Worth Reading: Practical Advice for Engineers

Sean Goedecke published an interesting compilation of practical advice for engineers. Not surprisingly, they include things like “focus on fundamentals” and “spend your working time doing things that are valuable to the company and your career” (OMG, does that really have to be said?).

Bonus point: a link to an article by Patrick McKenzie (of the Bits About Money fame) explaining why you SHOULD NOT call yourself a programmer (there goes the everyone should be a programmer gospel 😜).

ChatGPT Strikes Again: IS-IS on Unnumbered Interfaces 🤦‍♂️

In the last few days, I decided to check out how much better ChatGPT has gotten in the last year or two. I tried to be positive and was rewarded with some surprisingly good results. I even figured out I can use it to summarize my blog posts using prompts like this one:

Using solely the information from blog.ipspace.net, what can you tell me about running ospf over unnumbered interfaces

And then I asked it about unnumbered interfaces and IS-IS, and it all went sideways:

Repost: On the Advantages of XML

Continuing the discussion started by my Breaking APIs or Data Models Is a Cardinal Sin and Screen Scraping in 2025 blog posts, Dr. Tony Przygienda left another thoughtful comment worth reposting as a publicly visible blog post:

Having read your newest rant around my rant ;-} I can attest that you hit the nail on the very head in basically all you say:

• XML output big? yeah.
• JSON squishy syntax? yeah.
• SSH prioritization? You didn’t live it until you had a customer where a runaway python script generated 800+ XML netconf sessions pumping data ;-)

Video: netlab Introduction by Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks created an excellent introductory Netlab - Automate Your Network Labs With YAML! video showing how easy it is to start and configure a container- or VM-based lab, and explaining the basic netlab commands you need to get started.

Thanks a million!

P.S.: If you’ve done something similar and I haven’t noticed it, please send me the link.

Response: True Unnumbered Interfaces

Hendrik left an interesting comment on my Running IS-IS over Unnumbered Ethernet Interfaces blog post:

FRRouting (Linux) with pure IS-IS, the only way it currently (10.3) works is to copy the loopback IPv4 address to the interfaces that you need to do IPv4 routing on. The OpenFabric (IS-IS “extension” draft) does support true unnumbered interfaces and routes IPv6.

Let’s unpack this. There are (at least) four reasons a router needs an address associated with an interface¹:

Amazing Speed of Bug Fixes in Nokia SR Linux

A few weeks ago, I was criticising Nokia’s unnecessary changes to the SR Linux configuration data model, so it’s only fair that I also publish a counterexample:

• On April 12th, SR Linux failed one of the netlab integration tests. We keep adding functionality to these tests as we discover edge cases we didn’t test before, so sometimes a device that passed the test before might fail the modified version.
• I opened a netlab issue, believing it might be a configuration error on our part.
• It quickly became evident that we’re dealing with an SR Linux bug, as the failure to apply routing policies was random.

I thought that was the end of the story and closed the issue, but then something truly amazing happened:

netlab 2.0: Use Custom Bridges on Multi-Access Links

netlab uses point-to-point links provided by the underlying virtualization software to implement links with two nodes and Linux bridges to implement links with more than two nodes connected to them. That’s usually OK if you don’t care about the bridge implementation details, but what if you’d like to use a bridge (or a layer-2 switch if you happen to be of marketing persuasion) you’re familiar with?

You could always implement a bridged segment with a set of links connecting edge nodes to a VLAN-capable device. For example, you could use the following topology to connect two Linux hosts through a bridge running Arista EOS:

Vibe Coding netlab Lab Topology with ChatGPT

I was considering an AI add-on that would have access to the netlab documentation and help you figure out how to use it for a few years, but never got around to implementing it (and surprisingly, with all the AI hype out there, there were no volunteers submitting pull requests). A few weeks ago, someone suggested adding an MCP server as an interface to ipSpace.net content, but the discussion quickly devolved into vague ideas.

However, as ChatGPT now has access to the live Internet, I decided to try out whether it can get the job done with a bit of prompting.

TL&DR: After a hiccup, it worked surprisingly well.

Response: CLI Is an API

Andrew Yourtchenko and Dr. Tony Przygienda left wonderful comments to my Screen Scraping in 2025 blog post, but unfortunately they prefer commenting on a closed platform with ephemeral content; the only way to make their thoughts available to a wider audience is by reposting them. Andrew first:

I keep saying CLI is an API. However, it is much simpler and an easier way to adapt to the changes, if these three conditions are met:

netlab 2.0.0: Hosts, Bridges, and SRv6

netlab release 2.0.0 is out. I spent the whole week fixing bugs and running integration tests, so I’m too brain-dead to go into the details. These are the major features we added (more about them in a few days; the details are in the release notes):

• Well-defined node roles (host, router, bridge) are now available on multiple platforms
• The firewall.zonebased plugin allows you to configure a rudimentary firewall
• SRv6: BGP L3VPN support is now available for FRRouting, so you can go out and kick its (free) tires.
• bridge nodes can be used as simple bridges or to implement multi-access links
• netlab defaults command provides sysctl-like CLI interface to user/system defaults.

