Okay. So, welcome everyone. I'm Vanessa Little from VMware. This is Marcos Hernandez also from VMware and we're here to talk to you today about VMware integrated open stack with NSX policy redirection for NFV. I know we've listed this section as beginner but we do have a technical deep dive but I think we have a lot of time left in our presentation so if there's anything that you have questions about while we're in the middle of the demo please feel free to raise your hand and ask. When you do ask questions we appreciate if you could use the microphone so everyone could hear. Alright. So here's what I'd like to go over today. We'll go over the general concept of the demo and the workflow of what it is that we've built and we'd like to show you today. The various components that we've used in in our demo build. VMware vCloud NFV which uses VMware integrated open stack as a key component and VMware NSX. We'll go over the architecture of the design of the demo that we built and we'll go over the use cases and we'll do a live demo internet permitting and then we'll have a little time for Q&A at the end. So what we hope to achieve today and end to display is that we want to use VMware integrated open stack and favored in conjunction with NSX. Show of hands in the room how many of you have had your hands on an NSX deployment. Very good. That's excellent. And so we're also going to show that you can set up the applications, the networks, now the workloads using the VMware integrated open stack manager and how to how those configurations will propagate and spawn into various other components that you can use one single dashboard for configuration. Then we're going to show adding layer four to seven security services to this build and work with the NSX APIs. Using the NSX APIs to be able to configure policy-based redirection in this demo we use the four to gate, four to net firewall for an example. All right, this thing's killing me. And we'll show how that's configured with NSX manager to achieve that policy-based redirection and then we'll do a live demo. So the components in our stack today, the key component is vCloud NFV, show of hands, anyone who's even heard of this before. Pretty good. That's actually really good. So vCloud NFV is a suite of software all composed by VMware that we've built together and configured in a very specific reference architecture. And we've tuned it for specifically for NFV type workloads and it comes in two flavors. One uses vCloud director and the one that we've used today uses VMware integrated open stack. Now part of this whole suite of tools also includes our management and monitoring telemetry suite with vRealize operations, vRealize log insight and not on the slide is also vRealize network insights, formerly known as ARKIN, recently acquired by VMware. And so the VMware integrated open stack architecture, let's have the slide build here. Oops. So where did it go now? I'm having so much trouble with the clickers here. All right. So the VMware integrated open stack architecture, so what VMware has done is we've implemented vanilla open stack on top of the ESX hypervisor because as we all know, open stack doesn't really care about the hypervisor, it just needs it as a functional component. And so that's really the only difference. All of the APIs, all the northbound interfaces, even the horizon dashboard is all exactly identical to what you know and love with a few VMware logos thrown in. The advantages of doing this is that we get to use all of the existing VMware tools that already interact with our hypervisor for management, monitoring and telemetry, as well as fault tolerance, dynamic resource scheduling, et cetera, et cetera. You get to apply all of those extra tools on top of your open stack build. So that's the real key difference between the way VMware does it versus if you were to download it off the internet. VMware NSX, so this is the VMware SDN or software defined networking overlay that's used. So we've integrated NSX with the open stack build in order to leverage all of the different capabilities of NSX within your native open stack deployment. So in this demo, we demonstrate what we can do with NSX security and that we use the NetX suite of API libraries integrated with a third-party VNF, in this case, the 48 firewall, to be able to achieve policy-based routing and redirection. So this is really key for N of V environments, because in order to build a service graph, you don't want to have to have every package linearly go through each of your VNFs. You want them to only go to the VNFs where they need to go and where they belong, so that your network is efficient in scales accordingly. So this is what we're going to demonstrate to you today, that you can use the NSX policy-based redirection to point to the VNF that you need it to go to. And so the architecture of what we've built today, these are the technical specs. I'm not going to go over them in detail, but it just shows that we've built a number of VMs within a VMware deployment. We can make this deck readily available or help anyone who wants to stand this up in their own labs later on, just come see us after our lecture. And so the workflow of what we're going to show you today. First, we register for it as a security service with the NSX manager. So this is something that's NSX specific. When you want to onboard a new VNF onto it that has the NetX integrations, you register it with the NSX manager. Then we auto deploy the FortiGate VMX to all the hypervisors because it lives in the VMware kernel or it connects to the VMware kernel, it has to live on each one of the hypervisor instances. In this case, we use two physical servers and so it has to be deployed to both. Then the FortiGate VMX connects with the FortiGate VMX service manager and so this takes care of license verification and synchronization. So the FortiGate VMX manager is the master controller of all of your FortiGate policies and all of your security policies as we've defined them here. So that those policies and license verification then has to propagate to all the instances that have been deployed to the various hypervisors in your network. Finally, the redirection policy rules are updated and this pushes the FortiGate policy through your network. And then we have real-time updates of the object database. So this is really key because of the NetX integration with NSX. Any time you make a configuration within the NSX manager, it automatically propagates into the FortiGate VMX manager so that you don't have to configure all these things in two different interfaces. It unifies your dashboard into one management control plane.  And now Marcos is going to explain the demo build. Thank you, Vanessa. So like Vanessa said, we're going to try to spend the bulk of the presentation on the technical demo and more of a technical presentation and content. So in this demo environment, we have the usual components that you would require for vSphere operations. We have a vCenter that is managing three vSphere clusters. One for management, one for edge services, and one for compute. The compute cluster is where your OpenStack instances are going to land. When you boot instances using Nova, they will land on that specific cluster, which in this particular demo environment has two nodes. And this is also the cluster where we're going to put the VNF from Fortinet in this example. We also integrate with a number of other security vendors and next generation firewall vendors. Fortinet is one of our leading solutions and partners. So that's why we decided to include it here in this demo. So since we have two compute nodes in this compute cluster, we will need one VM from Fortinet, one VNF from Fortinet on each node in that cluster for a total of two. And then I'll explain later what happens inside of the kernel when NSX does redirection of the interest in traffic. The edge cluster is where your OpenStack routers will reside. When you create a neutron router in OpenStack using standard API calls, the NSX plugin will in turn instigate the creation of what is known as an NSX Edge Services Gateway. We support both centralized routing and distributed routing services in NSX, all consumable from the standard neutron API. And then in the management cluster, we have the vCenter, as I mentioned, we have the NSX control and management plane in the responsible for all the operations of NSX. And we also have the OpenStack control plane itself. This is where VIO resides. And in this build, we have VIO 3.0, which is seven VMs that make up that control plane and that can scale to the maximums of a single vCenter. That is a thousand hypervisors and however many VMs you can cram into that. So it's a very simple environment, but it's a representation of what you would see in production. Because when we do this with actual customer deployment, this is the distribution of clusters and configuration that we recommend as a best practice. We want functional clusters for management services. We want functional clusters for North-South routing services or bridging services because our plugin also supports an L2 bridge. And then we want your compute clusters, your payload clusters for the OpenStack instances to be separate. And those will be controlled by Nova Compute. So even though this is a demo environment that is using NSXI, it's just a micro representation of what you would see in very, very large environments with hundreds of hypervisors and thousands of VMs. So as part of the preparation and the prerequisites for doing NSX, we have to do something called host preparation. And this is nothing more than a kernel update. We take this compute node, which are going to be hosting my OpenStack instances, need to be prepared for NSX. And that is a kernel update that installs some, like I said, kernel updates that make all the distributed data plane services at NSX support possible. That includes VXLAN, VIP, or VXLAN kernel update for overlay networking, distributed firewall kernel update, which is used by neutral security groups to create East-West segmentation policy and micro segmentation from OpenStack. And we also have a distributed routing kernel module that allows for the hypervisor to become a router for the VMs hosted within that hypervisor. So this is host preparation. And this all has to be done prior to the VMware integrated OpenStack integration. And it's also a prerequisite for doing service redirection with any of our partners, including Fortinet. That is showing the representation of the cluster. There's also this notion of a transport zone. This is extremely critical. In NSX, a transport zone is a logical construct that defines the diameter of your logical networks and your secure, of your logical networks, not necessarily the security policies, but of your logical networks. So in the simplest form, a transport zone will include all the clusters that will be used in NSX services. So we have a management cluster. We have a net cluster and compute cluster. So potentially all these three clusters could be included. You don't necessarily need to include the management cluster because there are no live tenant VMs that will be running there. It's just control plane interactions. But you could do that if you want to protect that management cluster with micro segmentation policy. So that's completely up to you. But the edge cluster and the compute cluster need to be part of this notion of a transport zone. And that is what makes possible for NSX to exchange services across this element. Okay. So let's go ahead and jump over to the live demo because we have time to show what we've done here. And hopefully the internet connection will work. So we're going to log into vCenter and I'm going to show you a setup. Hopefully that's not an eye chart. While I do this and while I log, I just want to bring to your attention that we're working, what we're showing here is possible right now. It's a way that you would do service redirection in an NFV environment or a non-NFV environment using NSX and OpenStack today. There are some caveats though. The assumption here is that the cloud administrator has completely relinquished network and security controls from the tenant. The tenant is using OpenStack to launch VMs, interact with the computer and storage APIs, but network and security remain in the hands of the network and security teams. So what that means is that we're going to be doing some things in OpenStack for computer and storage services, but when it comes to network and security, that's going to be happening directly in NSX. And that is possible today. It's a way to consume advanced security services in an OpenStack deployment today. As you may or may not know, neutral security groups, which are the preferred way of doing implemented security in OpenStack, are only layer three, layer four, aware. So with neutral security groups, you can protect a network or a VM from talking on Port 80, for example. But there's no native way in OpenStack to actually determine that what's right in Port 80 is HTTP traffic. There's no visibility. So NSX does have a capability via third-party integration with Fortinet to discern application traffic and create policy to secure your application by looking at the actual layer five through seven traffic and for your in your east-west implementation. And if I could just interject here. Please. So this is really key in service provider NFV deployments because they're multi-tenant deployments and you don't want to have inter-tenant communication happening. You don't want to have one malicious tenant that's able to compromise other tenants. Using using this type of topology on an OpenStack environment, this is actually possible with normal neutron networking. This is not yet possible. Yeah. And the key word there is not yet possible. But it's going to be possible. We're very fortunate that we have here in the room two of our top leading neutron engineers. So I did and Gary are working. They're here. They're great contributors to a neutron community. So if you have some questions about the road map and the things that we're working on, they're the people that you need to talk to. And they've been working on an implementation that will elevate to neutron the consumption of these redirection services. And we are currently in the process of testing and validating the various use cases. So very soon, and this will be incorporated into VIO natively when you integrate it with NSX, very soon it will be possible. Everything that we're showing you today outside of OpenStack will be possible inside of OpenStack. So a tenant or a network and security admin will be able to consume redirection security policies without bypassing the API, which is a preferred way of doing a cloud. Right. If you're doing OpenStack, that should be your one and only entry point for your consumption. But there are some customers that want to do redirection today and they don't necessarily, they cannot wait for neutron to have all of these capabilities. So what we're showing is what's possible today. But I just want to point out something extremely important that we are absolutely working in promoting all these services and consumption to neutron. So you don't have to do it at the NSX layer. Hopefully that is clear. And I did in Gary here and they can share some more details of what we're working on. So again, that's kind of an eye chart, but these are the clusters that we were referencing earlier. We have an edge cluster for neutron routers, compute clusters for any instances, and then the management cluster and they have been prepared for NSX, compute and edge have. What we've done here under service deployment, okay, I better hurry up. Under service deployment, we have deployed the 40 net solution. So the 40 net solution has registered with NSX. And now NSX and 40 net are linked. So every time that I do something in NSX that is related to security policies that I want to redirect, the 40 net solution will actually fetch that information from NSX and two-way communication between the solutions will be possible. So let me walk you. We're going to leave NSX, this is the NSX UI. We're going to leave NSX for now. Excuse me. We're going to leave NSX and we're going to go to OpenStack. So let's go ahead and log into OpenStack and let me show you something very important here. In this particular demo, in this particular environment, I am not using Neutral Security Groups. Okay. Remember, all security operations are not happening in OpenStack. They're being controlled from NSX. So Neutral Security Groups do not apply. So what I've done is for the VMs that I want to put under the NSX solution and traffic, the traffic for those VMs redirect to the 40-net VNF, for those VMs, I have detached the Neutral Security Group from the VNIC of that VM. If you look at it, if we edit, for example, this web server, and I'll show you a topology in a minute, and we do edit security groups, you will see that there are no security groups attached to this particular VM. So again, very, very important, we're bypassing Neutral Security Groups all together and affecting security directly on NSX. This is possible only in Mitaka, to be able to create VMs that do not have a security group association. It was possible before Mitaka, but you have to do some massaging of the, with Neutral Ports and things like that. In Mitaka, Mitaka made it really, really easy to launch VMs with no security group association. So again, I'm repeating myself, but this is very important. We are bypassing the security in OpenStack and interacting directly with NSX. And the topology that we have in this environment is very simple. Let me show you just curve it here real quick. And you will see the topology here. So it's a two tier app that has a router connecting two networks, DBNet, where a DBVM has been created, and WebNet, where two web servers have been created. So a very, very simplistic, very, very easy to understand two tier app. Two web servers connecting to a router that connects to the backend database server. I've done this in purpose. I've named these VMs. The name that I've created for these VMs, for all three of them, have a common prefix of DMZ. Keep that in mind. Make a mental note of that, because later when we create the security and redirection policy, we're going to reference the VM name as our classification mechanism. Okay. So very simple to tier topology as seen from OpenStack. So two key points. No neutral security groups. This is like the fifth time I mentioned that. And meaning that all the security services are being controlled by the firewall team. So now I am going to impersonate the firewall team. I'm going to go back to NSX. And I am going to take you here to Service Composer. Service Composer is a utility in NSX that allows, implemented a wizard-based approach allows you to create security policies very, very easily. I have created a security group called virtual DMZ. And let's see what's in that security group. If I edit the security group, I will see here that, okay. No. No. Yay, live demos. Yeah. It's okay. I don't freak out anymore. It happens all the time. So in this security group, a security group in NSX is just a wrapper. It's a bubble that aggregates VMs. VMs enter and leave that security group based on a membership criteria. Okay. In this case, the membership criteria is the VM name. I'm saying, if a VM is created with a name that contains anywhere in that name, the DMZ, the letters DMZ, that VM will be associated with the security group. Right? Just like I can use VMs. I can use operating system names. I can use any attribute that describes that VM as seen by vCenter is fair gain to create a classification policy. Right now, there's no security policy. I'm just identifying which VMs will be subject to my security policy, and that is done with a security group and the membership criteria of that security group. The membership could also be static. I could statically assign VMs to that security group. But dynamic inclusion is more flexible because you don't have to, for environments where VMs appear and disappear, where VMs are created and destroyed, the action of these VMs, the fact or the mere act of these VMs coming and going, if you use dynamic membership means that you don't have to reconfigure your security policy every time a new VM is added. This is a very, very, very popular application with NSX, dynamic membership. And this is a policy language in NSX that allows you to create firewall policy that looks like your business. You can say, okay, this is my DMC security group. This is my web. This is my DV. I'm not creating policy based on IP addresses. So my security policy is going to look like my business. My security policy is not going to look like my network. When you look at a firewall today, it's a bunch of IPs, and if you don't have an Excel spreadsheet to translate what <IP_ADDRESS> is, you don't know what your security policy is. So that is a security group. So I have three VMs that satisfy that membership criteria. There they are. If I were to create a fourth, a fifth, a sixth one, they would be automatically added. As long as they satisfy, they meet the membership criteria for the dynamic conclusion. Okay? So those are my three VMs. Web one, web two, and my DV VM. Now let's move on to security policies. Security policies, I have one here called redirect DMC. Okay? Let's go ahead and edit this. A security policy is the security policy. What I'm doing is I'm taking the VMs that I already classified in a security group, and now I am going to apply a consistent security policy to them. And that security policy will control the entire life cycle, security life cycle of that app. So we have guest introspection services. I'm not using that in this example, but NSXF services that actually look into the guest and do guest-level protection. We're going to bypass that. You can create firewall rules in the distributed firewall. This is our east-west internal firewall. You can say, okay, this is how broad it's going to talk to test, or how my DMC is going to talk to the internet. You can do that with very broad and coarse firewall policies created in the firewall rules. But for the purpose of the demo, and because probably this is the first time that many of you see this, I kept it very simple. This is not a very realistic example. This is not how we see it in production. This is just for the purpose of the demo. If you notice here, there's something called network introspection services. Network introspection is where I create the redirection policy to the third-party VNF, in this case, Fortinet. And what I have here is an outbound and an inbound redirection policy where I am redirecting all the traffic to Fortinet. Basically the firewall in NSX is not being used. It's a bypass. I am redirecting everything to Fortinet. This is not, and I need to emphasize this, this is not the way, typically, that customers will do this. Typically, redirection will be of only a fraction of your traffic. You will only redirect high-risk traffic that you want to inspect. You only redirect a portion of the traffic. And then the security for the rest of the traffic is handled by the internal NSX firewall. We don't need to punt or redirect that to Fortinet. But here, for the purpose of the demo, I'm redirecting everything to Fortinet. So basically NSX is just a bump in the wire. Okay? So let's take a look at Fortinet now. So every single packet that is generated or received by the web VMs and the DVVMs will be redirected to Fortinet. So let's see what we can do here in Fortinet. So now I, and remember, I'm still the firewall guy, right? And I'm controlling the security policies. So in Fortinet, let's change the domain where we're operating. We have a domain called NSX. And here, under policy and objects, let me show you first addresses. There is, right there, a address group in Fortinet called virtual DMC. This was automatically synchronized with NSX when I created that first security group, where I put my DMC VMs. This happens with no intervention from the security operator. I create a security group in Fortinet. I create a redirection policy and that security group automatically appears on the Fortinet solution. And the three IP addresses for the three VMs in that security group are also automatically synchronized and reconciled. So we can see there the two web servers and the IP address for the database server. So this is one of the great, and this is in the workflow that Vanessa was describing. It was step number two, actually the last step in the integration process is constant two-way communication between Fortinet and NSX manager where all these objects are synchronized. So now Fortinet knows about the VMs. It knows about the IP addresses of those VMs in that security group. And with that group, I can create a policy just to keep it very, very simple so I don't have to mark around with like firewall rules because I don't think that would be like too interesting. What I've done is I've allowed everything through the Fortinet firewall. So let's take a step back. NSX is redirecting everything to Fortinet and Fortinet in the firewall is allowing everything in and out of the environment. So essentially I don't have any firewall rules. But I have enabled an anti-virus security policy for the inbound and outbound traffic. Okay? And again, this is not very realistic. Like I mentioned a few minutes ago, in a real deployment you would see a combination of east-west security rules of the NSX firewall, east-west security rules of the Fortinet or VNF firewall, and then maybe some additional introspection services like Network AV, IPS, IDS, it all depends on the capabilities of the VNF. But because this is a demo and I didn't want to overwhelm you with information, we kept it very simple and what we're going to be using in Fortinet is the AV engine. Okay, we're just looking at antivirus. Okay? So I'm no longer the security admin. I am now an irresponsible user in the DMC, right? And I am going to a website, again, very hard to read, but trust me when I tell you this, it's just a Wget. I'm just going to browse a website and download a file. And if you can read from where you're sitting, it's an iCar file. Who here is familiar with iCar? Yeah, it's Europe, so you guys invented it, right? So it's a file that looks and feels like a virus, but it's not a virus and it's used to test your antivirus policy.  So let me go ahead and do that, right? So the file was downloaded, but if I explore the contents of that file, I can see that in a browser, this would be rendered better. It would be readable, but basically 40 net because it's in the path, identify that as a virus and basically rewrote or rewrite the HTML. And now when I render that file in my browser, I see a big warning that says, file blocked, you're downloading a virus. So this proves that, a number of things, right? This proves that is West protection and a protocol application layer is possible via netx integration with NSX and also possible with OpenStack, assuming of course that the end user of OpenStack is not in charge of the security life cycle of the app, right? Which is, by the way, a very, very common practice for with some enterprise OpenStack customers. They only expose certain API services to the application users but retain control of the network and security policies. When our engineering teams promotes to Neutron all this redirection capabilities, it will be possible to do everything from OpenStack. So at that point, the tenants will also be able to create their own redirection policies if the cloud admin allows them to do so, okay? So the last thing that we wanted to show was V-Rubs, right? A little bit of monitoring. Hopefully, network operations, monitoring troubleshooting is not an afterthought in your deployment and you're also taking into account that once you get an OpenStack cloud with all the services, you've got to monitor and troubleshoot it. So we have a solution with V-Realize operations and what we call a management pack that integrates services for NSX and OpenStack. So we don't have time to show you everything in V-Realize operations, but let me just pull one of the most useful dashboards that we, our customers use in V-Realize operations and this is the NSX object path. There used to be this notion that because NSX uses overlays and there was some concern, there were some concerns that network administrators would lose visibility by using overlays because I'm not using V-Lens anymore, I'm using something else, I don't see my network, I don't understand my topologies. So to address those concerns, we have a number of tools. There's one called V-Realize Network Insight which has been mentioned a few times throughout the day today and we have V-Realize operations. In this case, this particular dashboard is showing me the logical relationship. I'm gonna click on Web Server 1 and I'm also, and then, let me just select that and let me click on Database Server 2, okay? Database Server 1, I'm sorry, Database Server and Web Server 1. So I'm selecting two VMs and I wanna see the logical and physical relationship between those two VMs. So this particular map is showing me here and I'm sorry, I apologize, it's hard to see. It shows me the VM, it shows me the logical switch, AKA the network that that VM is connected to, it showed me the router that separates the Web VM from the Database VM, it showed me the networks on the other side and it also shows me the other endpoint. There's a little firewall icon there that if I were to expand would actually tell me which firewall rules are being applied to the traffic between those two VMs. So this is the logical view and relationship from an overlay NSX perspective. We also have a physical view, which is probably gonna, it's gonna show blank. This is a nested environment, so we cannot display real switches and routers, but V-RUPS also have an SNMP CDP LDP hook into the physical infrastructure and we are able to paint the physical topology separating these two VMs. Again, the caveat here is that this is a nested live environment, so there are no real switches, so we cannot display that. But this is just a little bit of a taste of what is possible with some of the tools that are provided by VMWare for day two operations and troubleshooting. So hopefully that's a good demo and I think we're gonna take questions now or? In a minute. So right before we skip the questions, so I just wanna make sure that we put this in the context of NFV. What we've shown here is a very simple use case where we had a virus pass through a certain server and it was caught by a redirect rule. If you think of this in an NFV context, previously you were able to do this policy-based redirection only at layer three. If it's coming from this IP on this port, then go this way. Now we can do it through layer four through seven so we can have more of a logical service graph built out based on hostname, IP, or origination, destination, protocol, or even a sample of the data payload can all be factors that determine where the packets are going. And this lets you build a lot more, you can have a very simple interface to build a very complex service graph which as we all know in the mobility space the service graphs can get pretty intense. By being able to do it like this with this tool, it makes a very simple logical and a graphical interface where you can actually see where your packets are going and how your network is physically laid out without having to sit there and examine every IP and net flow with a complex tool. So with that, any questions? And if you have questions please, if you can come up to the mic so we can get them. Ask a question, get a t-shirt. Any questions about NFV topologies in general? So the question was where is the Fortinet firewall in that logical diagram? And that's a great question. Yep, the Fortinet firewall in that diagram or in the topology, and I'll show it to you, is in the compute cluster. So, kind of read my mind, I was gonna show you that anyways. It's in the compute cluster. So I have a compute cluster here with two hosts, right? And this, under this resource group called ESXagent, I have one, two Fortinet VMs, one per host. So NSX in the kernel redirects the interest in traffic to this VMs. And those are the VMs that actually do, in the case of demo, the AV inspection, the antivirus inspection. We need, in our architecture, for the standalone NSX case, for the OpenStack use case, and for the NFV use case, it's always the same, it's always the same. We need one VNF, we need one next generation firewall per compute cluster. But it's only where your OpenStack instances are located. Right, and we do this at a cluster level. You don't have to do it across your entire OpenStack infrastructure, you can only do it on the clusters that are high risk, if you will. And that you want to, where you wanna see more of a protocol view of the east-west traffic. Yeah, and this integration with NSX is key. So when you think about traditional firewall topologies, your firewall sat kind of outside of your compute network, and all of your traffic had to hairpin through it, and then come back in. Because the firewall is integrated directly with a hypervisor kernel, and it exists on each physical host, that traffic doesn't go anywhere. It's validated directly on that host, right away. Absolutely, so hopefully that answers the question. Okay, the management console for all this is in the management, when I logged into this website, or into this console, configuration console, this is in the management cluster. I'm managing those VMs for Fortinet in the compute cluster. So one, the Fortinet VMs are in the data path. This view here is another VM that is not in the data path, it's just management plane. So that's the architecture. Any other question, comment? Okay, you want me to take that one? Yeah, sorry. So the question is, can I redirect traffic to a physical firewall instead of a logical or virtual firewall? The answer is no. I mean, right now, the redirection in the kernel is not a network redirection. And once you understand how netx redirection works, you will see why that is like it is. This redirection is not a network redirection. The packet that gets redirected or the redirection is not done based on destination IP, destination MAC, none of that. Actually, the redirection happens before the packet touches the software switch, in this case called virtual distributed switch, the software switch that exists inside of the hypervisor. It's not networkless, I should say. So because of that, and the redirection happens in the kernel, we're doing it to a service VM that is connected to that hypervisor. With that said, we are looking into solutions with our next generation firewalls, such as Palo Alto and Fortinet, to implement a redirection policy and a redirection strategy that actually sends that traffic to the physical firewall. What exists today, and this is true for all of our major third party firewall vendors that integrate into the kernel, into NSX with NETX. What is true today is that once you create a policy that applies to your virtual environment, all the solutions synchronize that policy with the physical environment. Palo Alto, for example, calls that notify groups. So when you create something that applies to a virtual firewall, they can take the exact same policy and apply to a physical, creating the illusion of single policy across virtual and physical, right? So and the same is true with Checkpoint and Fortinet. You can reconcile the security policy that you have in the virtual with the physical. So that creates that notion of single pane of management for the firewall and for the security policy. And it's also important to note that while you can't redirect to a physical firewall today using this type of configuration, if you just wanna do it with straight layer too, you absolutely can. Exactly. Network redirection as we've been doing for 20 years is still possible here. Just send it, send the IP packet to the next hop and then cross your fingers that that next hop will enforce whatever security policy in the service chain, right? Any other question? Okay, well thanks everybody for coming and feel free to sneak up front and collect your shirts. We don't have to take them all home and see either one of us if you have any questions after our talk. Thank you.


Distro-hopping has gotten a bad name over the last few years and it seems like the more Gray beard people in the community tend to poo poo distro-hopping because it's for noobs and This is really a bad way of looking at it because distro-hopping can actually be really good for you And while it's not always the case I I think that distro-hopping is actually something that everybody Should do and I think everybody does do when they're new But I'm talking about even those of us who have been using Linux for a long time Should distro-hop from time to time and I'm going to talk about five reasons why today The first reason why is very much a new reason But it also applies to people who've used links for a long time Distro-hopping allows you to find your happy place and by that I mean it allows you to find the distribution that you're most comfortable on how are you supposed to know which Distribution you're supposed to be on the one that you'll enjoy the most if you haven't tried them all it'd be like going to the Furniture store and buying the first bed that you find or the first chair that you find there and not trying several of Them out because you may be missing out on the one that's actually even more comfortable than the first one you tried Or buying a car and buying the first one you see on the lot It's not necessarily the best one. You have to try a few of them. That's why you test drive things The second reason why you should distro-hop is it allows you to learn new things distros do things differently They come with different software. They install themselves differently. They use different file systems and so on and so forth not all of them are the same and We know that because they exist If every distro was exactly the same there'd be no reason for so many of them to be around Trying new distros allow you to learn those new things and to try them out And even if you don't like the distro that you try you will learn to those things and be able to take them with you and Use them whenever you settle down on the distro that is actually meant for you The third reason why you should distro-hop is that it allows you to argue with other Linux users now I like this one How are you supposed to know How to appropriately argue with somebody who comes along and says to you That their distro is better unless you've actually tried the distro that they're talking about because you would have no Points to argue you'd you can't tell me that that are you are is bad if you've never used they you are I Couldn't I can't tell you that PPAs are bad if I've never used the PPA system It's just the way it is if you want to be able to argue with people about why your distribution is better You also have to use other distros because you have to have something to compare them with you otherwise, you're just a neck beard you're somebody who's a you're a fanboy and It's okay being a fanboy, but if you don't have any evidence to back up your enthusiasm It's not a great thing. It's like saying your country is the best country in the world without ever having ever visited another country The fourth one is probably the most important on the list and that is Distro hopping gives you exposure to other Linux communities now Despite the Linux community being a gigantic melting pot of everybody around the world We have become very segregated. We got Arch users and we got Ubuntu users got Debbie and users We got open Suza enthusiasts. You know, we got fedora users and so on so forth. We don't really mix very well I mean technically we're all Linux users, but We've formed separate communities within the community and that has allowed rivalries to spring up and Means to show up. I mean everybody makes some of Arch users everybody makes one of Gen 2 users and These rivalries can sometimes lead to divisions within the broader community by distro hopping and trying out each of these Distros and becoming a part of the community of those distros You have an opportunity To not only be able to compare the communities and also it will help you Understand the community that you end up being a part of better because you'll be able to say well You want to at least I'm not the arch guys who are so stuck up or I'm not the gent two guys that are so stuck up My community is way better. It also allows you to interact with more people You know one of the greatest things about the Linux community as a whole is that there's a ton of people here that you would normally not interact with and By distro hopping you would at you actually meet more people for example I've hopped to Arco Linux, you know a couple years ago Whatever for the first time and I've met a lot of people in that community. That's the community that I've settled in But I've also been in the a boom to community and met a lot of people there I've been in the fedora community for a little while and met people there and it's the same thing with like window managers and desktop environments you hop between those as well and You meet people and developers and stuff like that for those that you use and Those things can lead to lasting friendships. They can lead to contacts and Technical support when you need it or whatever and it's just It's an enriching experience that you won't get if you just find one distro and stick with it forever and ever and ever The last reason why you should distro hop is a simple one. It's fun. Now. This one might just be me I am kind of crazy about distro hopping but For me, I really do enjoy trying out something new Now sometimes the cause of me distro hopping isn't fun So sometimes they get frustrated with a problem or something and I spend a while trying to fix it And I just can't so I end up distro hopping that can be frustrating that's basically been my experience over the last couple weeks because I've been having some Linux problems, but When I just choose to distro hop, it's because I'm looking forward to the entertainment of installing a new distro Making sure that it all works nice and good and installing all my stuff on it Reorganizing a lot of my stuff. It's it's kind of like I mean, I'd say it's kind of like spring cleaning But nobody likes spring cleaning. It's more like It's like maybe painting your room or something like it's like maybe it's not the process so much But at the end of it you have something new at the end and it's really kind of neat So those are the five reasons why I think you should distro hop They aren't all inclusive There may be other reasons why you think you should just hop and if there are make sure you leave those in the comments below Maybe you think that you shouldn't distro hop and you should just find one distro and stick with it forever and ever and ever You can also leave a comment below You can follow me on Twitter at the Linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com Slash Linux cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon Marcus Meglin Donnie Sven east coast web merit camp Mitchell and Chris. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time


Hello and welcome to the session. Let's discuss the following question. It says solve the following system of inequalities graphically. So let us move on to the solution. The first inequality given to us is 3x plus 2y less than equal to 150 and its corresponding equation of line is 3x plus 2y is equal to 150. Now to draw this line we need to have two points. So if y is 0 then x is equal to 50 and if x is 0 then y is equal to 75. So we need to plot the ordered pairs 50 0 and 0 75 to draw the line 3x plus 2y is equal to 150. So we have drawn the line 3x plus 2y is equal to 150 by plotting the points 50 0 and 0 75. Now we have to identify the region for the inequality 3x plus 2y less than equal to 50. For that we take any point not lying on the line 3x plus 2y is equal to 50 and we check whether that point satisfies this inequality or not. If that point satisfies this inequality we will shape the region which contains that point and if that point doesn't satisfy this inequality we will shape the region which doesn't contain that point. Now we take that point to be 0 0 as it does not lie on the line 3x plus 2y is equal to 150. So the inequality becomes 3 into 0 plus 2 into 0 is less than equal to 150 that is 0 is less than equal to 150 which is true. That means 0.00 satisfies the inequality 3x plus 2y less than equal to 150. So we will shape the region which contains the point 0 0 for the inequality 3x plus 2y less than equal to 150. Now this is the region which contains the point 0 0 for the inequality 3x plus 2y less than equal to 150. So we shape this region. This is the solution region for the inequality 3x plus 2y less than equal to 150 and this solution region also includes the line 3x plus 2y is equal to 150. So we darken this line. Now the second inequality given to us is x plus 4y less than equal to 80 and its corresponding equation of line is x plus 4y is equal to 80. Now if y is 0 then x is equal to 80 and if x is 0 then y is equal to 20. So we need to plot the ordered pairs 80 0 and 0 20. To draw the line x plus 4y is equal to 80. So let's now draw the line x plus 4y is equal to 80. For that we need to plot the ordered pairs 80 0 and 0 20. When x is 80 y is 0 so it is this point and when x is 0 y is 20 so it is this point. Now we join these two points to get the required line. Now we have to identify the region for the inequality x plus 4y less than equal to 80 and we see that 0 0 satisfies the inequality x plus 4y less than equal to 80 as 0 plus 4 into 0 is less than 80 that is 0 is less than 80. So we will shade the region which contains the point 0 0 for the inequality x plus 4y less than equal to 80. Now this is the region which contains the point 0 0 let us below the line x plus 4y is equal to 80 which contains the point 0 0 so we shade this region so this is the solution region for the inequality x plus 4y less than equal to 80 and the solution region also includes the line x plus 4y is equal to 80. So we make it dark and this is the solution region for the inequality x plus 4y less than equal to 80. Now the third inequality given to us is x less than equal to 15 and its corresponding equation of line is x is equal to 15. Now we draw the line x is equal to 15 here is x is equal to 15 so we draw this line now we have to shade the region for the inequality x less than equal to 15. Now here we have 15 x is equal to 15 so this is the region which we have to shade that means x less than equal to 15. So we now shade this region for the inequality x less than equal to 15 and it also includes the line x is equal to 15 because the inequality contains the less than equal to sign. So we make a dark line now we are also given y is greater than equal to 0 that means the region above x axis because we know that x axis is a line y is equal to 0 that means y greater than equal to 0 is the region above x axis and including x axis. Now we see that the region in brown is common to all the four regions and it is the required solution region. So this completes the question bye for now take care have a good day.


Hello and how are you all today? My name is Priyanka and I shall be helping you with the following question. It says, state whether the OR used in the following statement is exclusive or not inclusive. Give reasons for your answer. Now here we are given three statements in OR for which we need to tell whether the OR used in these statements are exclusive OR or inclusive OR. So before proceeding on with the solution, we should be well versed with the concept of inclusive OR, exclusive OR. Now if both the component statements containing OR are true then it is said to be an inclusive OR and when only one of the component statement then the OR is exclusive. Right, this is the key concept for this question. Let us read the component statement given to us here. Sun rises or moon sets. Here the component statement are sun rises and the second one is moon sets. Sun rises or moon sets but they both cannot happen together. So here OR is exclusive. Right, let us study the second one. Here driving license you should have a ration card or a pair. The component statements are driving license you should have a ration card and the second one will be to apply for a driving license you should have a passport. Now for applying for a driving license we can have either of the two options which are given to us. Right, and we can have both of them. So here the OR which is used is inclusive. Proceeding on with the last one all integers are positive or negative. Now here the two component statements become all integers are positive and then all integers are negative. Now here both the statements are false. All the integers are not positive and they are not negative. Also if they are positive they are not negative and vice versa. So here the OR which is used in this component statement is exclusive. Right, so these are the required answers to the question that was asked from us. Hope you understood this key idea well and on the base of this key idea understood why we called one compound statement as exclusive and the other as inclusive. Hope you try a little more and have a nice day ahead.


Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode, we'll look at some of the history of Santa and his cohorts and how they've all not been as jolly as we know them now. I'll tell you an Icelandic Christmas story that is so creepy the government was forced to censor it. But first, Christmas parties are a time for joy, laughs and family, a time to be shared with the ones you love. But sometimes, the ones who love us have a different, more sinister plan. That was the case of Bruce Jeffery Pardo, the killer Santa. We begin with that story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com where you can send in your own personal paranormal stories. Watch horror hosts present old, scary movies 24-7. Shop for Weird Darkness and Weirdo merchandise. Listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated. Sign up for the newsletter to win free stuff I give away every month and more. And on the social contact page, you can find a show on Facebook and Twitter, and you can also join the Weird Darkness Weirdo's Facebook group.  Bruce Jeffery Pardo grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from John H. Polytechnic High School and went on to study computer science at California State Northridge. A bright man, he graduated and secured himself a job as a software engineer for Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Bruce wasn't the model employee, spending time hacking the company's systems to access private personnel information, including but not limited to compensation, tax information, etc. He also had very poor attendance. Despite all of this, by 1988, at the age of 24, he found himself engaged to Delia, a fellow employee. Bruce still lived with his mother and wasn't in the best financial shape, so Delia agreed to pay for a wedding reception at the country club as well as a honeymoon into Haiti. Everything was set up and both Delia and Bruce's mother were excited. The big day arrived on June 17, 1989. Delia waited at the church in nervous anticipation, but Bruce never showed up. She later discovered that he had withdrawn $3,000 from their joint bank account and took a trip of his own to Palm Springs, Florida. Delia called off their engagement and things went back to how they used to be. It wasn't until 2001 that Bruce found himself in another difficult situation. He was living with his new girlfriend, Eleanor, and their 13-month-old son, Matthew, in Woodland Hills, California. It was the most stable relationship Bruce had ever had, and things were going really well. That is, until the day Eleanor went out, leaving Bruce home alone with the baby. Bruce turned on the television and got sucked in. He wasn't paying careful attention to Matthew and the boy fell into the backyard pool. When Eleanor returned home, she found Bruce holding their son nearly hysterical. Matthew was rushed to the hospital and after just one week of intense medical attention, the doctors informed them that their son would never fully recover. In fact, Matthew had sustained brain damage and was now a paraplegic. As Bruce did when things got hard, he left, never to see his son again, despite his mother's continued interest in and support of the child. In 2004, a co-worker of Bruce's introduced him to his sister-in-law, Sylvia. Sylvia was a 40-year-old mother of three and they hit it off right from the start. January 29, 2006, the couple was married. Bruce purchased a three-bedroom, $452,000 home in Montrose. The happy family attended church together regularly. Bruce even volunteered as an usher. But things are not always as they seem. The relationship was suffering under financial stress and then Bruce's mother Nancy decided she had to say something. She was quite fond of Sylvia and knew her son had his troubles. She told Sylvia about her son's past relationships, including that with Eleanor and their son Matthew. Sylvia was shocked by this revelation, having not known anything about Matthew and further angered by Bruce's dishonesty and his lack of responsibility. Then it was discovered that although Bruce had not seen his son since that day in the hospital, he was still continuing to claim him on his taxes as a dependent. Sylvia filed for divorce in April 2008 and Bruce spiraled into depression. In June, he purchased his first gun, a 9mm handgun. On June 18, in divorce court, he was ordered to pay $1,785 per month in spousal support. He wrote his first check, which bounced, and then he stopped payment on the second, making no further attempts to pay. On July 31, he was fired from his job for billing fraudulent hours. He applied for unemployment but was denied as workers who are fired are deemed ineligible. On August 8, Bruce purchased another 9mm handgun, followed by another purchase on September 8. He then contacted one of his neighbors, Jerry, who happened to be the proprietor of Jerry's costumes. He requested a custom-sized Santa suit with a little extra room for comfort, as he was 6'4 and 270 pounds making a standard suit too small. He told her that it was for a children's party, and he paid a $200 deposit with a promise to pick up and pay the rest in November. Then on October 11, he purchased his fourth handgun. He received a call from an old high school friend, Steve Irwin, who asked him over to his home in Iowa to celebrate his 45th birthday. Bruce accepted, and while he was there, confided in Steve. He was embarrassed that his personal life was open and on display in court where everyone could see his finances and now knew of his firing. Even more so, he was upset that he and his mother hardly spoke and during the divorce proceedings, she chose to sit with Sylvia's family, not providing support to her own son. November came, and Bruce returned to Jerry's costumes and paid the outstanding fee for his costume, and even left her a $20 tip. On the 13th, he purchased yet another handgun, now totaling five. He had also acquired a DeWalt compressor, a 50-foot hose, and a tank of high-octane fuel. Just one week before Christmas, on December 18, 2008, Bruce's divorce from Sylvia was final. He agreed to let her keep her diamond engagement ring and agreed to pay her $10,000. The next day, he went to a Montrose travel agency where he booked a ticket to Iowa where he would visit his friend Steve. He paid $650 for a round-trip flight that would depart at 12.20 am on Christmas Day and return two weeks later. He rented a Dodge caliber from Budget, then rented a Silver RAV4 from Renarec. He loaded up the RAV4 with maps of the Southwestern United States as well as water, food, clothing, a tank of gas, a laptop, and desktop computer. Early evening on Christmas Eve, he stopped to chat with a neighbor saying he was heading out to a Christmas party. He had been signed up to serve as an usher for midnight mass at the church he attended, but didn't show up. Instead, at approximately 11.30 pm, dressed in his Santa suit, Bruce knocked on the door of his former in-laws' house where he knew his ex-wife would be. The door was answered by 8-year-old Letitia Yuzupulski, Sylvia's niece. Excited to see Santa Claus, she rushed toward him. Bruce didn't hesitate. He fired, hitting her in the face. He went on to shoot indiscriminately at the frightened party guests. When he felt he was done shooting, he unwrapped the gift he had brought with him. It was a homemade flamethrower. He began to spray racing fuel around the home, intent on lighting it with a flare. Unfortunately for Bruce, the flames from two separate fireplaces triggered an explosion. Bruce fled the house, dropping a pair of fake glasses and his Santa hat in the yard. He jumped into the Dodge Caliber rental car and drove 30 miles to Silmar, parking about a block away from his brother's home. He carefully peeled his shredded Santa suit off his body as it had melted into his skin from the explosion, causing third-degree burns. He used his suit to set up a booby trap. If the suit was moved, a tripwire would ignite a flash fire, exploding 200 rounds of ammunition. Bruce's brother returned home around 3.10 a.m. and found him sprawled on the living room couch with two handguns by his side. He was dead, having shot himself in the mouth. Back at the house, the fire soared 40 to 50 feet and took 80 firefighters an hour and a half to extinguish. Nine people were dead and three others wounded. Due to the intensity of the fire, victims could only be identified with dental and medical records. Sylvia Ortega Pardo, Bruce's ex-wife, died from a gunshot wound. Alicia Sotomayor Ortega, Sylvia's mother, died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Joseph S. Ortega, Sylvia's father, died from multiple gunshot wounds. Charles Ortega, Sylvia's brother, died from a combination of smoke inhalation and gunshot wounds. Sherri Lynn Ortega, Charles' wife, died from a combination of smoke inhalation and gunshot wounds. James Ortega, Sylvia's brother, died from a combination of smoke inhalation and gunshot wounds. Teresa Ortega, James' wife, died from a combination of smoke inhalation and gunshot wounds. Alicia Ortega Ortiz, Sylvia's sister, died from a combination of smoke inhalation and gunshot wounds. Michael Andre Ortiz, Alicia's son, died in the fire. Sylvia's eight-year-old niece, who had answered the door to start it all, who had been shot in the face, suffered severe but non-life-threatening injuries. A 16-year-old girl was shot and wounded in the back, and a 20-year-old woman suffered a broken ankle, jumping from a second floor window. It has been established by a lot of my Yule season episodes over the years, and the holiday season was not always merry and bright. There are a lot of frightening aspects to the Christmas slash winter solstice season that date back to the days of the pagans who started most traditions that we still honor today. Many would say that Santa's origin story began with the Norse god Odin and his wild ride through the winter skies to bring presents to the Vikings, but others would say that it began with St. Nicholas, a Catholic saint who was known for his generosity. But even this Santa origin story has some scary and gruesome elements to it. In European countries, St. Nicholas arrived bringing good cheer and a demon named Krampus on December 6th. He was the gift-bringer who rewarded good children with stockings filled with toys and treats. Krampus doled out the punishments for the children who had been bad. But St. Nicholas was no mythical figure. He was a real person who became a symbol of the holidays. He was known to have lived in the 4th century in what is now Turkey and served as a monk, then a bishop, and then an archbishop during his religious career. Beyond these few facts, little is known about his life. Most of what is left is legend. Signs of his holiness allegedly began at birth when he immediately stood up to praise God and later refused his mother's milk on fast days. He went on to become the world's most popular non-biblical saint and more than 2,000 churches dedicated to him in France and Germany and 400 in England. Artists portrayed him more than any other saint except for the Virgin Mary herself. He is the patron saint of many things, including bankers, pawnbrokers, butchers, sailors, orphans and royalty, as well as pirates, prostitutes and thieves. According to stories, Nicholas was very wealthy from an inheritance, but he secretly gave away his money to charity. One legend told about him is said to be the source for hanging up stockings and giving gifts at Christmas time. A desperate father lost all his wealth and was unable to provide dowries for his three daughters. This meant that the girls would likely live a life of slavery and prostitution. Hearing of the predicament, Nicholas tossed a bag of gold through the family's window each night to make sure the daughters had their dowries. Instead of landing on the fireplace hearth, though, the gold fell into stockings that were hung there to dry. Besides just being generous, Nicholas was also said to have miraculous powers as often recalled in one dark tale. There was a butcher who was making a living by luring children into his home to murder them, cut them up and sell them in barrels as food during a time of great famine. Yeah, that's part of the Santa Claus legend. When an angel told Saint Nicholas of these atrocities, the bishop went to the butcher's home just in time to restore life to the three boys before they could be eaten. I can't connect that story to anything we celebrate about the holidays now, thank goodness, because having your Christmas hand get up and walk away would likely ruin your holiday traditions, but well, here we are. Saint Nicholas is said to have died on December 6th, which became a day in his honor, filled with celebration and gift-giving. His body was interred inside of a stone tomb in the church where he served, but that is not the end of the story. In 1071, the church was damaged during an attack from Muslim invaders. Fearful that harm may come to Saint Nicholas's remains, Italian sailors broke open his sarcophagus and stole his bones away to Bari where they believed they would be safe. The stolen bones were interred in a crypt in the Basilica di San Nicola by Pope Urban II and were undisturbed for almost 900 years until 1953 when they were removed for safekeeping while the church underwent restoration. Once the bones were out, though, words spread that a mysterious, sweet-smelling, oily liquid was oozing from Saint Nicholas's bones, a liquid with healing properties. Even today, the small amount of liquid is mixed with holy water and sold to pilgrims as a cure-all. Somehow, over the centuries, Saint Nicholas's bones have spread around the globe. There are dozens of churches around the world claiming to possess teeth and other bone fragments of Saint Nicholas. They can be found in Belgium, Italy, Turkey, France, and were also at the Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church in New York, which was destroyed on September 11. One of the most famous relics can be found at the St. Martha of Bethany Church and Shrine of All Saints in the town of Morton Grove, Illinois. They actually have bones and relics from nearly 3,000 saints, including Saint Nicholas. His pelvic bone was bought on eBay from an order of nuns in France, but locals swear it is authentic. I guess you can judge that for yourself. Unfortunately, our modern Christmas traditions are lacking in stories of cannibalism and prostitutes, but we still have the story of the man who would eventually be turned into Santa. It took the Protestant Reformation to replace Saint Nicholas as the Christmas bringer of gifts. Gift-giving day was moved from December 6 to December 25, which had been chosen for Christ's birthdate by the Church, which wanted to remove all of the pagan connections to winter celebrations.  He arrives every Christmas eve from the North Pole in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, dropping down chimneys to bring gifts to children. But it wasn't always this way. Our ancestors in the 19th century hadn't really made up their minds about what Santa was supposed to look like. He was just being invented in America and every artist and newspaper writer seemed to have his own ideas of what he looked like and how he made his holiday rounds. The first written description of the American Saint Nicholas was by Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1809. With the Dutch-owned Old New York, Saint Nicholas showed up on Christmas afternoon in a horse-drawn wagon, traveling over the roofs of houses and pulling presents from his pockets and dropping them down chimneys of the homes of people he liked. The formal name for Saint Nicholas, Saint Nicholas, was later slurred by American children into Sinterklaas and then Santa Claus. A very rare small book the children's friend published in 1821 by an unknown author is the first American book about Christmas. In it, a fur-wearing Santa Claus, all one word, is pictured on rooftops in a sleigh drawn by a single reindeer. In just twelve years his name had changed and now he had a sleigh, reindeer and a fur suit. There is no known record as to how all of that happened. And then came the 1822 poem, a visit from Saint Nicholas by American poet Clement Moore. In it, Saint Nicholas is now described as chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf and dressed in fur as from his head to his foot. He also has a white beard, smokes a pipe, has a bundle of toys on his back and a tiny sleigh pulled by eight miniature reindeer, each of whom now has a name. In the years that followed, Santa Claus was literally invented by writers and artists across the country. His attributes, like keeping bad children in line with threats of lumps of coal instead of gifts, were imported by the Germans and mixed into the legend. Even so, depictions of Santa varied widely across America for the next few decades. Every artist tried his hand and some were pretty odd and downright scary. Luckily for the children, most of them were in black and white because color printing was just too expensive in those days. But that would soon change and in the late 1800s, Santa gained a new life thanks to artist Thomas Nast, who created the image that we all know and love. A fat, jolly, elderly man with a kindly bearded face, a belt around his ample middle and dressed in a fur suit and cap. As full color lithography came into being, Santa's suit, which had been described in a number of colors, became bright red, a color which continues today. Thomas Nast had, thankfully, saved Santa Claus for American children. With a little help from Coca-Cola, starting in the 1930s, when the soft drink began advertising in color in popular magazines of the era, the first ad appeared in 1930 when a department store Santa was painted in a crowd drinking a bottle of Coke. The ad featured the world's largest soda fountain which was located in the famous bar department in St. Louis. From that time until 1964, Coca-Cola advertising showed Santa delivering toys, pausing to read a letter and enjoy a Coke, visiting with the children who stayed up to greet him and raiding the refrigerators at a number of homes. The original oil paintings were turned into ads in magazines and in store displays and on billboards, posters, calendars and more. Whether we realize it or not, the Coca-Cola paintings have influenced our modern Santa more than anything else. But Santa is far from the only figure that has become a symbol of the holiday season as we will see in just a few moments. He just happens to be the only one that is no longer terrifying. When Weird Darkness returns, an Icelandic Christmas story that is so creepy that the government was forced to censor it. Up next. Given that it was a rough habitat to settle, it's unsurprising that Iceland's folklore isn't exactly warm and fuzzy. In fact, their first stories are almost as horrific as the brothers' grim fairy tales. Even Icelandic children were not sheltered from the rougher aspects of life. During the Christmas season, for example, the youngest children were told creepy tales of the yule lads. Accompanied by their mother Gryla and the demonic yule cat, the yule lads prowled during the Christmas season. Children unlucky enough to be kidnapped by them were cooked alive and eaten. The yule lads had many iterations over the years and were eventually immortalized in a poem that is still memorized in Icelandic schools. However, the original story of these scary Christmas creatures was so terrible that it was eventually banned altogether. After hearing the tale of these morbid elfin lads, any childhood fears you had of Santa Claus will seem pretty silly. According to the legend, the yule lads would visit children at night in the thirteen days leading up to Christmas. The purpose of these visits was always malevolent. There were thirteen individual yule lads with unique names and personalities. Each one performed a wicked task related to their specific persona, and they often stole food and resources that were important to survival. Stegestar, Kiljaguar, and Stufar were all said to steal milk and farm animals, and I am sure I am butchering these names, please forgive me. Eskazglikdjur allegedly licked up leftover food from pots. Jugnokrykjur took sausages and Ketkroker held a hook that he used to steal meat. Horoskeller would come and slam doors at night for the sole purpose of scaring sleeping children. Kirtnastnikur supposedly followed children to steal their candles and lanterns, leaving them alone in the dark. The yule lads were said to be parented by two monsters named Gryla and Lopalawoi. While both monsters were unpleasant, the mother figure of Gryla was particularly menacing. Dating back to pagan times, the legendary Gryla was a troll with hooves for feet and thirteen tails. She lived in the mountains and would periodically come down into the towns to hunt for bad children. Supposedly bad things happened to the children unlucky enough to encounter Gryla. They were placed in a sack and dragged back to a hillside dwelling. The kiddos were then boiled alive and eaten in a stew. This is a considerably more morbid punishment than getting coal in your stocking from Santa and his elves. As if the stories of the ogre parents weren't terrifying enough, Gryla and Lopalawoi also had a pet cat that's even scarier than the yule lads. The cat did not discriminate between good and bad children. Regardless of behavior, the cat would stalk and eat whomever because it could only feed on people. Children who received a new item of clothing were said to be immune from the yule cat, so perhaps it was created to make children grateful for receiving sweaters as gifts. What exactly were the yule lads and where did they come from? Origin stories vary. Some stories said that freakish creatures were from another dimension that existed side by side with our own. They were essentially invisible until the holidays. Other stories claimed that the boys were children of Eve that she hid from God. The lads were banished to another world after God discovered them. Some other sources reported that the yule lads were fallen angels. Whatever the origin story, the yule lads were certainly never described as benevolent entities. In addition to being menacing, the yule lads were described as physically terrifying. They were always portrayed as ugly and hag-like in drawings. Some had unique physical characteristics that allowed them to commit mischief. One had an abnormally large nose used to sniff out food. Another was incredibly thin, so he is able to slip through cracks and crevices in homes to steal food. Yule lads, while no longer as frightening as they once were, do still remain part of Iceland's culture. In fact, there is an elf school in Iceland where scholars can study the history and mythology of the yule lads and other elven creatures. Some people in Iceland legitimately believe in the freakish lads and in other elves from hidden worlds. People have come forward claiming to have interacted with elven beings and, according to Iceland's elf school, roughly 54% of Icelanders believe in elves. Before the tales of the yule lads were written down, they were shared via word of mouth. Stories varied greatly, and there was a time when there were 82 different yule lads. In 1932, the poet, Johans Erkutlum, wrote a poem describing only 13 of them. With time the poem became so popular that 13 became the generally accepted number. The poem is still recited around Christmas time in some Icelandic schools. In modern Iceland it is laughable to think that the yule lads could ever be worthy of outright banning. Children now leave shoes out for the yule lads. Good children receive toys and candy from them while bad children receive a raw potato. Somehow the yule lads went from demonic child-eating monsters to entities that, at their absolute worst, put a root vegetable in your shoe. How did that transformation happen? At the beginning of the 20th century, Santa Claus became more prevalent worldwide. As the more benevolent figure became popular in Iceland, the yule lads morphed to become a little less frightening. They were mischievous and their antics were toned down to make for a lighter and cheerier holiday narrative. Why did people start telling such horrific stories to children to begin with, though? Life was a difficult territory to settle, given its rugged and cold conditions. Life was hard for the early settlers. The yule lads' legend may have been made terrifying to breed bravery and resilience in children so that they could grow up successfully in the difficult habitat. In modern times the yule lads have been toned down considerably. They are still sad to visit children in the 13 days leading up to Christmas, however their old ways have been converted to be more child-friendly. Lads that would steal milk, for example, now politely request that children leave a glass of milk out for them. The misdeeds they commit are mostly in good fun. They may lick spoons as a joke instead of malevolently stealing resources from families in need. Stories of the yule lads in the beginning though were pretty terrifying for young children.  In 1746, parents in Iceland were officially banned from telling their kids stories about the yule lads. I guess if you're in Iceland and listening to Weird Darkness right now, you might have just broken some local ordinance or something. Oh well. Merry Christmas. Also on the website, you can find free audiobooks that I've narrated. Watch old horror movies with horror hosts at all times of the day for free. Sign up for the newsletter to win free prizes. Grab your Weird Darkness and Weirdo merchandise. Plus, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. And you thought you knew about Santa was written by Troy Taylor. Bruce Jeffery Pardo, the killer Santa, is from the Scare Chamber. And the Icelandic Yule Brothers is by Eris Wisty for Rankers Weird History. Again, you can find links to all of these stories in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. First Samuel 12, verse 24, but be sure to fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. Consider what great things he has done for you. And a final thought, your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have, so concentrate on making that relationship healthy first. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.


Andy Mendoza here with head coach and excuse me with Amherst head coach John Thompson and coach You know tough start to the game obviously getting down early But what was the message at halftime that that really propelled you guys in that third period an 8-2 period and really made it a game Yeah, we clearly didn't come out the way. We would have liked to and credit RIT for for sort of putting the boots to us in The first quarter they did a really nice job off the ground You know that has been one of our our identities is winning the ground and winning the wing wing ground ball battles And just didn't do that in the first quarter And then when they locked that penalty in and we had for you know, we gave up four man down Penalties back to back to back to back that helped their run quite a bit And and so you know we went into halftime. It was nothing magical that I said It was just the guys sort of made a decision said hey you this game is gonna go one of two ways And out that's what I just told our guys in the locker room Just how proud how proud of them I how proud of them I am just for the fight They showed in that third quarter we got a good group and you know We spent all of our energy getting it to 14-13 fail the clear And you sort of just felt the air come out of the ball a little bit and and you know I thought our goalie played pretty well this game Which had been had been something that we've been focused on a little bit So it sort of is always a great lacrosse game with our IT and unfortunately we came out on the wrong end of it this year And what do you credit the resiliency of your team? I mean really when you're down like you said as much as you guys were in that first half It's easy to kind of fold up the 10 and just say you know We'll have to fight another day But your guys fought back made it a game like you said got within one and then for the rest of the way kind Of just traded goals back and forth. What do you credit that resilience in that fight? Yeah Leadership is my first answer Dylan Fennazo at the face-off stripe I think may be the best in the country and so he allows us to play the way That we want to play and that's you know getting up there into the high teens in the low 20s And and so he really did a nice job of stepping up and then Jimmy McAfee on the wings and Jordan Sanford on the wings You know, we really just got back to being us a little bit you know you started winning some wing ground balls and We just got back to being us and caring a little bit less about our opponent and caring more about ourselves and You know, I think when we do that we're a tough out for anybody and Unfortunately today, we only did that for about three-quarters and our IT certainly had something to do with that And what can you say about the game that Jackson? Herak had four goals. Some of them were really fantastic individual efforts What can you say about his performance today and what he can do moving forward also for your guys? Yeah, he's a really good athlete. It's fun watching. It's fun watching him dodge He's also shoots shoots the ball with really really good velocity and you know I think he got one it might have been his first one where he came back to his left And he got one there that really sort of got a monkey off his back and then after that he just started rolling and You know that makes it a little bit of a tough out in terms of you know Who are you gonna put the long stick on is it soul burger is a herrick and and you know I thought Jackson did a really nice job of capitalizing on that and you know Getting to spots where he had all four corners of the net to shoot at and when the ball is going 98 miles an Hour and you got four corners that makes it a little more difficult on a goalie sure Yeah, and obviously didn't get the outcome you wanted today, but big win yesterday One-on-one on the weekend. What do you take from this weekend in terms of positives moving forward for the rest of the season? First of all the Stevenson organization just the way that they put this event on I'm really grateful for being a part of it It's completely professional. It's certainly the best division three event going and the elite of the elite are here And so to get a chance to play against these two teams, you know who happen to be one and two in the country is really really great You know, I'm not so certain how different they are from our league You know the league that we face on a regular basis with you know, however many top 20 teams Six or eight or whatever it may be, you know at any time It prepares us well for for May and you know coming up on seven days from now We got we got one of those teams. So I just I I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out But you know back-to-back games certainly if we're fortunate enough to play in the in the NASCARX semi-finals and finals Certainly prepares us for May. Thanks so much for the time coach. Good luck the rest of the way appreciate it Thank you very much for more coverage on the Mustang classic. You can go to go mustang sports comm


The day that you declared for the draft was it anxiety was it excitement you with your family? Who do you call? Could you put us in your shoes and what that day was like?  Kind of being able to say, mention the draft, you know, it's always been a dream of mine, so. A lot of emotions that day, but, ultimately, you know, I felt like I was ready. Absolutely. Absolutely. Guarantee us something that you think that you will accomplish throughout your NBA career. I'm not sure if it's a defensive player of the year, just something you are looking to aspire to be.


Tonight is important because of me because of me because of my child because of my mother because of our discoveries because we are closer than ever to an answer because we must not give in to heart disease we can never give up I died and was resuscitated I couldn't breathe my heart stopped my son was at risk for sudden death and I had no way of knowing I had my risk of heart attack identified before it occurred tonight is important because of each of us tonight is important because heart disease does not discriminate it kills men and women and children it is the leading cause of death more than cancer in fact it kills more people than the top four cancers combined that is why we are here it is why we never stop working exploring helping people with cardiovascular disease and imagining the future a future without heart disease a future for me me for me my dad a future for all of us all because of the work that is happening here at the Texas Heart Institute since dr. Cooley first imagined the Texas Heart Institute 54 years ago we have opened a world of discovery of imagination of research that has transformed the past and more important redefine the future of cardiovascular discovery learning education and most importantly patient care dr. Cooley laid a foundation for many of the world's most renowned heart and cardiovascular thought leaders physicians and researchers to come together under the direction of the visionary dr. James Willerson together they created a safe haven for discovery for these forward thinking men and women a place that for the past half century they question they explored they discovered and for each of the past 25 years their work has ensured that Texas Heart Institute has been recognized by the US News and World Reports as one of the very top not simply in the nation but in the world we remain one of the leading research and education institutions anywhere an institute that continues to lead to change to reinvent the future of cardiovascular discovery and care and that is what defines Texas Heart Institute care our discoveries are changing the future of care and the outcomes that care provides we are rewriting protocols redesigning pathways for the heart to function we are rethinking how the heart can and will function we are providing solutions to problems that few even know exist what will be the next game-changing regenerative cardiovascular discovery who will be the mastermind behind the next stem cell advancement who and what are challenging to define but without question what is next will most insurely be discovered here at the Texas Heart Institute this is where doctors James Willerson and Emerson parent are leading a worldwide trial on the use of pioneering stem cell therapies to cure heart disease this is where doctors Doris Taylor and Bob Schwartz are redefining regenerative medicine and where they are building a human heart and translating cardiovascular cell therapy research into leading-edge patient care this is where Dr. James Martin is reimagining genetic signaling pathways in the heart to successfully treat and repair damage after a heart attack this is where Dr. Bud Frazier and Dr. Billy Cohn have developed or provided input on every cardiac assist device currently in clinical use worldwide this is where our Center for Coronary Artery Anomalies Group has written the protocol for using MRI screening to detect high-risk heart defects in young children and athletes with unprecedented accuracy this is where Dr. Richard Dixon and his team are identifying dangerous atherosclerotic plaques that cause heart attacks this is where Dr. AJ Marion and his colleagues are identifying genes that cause heart disease this is where historic collaborations are taking place with Catholic Health Initiatives, Baylor, Rice University, the University of Texas System and others this is where discovery is happening this is where barriers are being broken down and people are coming together so to Dr. Cooley to the men and women of Texas Heart Institute who give of themselves to ensure a different tomorrow for each of us thank you thank you thank you for pushing the envelope for not accepting the status quo and for bringing new discovery to Houston to our country and to the world Texas Heart Institute where tomorrow is happening today