickly. Just we had about 110, maybe 120 users that were our initial batch. So we just broke them down into batches of 10. It was really easy. We scaled it out and just quickly manifested a bunch of thin provision containers across the cluster and within maybe five, seven minutes we had all of our storage online and available to our users. So I thought that was really pretty cool. I get excited about those kind of numbers as an HPC dude. And I also get excited about pictures like this. I tend to like my pictures look a little bit less choppy than the one on the left but that was my fault. I should have taken a picture when it was live. I let my RDD database basically go towards a more condensed view. But this is a picture of what happens when you need more storage. So I was mentioning that we had 10 servers that we aggregated with Ceph. Well, we got to the point where after making this research storage available to our researchers, go figure, they go put data in it. And they started moving data into it and I was watching my numbers and I was like, ooh, okay, so they're getting kind of close to a full point and so I need to get another server online. So I went and I plugged in my server and I said, well, let me just add some more data. And I was just kind of left off the, left it all in all the defaults and just kind of provisioned it with the provisioning fabric, the crowbar provisioning fabric. And well, I watched to see what would happen. And so this on the left-hand side, I know the numbers that are scaling up on the left are a little bit small but at the top it says 500 M and it's in bytes per second. So that's 500 megabytes, five gigabits per second. And that big vertical jump there is what happened when I said become a Ceph node. And so it said, okay, and it made itself a Ceph node and told the rest of the fabric, hey, I'm here and Ceph starts to rebalance itself. And so data just started flowing to this node and we have a 10 gigabit network so it's something about half of the network that we're talking about here. But a really nice, what this looks like in my world is a great job. And so it's basically scales up and you can see this is one of the OSDs that were actually being filled by this rebalancing effort. So we were about probably 75% full at the start of this operation, kind of probably stepped down to I don't know, maybe 60% I did actually went and added another server where we're below 50% again now. But each time I did it, I basically saw the same kind of pattern. A nice steady, this is a Nagios graph over here on the right hand side, a ganglia graph on the left. And we see just a nice steady data growth pattern in here and we see it going from essentially zero bytes on the disk to its eventual balance point of a little bit over, let me get terabyte and 1.3, maybe 1.4 terabytes. Of course then I went ahead and added another one and so everything we have right now is about roughly half full. So use it, that's what it's for. That's the nice thing about this proof of concept. We got past the whole rubbing our heads and scratching and thinking, okay, so how are we gonna get this in place to having it in place and being able to actually leverage it for the things that we were interested in doing. And so what that gets you to the point of doing is thinking in terms of cloud. You're no longer thinking in terms of your infrastructure, you're thinking in terms of what you can now do with it. And that's a really important transition that you need to go through and bringing your own private cloud into the space is really helpful for that.  So this is kind of like a little bit of a grab bag of some of the things that we did early on and how we've adapted over the past year from our deployment. Mostly it's been really good. The decision that we made going forward, I think I wanna point one out in particular, which is the sizing of your network. Don't think too small. Think in terms of what your network, your own network architecture looks like. In UAB we have two class B ranges, we're a large campus. So what we did is we said, well, why not just run a whole class B off of this fabric? So we went ahead and sized it accordingly. And it's actually benefited us tremendously because it allows us to map pretty freely over to the VMs and stuff that we deploy in the class, in the VMwares, in the OpenStack space. The other, let's see here. The other thing that we noticed is that, at first you're kind of cautious. You're like, well, this is all on micro provision. But there's ranges in there that are set aside and you can work and kind of hook your own custom interfacing nodes into the space. And it's a comfortable thing to do. And that gets you access. That's how we actually do our research storage is we actually created an NFS survey that's sitting right on top of our storage network and consuming the images directly from that backend network. And another caution would be to, gotta watch out for the people who are excessively paranoid. That's a good thing. I don't wanna say it's necessarily all bad, but you bring something unfamiliar into the environment and they get extremely paranoid. And so kind of be sure to, OpenStack is not crazy or anything like that. So it's a comfortable space. So be sure to stand your ground and make sure you get your deploy in that you want because if your fabric's inaccessible, it's unusable. So I think one of the fun things that I fixed was we had kind of a range of IP addresses that we'd opened up. And well, they didn't quite match up with what we wanted. So we use the fabric to fix it with getting some reservations out of the way. And so the lesson here is use the fabric. It's flexible. Use it to your advantage and make sure to let it help you solve your problems. But problems will arise. And we uncovered a couple of ones that were a little bit of a bump in our road. One of them, as we started looking at the performance characteristics of our environment, we were noticing with iPerf, that's how we test our network performance. We were noticing some sort of really jumpy and jittery performance on our 10-giggy fabric within the Ceph space. And we eventually tracked it down to upstream packaging of the Intel driver that was embedded inside the Ubuntu distribution that we had on our fabric. It was a fairly simple fix to just then update the driver and we saw a nice clean line at 10 gigabits per second or just a hair underneath 10 gigabits per second. But an important part of that is remember that there's an upstream to these and that there's a healthy community upstream. And you need to make sure to not just look at your vendor but look at the community upstream because this particular problem happened all the way into the kernel deploy space and how the relationship between the mainline kernel and the driver database, the driver integration goes. Now, this is not an issue in modern Ubuntu boxes so this is more of kind of a historical note and an educational note. But the other thing that is sometimes you go through these processes to fix something and you coincidentally break something else maybe accidentally. But again, you have lots of moving parts that might be a little bit complicated but there's places you can go in the open source community and you can see how this fabric was built together. It's kind of like becoming familiar with how your car was manufactured and knowing what the distribution network looks like and then being able to be deeply engaged in a primary authority on what you need to essentially change inside your fabric in order to fix it or make it better or we've heard a lot of the talks talking about how making sure that things go back upstream and so don't forget that there's an upstream and solid communities upstream to work with. Just work methodically, you'll learn a lot as you go along and respect the tool boundaries as you kind of work through this. It's not some sort of a magic environment. They really is a very disciplined transition between different components. And this is just for the folks who like to read Bash. This is an example of one of the problems that I ran into. I like it in particular because it is actually problem. I mean, that was the problem. It was one of my nodes basically went into a funky state and I couldn't figure out what the issue was. And so I had to go through and kind of step through the different spaces and this particular snippet of code is something that happens during the boot sequence and it essentially is going through and running a chef client to make sure that there's a sane environment. This is part of the kind of the, and by provisioning myself where I'm in operational mode step. So I'm kind of long story short. It goes through some of these problems but I mean some of these steps and if it can't succeed, well it does what it should do. It says there's a problem. And so it says final state problem and it reports that up to the management fabric and the management fabric brings your system red. So in the end, the solution was in this particular case is that was to either reboot the node or rerun this initialization script and get myself back into a sane environment. What I had done was I had rebooted something when one of my primary components, the administrative component was offline and I had set myself in a tailspin. But it was again, not hard to fix and the important part is that the code is the documentation and that's an extremely good thing is that you're not left, I wasn't sitting there looking at a black box and saying geez, I really kind of wish that I knew what was going on here. I'm kind of up the creek here and I don't know what to do. Well, I could start reading my way through it and really understanding what is the process and it's just a very logical process. What a system administrator would do. It would say, okay, well, I'm trying to bring this thing provisioned and it's not working so that there's a problem. Well, instead of having a system admin do that and my computer did it for me and let me know. And so the code is a good thing. So where are we today? Well, as far as the research computing system, that's the environment that we provide to our researchers, OpenStack and SAF are here to stay. There's kind of a no question about that. It's provided us with a lot of flexibility with respect to storage and it's also providing us with a lot of flexibility with respect to adding new workflow opportunities to the research community, specifically around models where they just want to, they're kind of trying to have some sort of new product that go online and they say, hey, look, someone's got this working on Ubuntu and I don't have to do as quick some buttons and I can make that happen. And so we can now give them an environment in the cloud space where they can spin up these VMs and kind of think through this. One of the key components that we've been dealing with I was mentioning early on that we're kind of like a, you know, we've been thinking about DevOps for a long time and trying to operate along that model with VMs. So we had our own kind of protocloud in place that was just like KVM and different bits and tied together. We built our Galaxy Next Gen Sequencing Platforms which is a web-based interface for Next Gen Sequencers to users to basically upload data, send it through their alignment processes and do post-processing on their data. It's a really nice little tool to get researchers up and running but we're running that right now in our protocloud, our KVM fabric. So what we want to do now is move that over to our OpenStack fabric and really put the keys in the hand of the research community that manages that fabric without having to worry about their relationship with the rest of our systems in our environment. They're going to be sitting on the cloud and they'll be authoritative. We want to add some object storage services. We started off with the research storage, the imaging component, but Ceph also has an object store embedded with it. Of course, there's Swift from the OpenStack fabric. We haven't seen a lot of our use cases really come from the research community leveraging that but one example is now Galaxy is starting to work it into their own workflow so that researchers can publish objects out of the Galaxy fabric so that'll be a nice tie-in. And then making sure that the researchers can actually touch this directly. They don't have to touch it by way of our own infrastructure on hands. But the big question is how far can we really take this? And I think from my perspective, the reason why you do process automation is scaling. That's what we've known in the HPC environment. It's what's needed to be done in traditional environments as well, whether it's a little research shop that starts off with their one VM and then says, well, now I've got 25 files, I'm really like 25 VMs because it takes an hour and then I can keep my computational time the same. The manual processes and steps are a real cost and as you automate those and document those through code, you begin to save on that. And then in my mind, success is really around dual use.  It's repeatability and reliability. And then generally, we have the talent in-house. People can do system administration self-help and that turns into future systems developers. And traditional models are just ripe for replacement. So just be aware. So I'm hoping there might be a lesson five. Can we learn from research and engage as a partner? I think that that's a lesson that's actually very apparent here in the OpenStack conference, so. Oh, let me pass this back on to you. Okay, so can you hear me? Thank you. So, well, I have a couple of questions for you before I open it up for the audience. So you know that Ceph has a file system called CephFS which kind of helps you with scalable file storage that can be shared amongst multiple users. Sounds like you're mainly using this for block storage, like RBD, and individual users kind of put their own file system on it, right? So are there plans to go forward? Yeah, I'm very interested in what CephFS has to offer. It's a very, it's got some extremely interesting models around checkpointing and being able to just let the end user touch a file that then creates you a checkpoint. So from that perspective, I'm very interested in it. We're, of course, an HBC shop, so distributed file systems are ranked high. It's mainly been an issue of time and what we can explore over the past year that we haven't brought that online. Okay, perfect. So a couple of quick note here. There is a, if you want to learn more about OpenStack and Ceph, there's a deep dive session that's happening today at 2 p.m., room number 313. We're gonna have Neil Levine from Ink Tank who is their product guy. Really go deep into what's coming next in Ceph. And we at Dell have been working on creating reference architectures that'll help you sort of scope and plan your implementation and look at the kinds of architectures you need to build out yourself cloud. So make sure you come over to 313 at 2 o'clock today. Do we have time for questions, maybe one or two? Yeah, all right, go ahead. So you spoke a lot about, can you use the mic, please? Oh, sure. So you spoke a lot about operational efficiencies and can you speak a little bit about what you looked at in terms of compliance and data security concerns as you are moving to OpenStack? Yeah, so we did treat this as a proof of concept and one of the things that we were trying to understand was how does this fabric operate so that we can essentially engage in a compliance and data security conversation around it? We've, I mean it's an active dialogue on our campus. I don't see anything inside the OpenStack fabric from what I've been looking this year that doesn't fit within those models. It's really a question of how you're deploying it and who you're letting have access to run it. From what we've been seeing, it's a lot about the compliance issues are a lot about documenting your process and following what you've documented. It's a back and forth, it's a downstream and an upstream so it's kind of got this nice pattern to it. So I'm very confident that we'll be able to get that. Now there are features of course that within even our research community on campus, we have some researchers that are looking into actual provenance issues baked right into OpenStack that would hopefully be useful in the future within that kind of space. But all of the models around the DevOps and essentially coding in, baking in your documentation and your process, I think those are good, strong foundations that we can build on to get into our compliance frameworks that we need. Okay, any other? Yeah, maybe we have time for one more question, yeah. Seth seemed to have a feature where you can actually run computation on the safe nodes. I haven't tried it personally, so I was wondering whether it is something you will be looking at, what are the use cases, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely, that's my little dream right there. We mainly separated this out from a sanity perspective. The reference architecture that we were working on with Dell, as Kamesh mentioned, they had been working with Ink Tank for about six or seven months prior to our engagement. It was about, if you will, a kind of a clean room separation, and so we wanted to just kind of respect that existing distribution. But we're very, very interested in being able to consume the computational capacity that's on those nodes. We bought them for that purpose, for data intensive computing. There's some interesting models in the CEPH community around Hadoop and being able to lay a Hadoop file system on top of CEPH. I haven't looked into that deeply, although our NGS upgrades that we wanna do this summer are probably gonna investigate that more clearly because the alignment processes that they rely on, the tuxedo tools, I believe now support distribution via Hadoop framework. So it's definitely on the model. Backfilling with Condor is something that I think is very appealing because Condor's very good at just getting the heck out of the way when you've gotta do something like rebalance your cluster because you've got a new node added. And we'll be talking a lot about that at two o'clock in terms of how do you balance your clusters, what are the considerations that are on hardware, compute, storage. So feel free to come over there. I think we're out of time now. Let's give a big round of applause to John Paul. Thank you for coming.


Here we are at the midway point of the NBA season. So I'm going to give you my top five NBA candidates for the first half of the season. Not who I'm projecting to win it all at the end of the season, but who have been the five MVPs this year? And at number five, I'm starting with Steph Curry. You know the numbers. He's been sensational. 29 points a game leading the Golden State Warriors. Six assists, five rebounds. But he's missed 11 games. That's a quarter. 25% of the season he's missed, but the Warriors without him, five and six. That was their record. They're 25 and eight with him, five and six without him, Steph Curry's in fifth place. At number four, LeBron James. And you might say, wow, Steph five, LeBron four. This is why being there is part of the job description. You can't miss all of these games, 20% of the games and be the MVP. And LeBron has missed 24% of the Lakers games thus far. He's playing sensational basketball. There are only four and seven with him. Check this out. They're on a 48 win pace when LeBron is on the court. Without him, they're on a 30 win pace. So LeBron James in the fourth spot because obviously he's making a huge difference for the Lakers. At number three, Nikola Jokic. And yes, he has played every game for the Denver Nuggets. Denver shocked everybody and has the second best record in the Western Conference. They got the best record at home in the Western Conference and Jokic, a seven footer who can do everything, plays the point guard, plays the center. He leads them in scoring, assist, rebounds and even steals. So Nikola Jokic third place for the MVP race. At number two, Yanis Atedicumbo in Milwaukee. He has the Bucks playing great basketball. They've beaten everybody, Golden State, Boston, Toronto, Philadelphia, Denver. And he leads them in scoring 26 points a game, rebounds, almost 13 a game, assist, six a game. And he's like sixth, seventh in the league and fourth quarter scoring. Yanis is definitely running hard for that MVP award. And at number one, the MVP over the first half of the season, you guessed it, James Hard.  Stuff that Michael Jordan never did. Stuff that no one has done since Karim Abdul-Jabbar and Will Chamberlain way back when the ABA existed. He broke Kobe Bryant's record of 16 straight 30 point games. That existed since the 1976 merger of the NBA and the ABA. Here's the best thing about it. The Houston Rockets are 13 and four in those 17 games in which Harden has scored 30 or more. It's incredible what he's doing. Leading the league and scoring 34 and a half points a game. Fourth and assist, eight and a half dimes a game. He is literally doing everything for the Rockets. It's hard to believe because they're still winning. With Chris Paul on the bench has missed 17 games. With Eric Gordon on the bench has missed 11 games. And now Clint Capella's out and yet the Rockets keep churning all because of James Harden. He's your MVP over the first half of the NBA season.


Do the Chinese driver first race one point. That's really good. That's really good first race first point You know in Formula 1, it's a big benchmark for you to score your first point and be up there with the driver that have been scoring points So Alfa Romeo did a good job but Voltaire but that's really really nice We can do also you know learning a little bit not far from but us but not quite the same pace You which you would expect but you had a good fight on track with Hamilton Which was great to see but really good for him and good for Alfa Romeo to be two winner points


Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Palo Alto. We've got some remote guests going to break down the Fortinet vulnerability, which was confirmed last week as a critical vulnerability that exposed a zero day flaw for some of their key products, obviously FortiOS and FortiProxy for remote attacks. So as we're going to break this down, it's a real time vulnerability that happened, has discovered in the industry, Horizon3.ai is one of the companies that was key in identifying this, and they have a product that helps companies detect and remediate a bunch of other cool things you've heard on theCUBE here. We've got James Horseman, an exploit developer, love the title, got to say I'm not going to lie, I like that one, and Zach Hanley, who's the chief attack engineer at Horizon3.ai. Gentlemen, first thank you for joining the Cube conversation. Thank you. So before we get into the whole Fortinet, this vulnerability that was exposed and how you guys are playing into this, I just got to say I love the titles, exploit developer, chief attack engineer. You don't see that every day. Explain the title, Zach. Let's start with you, chief attack engineer. What do you do? Yeah, sure, so the gist of it is, is that there is a lot to do in the cybersecurity world and we made up a new engineering title called attack engineer because there's so many different things an attacker will actually do over the course of an attack. So we just named them an engineer and I lead that team that helps develop the offensive capabilities for our product. Got it, James, you're an exploit developer. Exploiting, what are you exploiting? What's going on there? So what I'll do in a day to day is we'll take end days, which are vulnerabilities that have been disclosed to a vendor, but not yet publicly patched necessarily or a pocket exists for them and I'll try to reverse engineer and find them so we can integrate them into our product and our customers can use them to make sure that they're actually secure. And then if there's no interesting end days that go after, we'll sometimes search for zero days, which are vulnerabilities in products that the vendor doesn't yet know about. Yeah, and that was the most critical. Those things can be really exploited and cause a lot of damage. Well, gents, thanks for coming on. We're here to talk about the vulnerability that happened with Fortinet and their products, zero day vulnerability. But first for the folks, for context Horizon 3.ai is a new startup, rapidly growing, they've been on theCUBE, CES, Nehal and team have described their product as an autonomous pen testing, but as part of that, they also have more of a different approach to testing environments. So they're constantly putting companies under pressure. Let's get into it. Let's get into this hack. So you guys are just kind of like, I call it the early warning detection system. You're seeing things early because your product's constantly testing infrastructure. Okay, over time, all the time, always on. How did this come about? How did you guys see this? What happened? Take us through. Yeah, sure. I'll start off. So on Friday, we saw on Twitter, which is actually a really good source of threat intelligences these days. We saw a person release details that Fortinet sent an advanced warning email that a critical vulnerability had been discovered and that an emergency patch was released. And the details that we saw, we saw that it was an authentication bypass and we saw that it affected the 40 OS, 40 proxy and the 40 switch manager. And we knew right off the bat, those are some of their most heavily used products. And for us to understand how this vulnerability worked and for us to actually help our clients and other people around the world understand that we needed to get after it. So after that, James and I got on it. And then James can tell you what we did after we first heard. Yeah, take us through play by play. Sure. So we saw it was a 9.8 CVSS, which means it's easy to exploit and low complexity and also kind of gives you the keys that take them. So we like to see those and they're, because they're easy to find, easy to go after their big wins. So as soon as we saw this come out, we downloaded some firmware for 40 OS. And the first few hours were really about unpacking the firmware, seeing if we could even to get it run, we got it running a VMware VMDK file. And then we started to unpack the firmware to see what we could find inside. And that was probably at least half of the time. There seemed to be maybe a little bit of obfuscation in the firmware. We were able to analyze the VMDK files and get them mounted. And we saw that their operating system was compressed and when we went to decompress them, we were getting some strange decompression errors, corruption errors, and we were kind of scratching our heads a little bit, like, you know, what's going on here? These look like they're legitimately compressed files. And after a while, we noticed they had what seemed to be a different decompression tool than what we had on our systems, also in that VMDK. And so we were able to get that running and decompress the firmware. And from there, we were off to the races to dive deeper into the differences between the vulnerable firmware and the patch firmware. So the compressed files were hidden. They basically hid the compression. Yeah, we're not so sure if they were intentionally obfuscated or maybe it was just a really old version of that compression algorithm. It was the XZ compression tool. So what happens next? So take us through.  How did this thing? I mean, I saw the news hit heavily. You know, they updated, everyone updated their catalog for patching. So this kind of hangs out there. There's a time lag out there. What's the state of the security at that time? Say Friday, when it breaks over the weekend, potentially a lot of attacks might have happened. Yeah, so they chose to release this emergency pre-warning on Friday, which is a terrible day because most people are probably already swamped with work or checking out for the weekend. And by Sunday, James and I had actually figured out the vulnerability to make the timeline a little shorter. But generally what we do between when we discover or hear news of the CV and when we actually pocket is there's a lot of what we call patch diffing. And that's when we take the patched version and the unpatched version and we run it through a tool that kind of shows us the differences. And those differences are really key insight into, hey, what was actually going on? How did this vulnerability happen? So between Friday and Sunday, we were kind of scratching our heads and had some inspiration Sunday night and we actually figured it out. So Sunday night, we released news on Twitter that we had replicated the exploit and the next day, Monday morning, finally, Fortinet actually released their P-Cert notice where they actually announced to the world publicly that there was a vulnerability. And here are the mitigation steps that you can take to mitigate the vulnerability if you cannot patch. And they also released some indicators of compromise but their indicators of compromise were very limited. And what we saw was a lot of people on social media, hey, asking like, these indicators of compromise aren't sufficient. Like we can't tell if we've been compromised. Can you please give us more information? So because we already had the exploit, what we did was we exploited our test Fortinet devices in our lab and we collected our own indicators of compromise and we wrote those up and then released them on Tuesday so that people would have a better indication to judge their environments if they've been already exploited in the wild by this issue, which they also announced in their P-Cert that it wasn't a zero day being exploited in the wild. It wasn't a security researcher that originally found the issue. So what's the unpack the difference for the folks that don't know the difference between a zero day versus a research note? Yeah, so a zero day is essentially a vulnerability that is exploited and taken advantage of before it's made public. An end day where a security researcher may find something and report it that and then once they announced the CDE that's considered an end day. So once it's known it's an end day and once if it's exploited before that, it's a zero day. Yeah, and the difference is zero day people can get in there and get into it. You guys have saw it Friday on Twitter you move into action. Fortinet goes public on Monday. The lag between those days is critical time. What was going on? Why are you guys doing this? Is this part of the autonomous pen testing product? Is this part of what you guys do? Why Horizon 3 AI? Is this part of your business model? Or is this was one of those things where you guys just jumped on it? Take us through Friday to Monday. James, you want to take this one? Sure, so we want to hop on it because we want to be able to be the first to have a tool that we can use to exploit our customer system in a safe manner to prove that they're vulnerable so then they can go and fix it. So the earlier that we have these tools to exploit the quicker our customers can patch and verify that they are no longer vulnerable. So that's the drive for us to go after these breaking exploits. So like I said, Friday we were able to get the firmware, get it decompressed. We actually got a test system up and running, familiarized ourselves with the system a little bit. And we just started going through the patch and one of the first things we noticed was in their API server, they had a diff where they started including some extra HTTP headers when they proxied a connection to one of their backend servers. And there were, I believe, three headers. There was a HTTP forwarded header, a VDOM header and a cert header. And so we took those strings and we put them into our decompiled version of the firmware to kind of start to pinpoint an area for us to look because this firmware is gigantic. There's tons of files to look at. And so having that patch is really critical to being able to quickly reverse engineer what they did to find the original exploit. So after we put those strings into our firmware we found some interesting parts centered around authorization and authentication for these devices. And what we found was when you set a specific forwarded header the system, for lack of a better term, thought that you were on the inside. So a lot of these systems they'll have kind of two methods of entry. One is through the front door where if you come in you have to provide some credentials they don't really trust you. You have to provide a cookie or some kind of session ID in order to be allowed to make requests. And the other side is kind of through the back door where it looks like you are part of the system itself.  So really the nature of this exploit was we were able to manipulate some of those HTTP headers to trick the system into thinking that we were coming in through the back door when we really coming in through the front. So take me through that impact. That means remote execution. I can come in remotely anonymous and act like I'm on the inside system. Is that, and that's the case of the kingdom as you said earlier, right? Yeah, so the crux of the vulnerability is it allows you to make any kind of request you want to this system as if you were an administrator. So it lets you control the interfaces, set them up or down, lets you create packet captures, let you add and remove users. And what we tried to do which surprisingly the exploit didn't let us do was to create a new admin user. So there was some kind of extra code in there to stop somebody that did get that extra access to create an admin user. And so that kind of bummed us out. And so after we discovered the exploit we were kind of poking around to see what we could do with it. Couldn't create an admin user. We're like, oh no, what are we going to do? And eventually we came up with the idea to modify the existing administrator user. And that the exploit did allow us to do. So our initial POC took some SSH keys adding them to an existing administrative user and then we were able to SSH in through the system. Awesome, great, great description. All right, so Zach, let's get to you for a second. So how does this happen? How did we get here? What was the motivation if you're the chief attacker and you want to make this exploit happen? Take me through what the other guy's thinking and what he did or she. Sure. So you mean from like the attacker's perspective why are they doing this? Yeah, what the exploit happened and what was it motivated by? Was it a mistake? Was it intentional? Yeah, ultimately like I don't think any vendor purposefully creates vulnerabilities but as you create a system and it builds and builds it gets more complex and naturally logic bugs happen. And this was a logic bug. So there's no blame on 40 net for like having this vulnerability and like saying it's like a backdoor it just happens. You saw throughout this last year, F5 had a very similar vulnerability. VMware had a very similar vulnerability all introducing authentication bypasses. So from the attacker's mindset why they're actually going after this is a lot of these devices that 40 net has are on the edge of corporate networks and ransomware and whatever else if you're an APT you want to get into organizations. You want to get from the outside to the inside. So these edge devices are super important and they're going to get a lot of eyes from attackers trying to figure out different ways to get into the system. And as you saw, this was in the wild exploited and that's how 40 net became aware of it. So obviously there are some attackers out there doing this right now. Well, this highlights your guys business model. I love what you guys do. I think it's a unique and needed approach. You take on the role of I guess white hacker as a white hat hacker as a service. I don't know what to call it. You guys are constantly penetrating, testing, creating value for the customers to avoid, in this case, a product that's popular that just had the situation and needed to be resolved. And the hard part is how do you do it? So again, there's all these things are going on. This is the future of security where you need to have these, I won't say simulations, but constant kind of testing at scale. I mean, you've got the edge. It takes one little entry point to get into the network. It could be anywhere. Yeah. It's definitely security. It has to be continuous these days because if you're only doing a pen test once a year or twice a year, you have a year to six months of risk just building and building. And there's countless vulnerabilities and countless misconfigurations that can be introduced into your network as the time goes on. Well, autonomous pen testing is great. That's awesome stuff. I think it's just freeze up the talent in the organization to do other things and again, get on the real important stuff. Just because your network was secure yesterday doesn't mean it's going to be secured a day. So in addition to your defencing depth and making sure that you have all the right configurations, you want to be continuously testing the security of your network to make sure that no new vulnerabilities have been introduced. And with the cloud native app modern application environment we have now, hardware's got to keep up. More logic potential vulnerabilities could emerge. You just never know when that one end vulnerability is going to be there. And so constantly looking out for it's a really big deal. Definitely. Yeah. The switch to cloud and moving into hybrid cloud has introduced a lot more complexity in environments. And it's definitely another whole attack is it going after. All right. Well, I got you guys here. Great to commentary on this vulnerability and this exploit opportunity that Fortinet had to move fast on you guys help them and the customers. In general, as you guys see the security business now and the practitioners out there, there's a lot of pain points. One of the most powerful acute pain points that the security ops guys are dealing with right now is it just the constant barrage of attacks? What's the real pain right now? I think it really matters on the organization. I think if you're looking at it from in the news level where you're constantly seeing all these security products being offered, the reality is that the majority of companies in the US actually don't have a security staff. They maybe have an IT guy, just one and he's not a security guy. So he's having to manage helping his company have the resources he needs, but also then he's overwhelmed with all the security things that are happening in the world. So I think really time and resources are the pain points right now. Constant change. Any comment? Yeah, just to add to what Zach said, these IT guys they're put under pressure. These Fortinet devices they could be used in a company that just recently transitioned to a lot of work from home because of COVID and whatnot. And they put these devices online and now they're under pressure to keep them up to date, keep them configured and keep them patched. But anytime you make a change to a system there's a risk that it goes down. And if the employees can't VPN or log in from home anymore then they can't work, the company can't make money. So it's really a balancing act for that IT guy to make sure that his environment is up to date while also making sure it's not taken down for any reason. So it's a challenging position to be in and prioritizing what you need to fix and when is definitely a difficult problem. Well, this is the great example. This news article and this Fortinet news highlights the horizon three AI advantage. And what you guys do, I think this is going to be the table stakes for security in the industry as people have to build their own. I call it the militia. You got to have your own test and you got to have your own way to help protect yourself. And one of them is to know what's going on all the time, every day, today and tomorrow. So congratulations and thanks for sharing the exploit here on this zero day flaw that was exposed. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having us. Okay, this is theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, you're watching security update, security news breaking down the exploit, the zero day flaw that was exploited in at least one attack that was documented at Fortinet devices now identified and patched. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


In today's video, we're opening some loose power of the duelist first edition packs. And wow, these turned out crazy. What's up guys, we're back with another video. This is kind of a weird intro cause normally I don't know what's about to happen but because I recorded this in another video and realized I wanted to make it its own video, I've already experienced most of the opening. There's some crazy errors inside. We were opening Lars mystery box the other day and there were some awesome pulls before I ended but then this crazy power of the duelist opening happened and I figured we get two videos cause this video needs to be its own video. So shout out to Lars for the awesome videos. So before we hop into it, we have a giveaway. YZ Tank Dragon from Magician's Force. Last where you're from another planet from L.O.N. Labrador Nightmare. And Dark Magician Girl the Dragon Knight from Dragons of Legend 3. So I think you'll like that fusion giveaway. To enter the giveaway, just like the video, be subscribed, turn on notifications. Let me know what your favorite error opening of all time is and what do you think about these weird packs? All right, let's get to the opening. All right, we got three more items. In here we have what appears to be some loose packs and it looks like it's first edition power of the duelist which I would consider to be pretty epic. It looks like maybe 24 packs here, like a whole booster box worth, which is pretty insane. This could, if these are retail, you get future fusion. If they're hobby, you could get every, you know, the crazy stuff. So there's good options either way. I think, wait, is future fusion in here, right? I think it is. One, two, three, four. Let's see if we can get some cr... There's... Oh. Oh, and a hollow. Okay, I didn't go through the cards because I thought I ultra rucks and specialed it by putting the rare to the front, which I did put a rare to the front, but then there was another rare and another rare and another rare. And then there was a hollow super rare at the end. Five rare slot cards in one pack instead of one. That is an insane error pack. Unfortunately, none of these are like huge money cards but even then, that's insane. I don't think I've ever pulled four rares and a actual foil card out of one pack. That's insane. What a start to the... Maybe they're all errors. Okay, I'm officially ready to freak out because I don't know what to do here. I don't know what to do because if there are multiple error packs in here, I'm gonna lose it. So I don't know if... This next one we're gonna go straight through. We're not gonna pack trick. I know some of your people are celebrating right now. Okay, here we go. So let's just go straight through and see what happens. We have alien gray, de-spirit, a flying saucer, hero neos, overload fusion. So that's where the normal one would be. Okay, so it looks like... Okay, maybe we just got one. I was getting excited. Maybe we got multiple but it looks like there was only one error pack. Only one error pack. I hope... Was there another one? I don't know. Who knows? Haven't seen one yet, but I'm gonna try. Okay, that was pretty insane. That was four rares in a super in one pack. No, there's another one. Cyber summon blaster. I did it right that time. Dasher. I wish this was still a $20 rare. That'd be big. Okay, future fusion. It's in here. I mean, we got the old D version. It'd be crazy. Supercharged has four rares. Alien gray, the acrobat connection zone, fossil excavation. We have baby Sarasaurus and another rare. Fifth rare, submarine roid. Five rares in one pack. Okay, first edition power of the duelist. 24 packs. Okay, this is pretty crazy. Two out of three have been error packs. I'm gonna do this. Okay, it looks normal here. Royal Ritz, Saber source, but I mean, looks normal. I'm not sure if I trusted it at this point. Fearmonger, Vecora connection zone, fossil excavation, and Dog City. The darkest of cities. Next pack, two error packs already. That's pretty crazy. I hope there's something, it'd be great if you could get like four Supers or four Ultras or something like that. That would be nuts. One, two, three, four. Let's see. It's been every other so far, and it seems like it might continue. Causical or ganglia, we have Neospace. Alien mother, cyclone blade. Okay, four rares in a row. That Neospace also has some damage to it if you guys can look right there. Orbital bombardment. We have Black Terra, synthetic Seraphim. Are we gonna get a foil this time? Reskiroid, and supercharged. So another five rare pack. This is super weird. Okay, that is pretty strange. Power of the duelist. Let's just keep going. So I'm guessing this is gonna be a normal pack in the faces that regular trends. Let's see. One, two, three, four. We have a Destiny Mirage. Yeah, seems like a normal pack for all I can tell. Crop circles, we've got Rallis. Alien, we have Seraphim, Black Terra. Orbital bombardment. It's your fusion. I would love to see an ulti of that. That'd be cool. Okay, moment of truth. Are we gonna get a fourth error pack? Four error packs. Is that possible? That would be the most error packs I think I've ever opened at once. Except when we open like full boxes because we knew it was coming. We have, okay, okay. Maybe it's back to normal. Amulenceroid, Decoyroid, Jurassic Egg, Wonder Garage, Reskiroid, Seraphim, Elemental Hero Nios, and the Destiny Hero Double Dude. So we have a foil. So we're up to what? Two supers so far? Two supers and like 20 rares. We have like a booster box worth of rares already, almost. Because we've got 12, no, 14 from those. And then, yeah, 18 total, I think is what we're at. One, two, three, four. Okay, we're back. More rares, spell calling. DCHA, what is going on? Causing core gang kill. Neo space, this is so weird. Pass of Destiny. Orbital bombardment. We have Wonder Garage, Elemental Hero Nios. Alien mother, a fifth of rare. Five rares. We're gonna pull everywhere like five times at this rate. Just cool. I'm sure Lars will be okay with that. This is pretty weird. Pretty weird. One dasher so far, which used to be the big rare. Unfortunately, it is no longer very expensive. We have Blade Master, we have Common Soul, Destiny Mirage, Mausoleum of the Emperor, the Connection Zone, Excavation, Baby Ceresores, Contact, and Neo Space. Okay, back to regular packs. You just never know what you're gonna get in this video. It's insane. They're gonna be errors. They're gonna be not errors. It's nuts. Back and back and forth we go. Here we go. One, two, three. Will it be an error? Will it not? Looks like a Dark City submarine roid. I'm not Ultra Rux especially. It's just an error pack. Alien word. It's kind of crazy. Contact, Crystal's Dolphin. We have Amulets, Rescue Roid. This is near a Fearbogger. Can we get our first? I got a burp coming. Okay, does that mean we're gonna get an ultra rare? Maybe that's what the burp is signifying. No, it's just a fifth rare, as usual. Lots of rares. Can we get like something that's high rarity, though? That was not even a joke. I'm trying to make it sound like a joke, but it wasn't. One, two, three, four. We have Rallis, the Starbird. Saber, Sarasaurus. Saber, Saurus. Not Sarasaurus. Black Stego. We got Defender, Terra. Synthetic Seraphim. Amulets, Rescue Roid. Alien, Gray.  Maybe they replaced all the hollows with rares. That's what it seems like. POTD. Come on, I'm believing you. One, two, three, four. Come on. Okay, more rares. That's for sure. Gassher. Back in the day, that's a great poll. We have Fusion. We have Super Charge, Flying Saucer, and Mystical. We have Nios, Wonder Garage. We have Baby Sarasaurus, and Spell Calling. So many rares, so few foils. Still got a lot left, though. I mean, we just need an ulti, like to really turn it around. Be like, yeah, awesome, ultimate rares. Let's get four rares and an ulti in one pack. That'd be pretty cool. One, two, three, four. Bozzlyam, not this time. Miracle Jurassic Egg, Alien Skull, Royal Rit of Taxation, Connection Zone, Fire Soldier, Rescue Roid, Orbital Embardment, and Alien War. We have like 30 rares. We have two foils. Power of the Duals, First Edition. You can do this. I believe in you. If you haven't missed rares, now give us Ultimate Rares, or more rares. Okay, we have Cosmic War. We have Neo Space, Alien Mother, Cyclone Blade, Connection Zone. We have Fossil Excavation, Alien Grey, De-Spirits, and another super, Neospatian Dark Panther. All right, Neospatian Dark Panther. More rares, more foils. Still, what are we down to? Three, six, we got 10 packs left. We have pulled a lot of rares. We've pulled like three foils. We want to turn around the foil game. We don't want to have less foils than you're supposed to get when you have an error pack. That'd be sad. One, two, three, four. We have Destiny Herald Defender, Destiny Mirage, Bailon, Decoy Roid, Rescue Roid Contact, Alien Grey. Oh, rucks and spatch all right to the ultimate rare. Dark City, these are retail packs, so we could get the Future Fusion. Dark City, that is beautiful. Walking Dead, Dark City. The newest season is coming out. I mean, the newest series, I should say. Series number 27, where we follow a very random character to the darkest of cities. All right, that's a nice poem. That's a good one. We have an old C, we have three supers. Pretty GX-like, that's for sure. And then 50, 50 rares. That's very un-GX-like. Come on. Right here, right now we pull something crazy. One, two, three, four. We have Royal Rit of Taxation, Rallis of Starburn, Saber Source, Black Stago, Baby Saber Source, Contact, Wonder Gooders, Rescue Roid. Ah, Zero Vehicle and Jumbo Drill. I saw the Fusion, I was like, oh, Dark Nios, something crazy. Flair Nios, something big like that. And no, it's just a Super Vehicle. We do have four supers, one ultimate. We're actually maybe gonna end up on at least your box pace. Hopefully we, well, we're already past that on the rares, for sure. Maybe we can pull something big right here. The error box opening, essentially. It's not quite a box, you know, because it's not sealed, but it is a box worth of packs. We have Defender, Common Soul. Okay, so maybe we've escaped all the rare, rare packs, I'm not really escaped. It's the wrong word, because we kinda like those. Destiny Hero, and another Ulti Cosmic Horror, Gangiel. I actually almost mentioned this one earlier. This is actually kind of an expensive card. I think it's like around like 35, 40 bucks in your Metaverse 10, last I saw. Pretty nice card for a retail Ulti, for sure.  All right, we've already hit ratio for a box, but I mean, or for ultimate rares and supers, but guess what? We were way over in terms of ratio, in terms of rare, so maybe we can do the same with the other rarities, that'd be nice. We're gonna an Ultra, which is, you know, one in 24. It's pretty tough to get in these packs. One, two, three, four. We have Decoy Roy, it seems like we've gotten all the rares out, Miracle Jurassic Egg, Alien Skull, Ambience Rescue Roy, these are definitely not, I wouldn't say definitely, it doesn't seem like they're from the same booster box, you know, because there's a lot of difference. Fossil Excavation, and an Elemental Hero, Dark, Nios, let's go. What an amazing opening this has been. Power of the Duelist, two Ultis, and Ultra Dark Nios Cover Card, best card in the set, four supers, and like a hundred rares, an error box, or not error packs, inside of loose packs, they're not really a box, but wow, great opening. Okay, first edition, Power of the Duelist, you've been weird today. You've been awesome, you've been weird, I'm excited. Wow, Lars, Lars, Lars. You did quite well, Alien Skull, we have Royal Ritz, we have Sabrosaurus, D-Spirit, Wonder Garage, Alien Gray, Synthetic Seraphim, and a Future Fusion, I want the Ulti of that. Okay, first edition, we have five packs left, Lars, you have had a very interesting Power of the Duelist opening today. First-Ed retail packs going crazy. Oh, we got another one, we got to overload a few, more rares, Spell Calling, D-Chain. I don't think we pulled a high rarity card out of these, so if they are from a different box, that could be good news, that we get another Ulti or something. Reskiroid, or another Hollow, that's five supers, we have now pulled eight Hollows. Five supers, two Ultis, one Ultra is eight, which is more than you usually get out of a GX box. Okay, I have high hopes for another Ulti, I think it's possible, if we get four rares and then an Ulti in the same pack, that would be absolutely ridiculous. One, two, three, four, let's go. Miracle Jurassic Ag, we have Mausoleum, Decoiroid, Bite Lawn, Flying Saucer, Muscle, we have Paths of Destiny, De-Spirit, Wanna Garage, another Ulti, Submarine Roid, let's go, I love this card too. Okay, I can't over the sleeve. Submarine Roid Ultimate Rare, that's nine foils, and a hundred rares, don't forget about this.  Okay, this is a crazy opening, three packs left, I don't even know what to expect now, another Ultra, another Ulti, another Super, more rares, I mean, the limits are boundless at this point, or should I say limitless? Let's see, one, two, three, four, more rares, Future Fusion, Super Charges, now we're gonna get another Ulti right here, Dark City, we have the Submarine Roid, we have now pulled two of these in Ulti so far, Rocks and Special, I would like to pull maybe this one right here, the Future Fusion, we have Paths of Destiny, and let's rescue Roid, come on, Contact, Alien Gray, and we have a Destiny Hero Dasher, okay, another rare, if this was back when I was a $20 rare, we'd have three of those right now, which we still have three of them, they're just worth a dollar, not 20, okay, two packs left, what an insane opening, Error Packs, nothing more fun, one, two, three, four, nothing more exciting, we have Crop Circles, fake hero, oh no, Alien Hunter, Brainwashing Beam, Open Up Embardment, De-Spirit, Crystal's Dolphin, Black Terra, come on baby, fourth Ulti, ah, Cyber Summon Blaster, okay, nine foils, a hundred rares, 23 packs have been opened, here we go, I don't actually know it was 24, I just assumed, but we'll see, last pack here, one, two, three, four, we have the Alien, one more Error Pack for the road, why not, Cyclone Blade, we have a Cyber Summon Blaster, Dasher, another one, De-Spirit, Flying Saucer, Baby Sarasaurus, we have Crystal's Dolphin, and the final card for Lars out of Power of the Duelist, Cyclone Blade, all right, we cannot complain about how that went, that was pretty insane. You guys have enjoyed this error opening, make sure to thank Lars in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more content like this, hopefully more errors. Shout out to home folks, Daxter, Puffins of Doom, Ernesto Deanna, America Doidster, Leo Guine, 62, Brad KK Beats, Ananda Taisho, Ian Musa, Junior Marding, Robert F. Thomas McLean, Changelang, and Joey Castle, thank you guys for supporting the channel, I'll see you guys in the next one, peace.


Threat to Ukraine's port infrastructure remains following Erdogan-Putin talks, since the presidents of Turkey and Russia have failed to reach an agreement on the revival of the Black Sea grain initiative. The threat to the port and civil infrastructure of Ukraine remains relevant. That's according to Natalia Humenyuk, the press officer for Operational Command South of Ukrainian Army. Unfortunately, this practice and the conclusions of analysts are correct. When Russia sees no success in any direction of their efforts, they resort to such fire terror. We monitored their activities and preparatory work ahead of that important meeting. We saw a powerful overnight attack in two waves in the south of the Odessa region. It sent a clear message in the appropriate direction where the grain corridor functions, which is an irritant for the dictator. That is why we state the fact that there remains a threat to the port and civil infrastructure as well as grain as the enemy did not get what they wanted, Humenyuk said. As reported earlier on September 4th, the presidents of Turkey and Russia failed to reach an agreement at a meeting in Sochi regarding Moscow's fulfilment of the terms of the Black Sea grain initiative and the agreement's revival. Before meeting of presidents, Russia launched a drone attack on Ukraine's Danube River Port of Izmail, causing widespread damage to infrastructure. The Danube has become Ukraine's main route for exporting grain since July when Russia quit a UN and Turkey broker deal that had given safe passage to Kyiv's exports of grains, oil seeds and vegetable oils via the Black Sea.


We are entirely too close to another major war in the Middle East. The US and its allies have published a joint statement warning Yemen's Houthis to cease the attacks they've been making on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis, officially known as Ansarullah, have successfully slashed Israeli port activity by an extremely massive margin with their maritime tactics in response to Israel's ongoing massacre in Gaza. The statement asserts that the Yemeni attacks are a direct threat to the freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the world's most critical waterways, complaining that they are adding significant cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods, and ultimately threatens that the Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should these attacks continue. Many critics have been pointing out the irony of the Western Power Alliance threatening military intervention to protect shipping containers and corporate profits, while actual human beings are being butchered by Israeli airstrikes and starved by Israeli siege warfare with nothing but friendly support from these same powers. Palestinians would really love to get the same amount of attention and protection as shipping containers, tweeted Palestinian Canadian journalist Yasmine El-Sawabi, that the U.S. and its allies would go to war against the people who are trying to stop an active genocide tells you everything you need to know about them. The fact that they do it for corporate profit margins tells you even more, and the fact that they do it to a nation they've already helped inflict unfathomable horrors upon in recent years tells you more still. And that's just one of the potential wars looming on the horizon in connection with the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. As Trita Parsi recently explained in The Nation, there are three other fronts along which wars could also erupt in the region apart from a Western conflict with the Houthis. In Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces have been repeatedly under attack by militants in response to the Gaza assault, in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, and the absolute nightmare scenario of a full-scale war with Iran. That risk exists on four fronts between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria and Iraq due to attacks on U.S. troops by militias aligned with Iran, the Red Sea between the Houthis and the U.S. Navy, and between Israel and Iran following both the assassination of an Iranian general in Syria and the explosion in Kermon today at the commemoration of the death of General Qasem Soleimani that has killed more than a hundred, Parsi writes. It is a potentially ominous sign that Israel has begun focusing on ramping up aggressions against Iran and Hezbollah while simultaneously withdrawing thousands of troops from Gaza. Some analysts argue that we are seeing an attempt by Israel to pull the U.S. into a direct war with Hezbollah, which is something U.S. officials have reportedly been worried would happen ever since the Gaza assault began. There are entirely too many fronts along which a new horrific war in the Middle East could potentially erupt, and things are entirely too close to the brink on all of them, and all for land, money, and geostrategic control, same as always. The sooner the U.S. centralized power structure crumbles, the better it will be for humanity.


What do you mean, when you say transaction is incorrect? So what's the difference between correct and incorrect? That's a great question. So there are a set of rules within the system, probably about 30 or 40 rules altogether, that the software analyzes. So for example, if a transaction says, my address is paying your address some amount, right? Well, a correct transaction is one where my address is correctly formatted and is a valid address. Your address is correctly formatted and is a valid address. The amount described is within 0 to 21 million Bitcoin, which is the maximum amount you can have. I actually have that amount to pay you, and if I don't have it, I can't pay it. That amount hasn't been spent before from my account, so it's not being double spent, right? The transaction has the sufficient fee to pay the network. There's all of these little rules. Not just for transactions, but also for the blocks that contain them, and they're cumulative. My signature has to be correctly formatted. Now, those are kind of the logical human-level rules. There are 30 or so rules that are very at the programming level. The first three bits of the version number of the transaction have to be x, unless the time lock on the transaction is set, in which case these version bits, all of these arcane rules, which have to do with analyzing the format of the transaction. But your software does that, so you don't need to worry about it. You just say, I have money, I give you money, click, click, boom, done. Your software will produce a balanced transaction. The important thing to check is the software is not going, are you a good person? Are you a bad person? Are you on a list of good people or bad people? Are you allowed? When we're born, what's your gender? What's your religion? None of those are in the rules. And that's the important distinction.


Hi, my name is Daniela Varvaza and I'm the Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation. I'm excited to share that the Hyperledger Foundation will be in Barcelona for MWC, which is the largest and most influential event for the connectivity ecosystem. We will be there talking about blockchain use cases across the ecosystem. In addition to my various talks at MWC, I am also super excited about meeting our local Hyperledger Barcelona Meetup community. So please join us at the Barcelona Technology School on Thursday, March 2 from 6 to 8 p.m. I will be joined by our Meetup hosts, BTS and GFT, along with community leaders from our Hyperledger Technology community, including our Special Interest Group Chair and GMSA's Technical Director talking about GMSA's e-business network that leverages Hyperledger fabric. I'm also very excited to hear from local Barcelona firm, GFT, who are global digital transformation company working across the ecosystem. They will be sharing their work with Hyperledger Basu with UDPN. UDPN is the Universal Digital Payments Network, a global messaging network that was recently launched to support government-regulated digital currency systems, including regulated stablecoins and central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. And last but not least, we'll have some time to meet each other, as we have not seen our local community in person since 2019, and I certainly miss you all. At the end, we'll have some refreshments and networking time, so I very much look forward to seeing you all and raising a cheer while we're together for our community and all that it has accomplished. See you there.