Other changes include:

Forwarding Packets Across a Network

After inspecting the confusing bridging/routing/switching terminology and a brief detour into the control/data plane details, let’s talk about how packets actually move across a network.

As always, things were simpler when networks were implemented with a single cable. In that setup, all nodes were directly reachable, and the only challenge was figuring out the destination node’s address; it didn’t matter whether it was a MAC address, an IP address, or a Fiber Channel address. On a single cable, you could just broadcast, like, “Who has this service?” and someone would reply, “I’m the printer you’re looking for.” That’s how many early non-IP protocols operated.

Screen Scraping in 2025

Dr. Tony Przygienda left a very valid (off-topic) comment to my Breaking APIs or Data Models Is a Cardinal Sin blog post:

If, on the other hand, the customers would not camp for literally tens of years on regex scripts scraping screens, lots of stuff could progress much faster.

He’s right, particularly from Juniper’s perspective; they were the first vendor to use a data-driven approach to show commands. Unfortunately, we’re still not living in a perfect world:

OSPF Loop Prevention with Area Range Summary LSAs

In a previous blog post, I described how OSPF route selection rules prevent a summary LSA from being inserted back into an area from which it was generated. That works nicely for area prefixes turned directly into summary LSAs, but how does the loop prevention logic work for summarized prefixes (what OSPF calls area ranges)?

TL&DR: It doesn’t, unless… ;)

OSPF Summary LSA Loop Prevention

A networking-focused entity known only as humblegrumble sent me the following question after reading my When OSPF Becomes a Distance Vector Protocol article:

How do A1 and A2 know not to advertise a Type-3 summary LSA generated from area 1 prefixes back into area 1?

He’s right. There is no “originating area” information in the type-3 LSA, so how does an ABR know not to reinsert the type-3 LSA generated by another ABR back into the area?

TL&DR: The OSPF route selection process takes care of that.

Breaking APIs or Data Models Is a Cardinal Sin

Imagine you decide to believe the marketing story of your preferred networking vendor and start using the REST API to configure their devices. That probably involves some investment in automation or orchestration tools, as nobody in their right mind wants to use curl or Postman to configure network devices.

A few months later, after your toolchain has been thoroughly tested, you decide to upgrade the operating system on the network devices, and everything breaks. The root cause: the vendor changed their API or the data model between software releases.

ChatGPT on OSPF Area Ranges and Summary LSAs

I wanted to test a loop prevention when propagating summary LSA across areas scenario (more about that in another blog post) using the lab topology I developed for the When OSPF Becomes a Distance Vector Protocol article.

I started the lab with the FRRouting routers and configured OSPF area ranges. Astonishingly, I discovered that the more-specific prefixes from an area appear as summary routes in the backbone area even when the area range is configured. When I tried to reproduce the scenario a few days later, it turned out to be a timing quirk (I didn’t wait long enough), but my squirrelly mind was already investigating.

Switching, Routing, and Bridging Terminology

After discussing networking layers and addressing, it’s time to focus on moving packets across a network. Vendors love to use ill-defined terms like switching instead of forwarding, routing, or bridging, so let’s start with the terminology.

Connecting all relevant devices to a single cable would indubitably simplify any networking stack, but unfortunately, we’re almost never that lucky. We need devices in the network (typically with multiple interfaces) that perform packet forwarding between end nodes.

Worth Reading: BGP Unnumbered in 2025

Gabriel sent me a pointer to a blog post by Rudolph Bott describing the details of BGP Unnumbered implementations on Nokia, Juniper, and Bird.

Even more interestingly, Rudolph points out the elephant I completely missed: RFC 8950 refers to RFC 2545, which requires a GUA IPv6 next hop in BGP updates (well, it uses the SHALL wording, which usually means “troubles ahead”). What do you do if you’re running EBGP on an interface with no global IPv6 addresses? As expected, vendors do different things, resulting in another fun interoperability exercise.

Finally, there’s RFC 7404 that advocates LLA-only infrastructure links, so we might find the answer there. Nope; it doesn’t even acknowledge the problem in the Caveats section.

For even more information, read the Unnumbered IPv4 Interfaces and BGP in Data Center Fabrics blog posts.

How ARP Killed a Static Route

The amount of weird stuff we discover in netlab integration tests is astounding, or maybe I have a knack for looking into the wrong dark corners (my wife would definitely agree with that). Today’s special: when having two next hops kills a static route.

TL&DR: default ARP settings on a multi-subnet Linux host are less than optimal.

We use these principles when creating netlab integration tests:

• They should contain a single device-under-test and a bunch of attached probes.
• They should test a single feature.
• They should not rely on the device-under-test. All validation has to be done on probes.

How do you test static routes under these restrictions? Here’s what we did:

Rant: You Should Have Written a Book

I apologize for the rant; I have to vent my frustration with people whose quantity of opinions seems to be exceeding their experience (or maybe they’re coming from an alternate universe with different laws of physics, which would be way cool but also unlikely). You’ve been warned; please feel free to move on or skip the rant part of the blog post.

Rant mode: ON

This is the (unedited) gem I received after making some of my EVPN videos public: