Soap Opera: SRv6 Is Insecure

I heard about SRv6 when it was still on the drawing board, and my initial reaction was “Another attempt to implement source routing. We know how that ends.” The then-counter-argument by one of the proponents went along the lines of “but we’ll use signed headers to prevent abuse” and I thought “yeah, that will work really well in silicon implementations”.

Years later, Andrew Alston decided to document the state of the emperor’s wardrobe (TL&DR: of course SRv6 is insecure and can be easily abused) and the counter-argument this time was “but that applies to any tunnel technology”. Thank you, we knew that all along, and that’s not what was promised.

You might want to browse the rest of that email thread; it’s fun reading unless you built your next-generation network design on SRv6 running across third-party networks… which was another PowerPoint case study used by SRv6 proponents.

Soap Opera: SRv6 Is Insecure

I heard about SRv6 when it was still on the drawing board, and my initial reaction was “Another attempt to implement source routing. We know how that ends.” The then-counter-argument by one of the proponents went along the lines of “but we’ll use signed headers to prevent abuse” and I thought “yeah, that will work really well in silicon implementations”.

Years later, Andrew Alston decided to document the state of the emperor’s wardrobe (TL&DR: of course SRv6 is insecure and can be easily abused) and the counter-argument this time was “but that applies to any tunnel technology”. Thank you, we knew that all along, and that’s not what was promised.

You might want to browse the rest of that email thread; it’s fun reading unless you built your next-generation network design on SRv6 running across third-party networks… which was another PowerPoint case study used by SRv6 proponents.

Video: How Can You Master Public Cloud Networking?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably realized there’s still need for networking in public clouds, and mastering it requires slightly different set of skills. What could you as a networking engineer to get fluent in this different world? I collected a few hints in the last video in Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar.

Video: How Can You Master Public Cloud Networking?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably realized there’s still need for networking in public clouds, and mastering it requires slightly different set of skills. What could you as a networking engineer to get fluent in this different world? I collected a few hints in the last video in Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar.

Why Does Internet Keep Breaking?

James Miles sent me a long list of really good questions along the lines of “why do we see so many Internet-related outages lately and is it due to BGP and DNS creaking of old age”. He started with:

Over the last few years there are more “high profile” incidents relating to Internet connectivity. I raise the question, why?

The most obvious reason: Internet became mission-critical infrastructure and well-publicized incidents attract eyeballs.

Ignoring the click baits, the underlying root cause is in many cases the race to the bottom. Large service providers brought that onto themselves when they thought they could undersell the early ISPs and compensate their losses with voice calls (only to discover that voice-over-Internet works too well).

Why Does Internet Keep Breaking?

James Miles sent me a long list of really good questions along the lines of “why do we see so many Internet-related outages lately and is it due to BGP and DNS creaking of old age”. He started with:

Over the last few years there are more “high profile” incidents relating to Internet connectivity. I raise the question, why?

The most obvious reason: Internet became mission-critical infrastructure and well-publicized incidents attract eyeballs.

Ignoring the click baits, the underlying root cause is in many cases the race to the bottom. Large service providers brought that onto themselves when they thought they could undersell the early ISPs and compensate their losses with voice calls (only to discover that voice-over-Internet works too well).

Even Simple Data Models Are a Huge Win

Dan Augustine sent me a wonderful example illustrating how even a very simple data model together with some automation templates can simplify a large-scale deployment.

We have a 100 router installation coming up for our schools and both of our installation vendors do not use open source templating tools and they are not willing to share.

Having taken the Data Models in Network Automation part of your Network Automation Concepts webinar, I decided to install GitLab, make an Ansible project and invite our installation partners to the project.

Even Simple Data Models Are a Huge Win

Dan Augustine sent me a wonderful example illustrating how even a very simple data model together with some automation templates can simplify a large-scale deployment.

We have a 100 router installation coming up for our schools and both of our installation vendors do not use open source templating tools and they are not willing to share.

Having taken the Data Models in Network Automation part of your Network Automation Concepts webinar, I decided to install GitLab, make an Ansible project and invite our installation partners to the project.

Where Would You Need DNS Anycast?

One of the publicly observable artifacts of the October 2021 Facebook outage was an intricate interaction between BGP routing and their DNS servers needed to support optimal anycast configuration. Not surprisingly, it was all networking engineers' fault according to some opinions¹

There’s no need for anycast²/BGP advertisement for DNS servers. DNS is already highly available by design. Only network people never understand that, which leads to overengineering.

It’s not that hard to find a counter-argument³: while it looks like there are only 13 root name servers⁴, each one of them is a large set of instances advertising the same IP prefix⁵ to the Internet.

Where Would You Need DNS Anycast?

One of the publicly observable artifacts of the October 2021 Facebook outage was an intricate interaction between BGP routing and their DNS servers needed to support optimal anycast configuration. Not surprisingly, it was all networking engineers’ fault according to some opinions¹

There’s no need for anycast²/BGP advertisement for DNS servers. DNS is already highly available by design. Only network people never understand that, which leads to overengineering.

It’s not that hard to find a counter-argument³: while it looks like there are only 13 root name servers⁴, each one of them is a large set of instances advertising the same IP prefix⁵ to the Internet.

netsim-tools Release 1.0

It looks like netsim-tools reached a somewhat stable state, so it was time to do a cleanup and publish release 1.0 (also available on PyPi, use pip3 install –upgrade netsim-tools to fetch it).

During the cleanup, I removed all references to the obsolete scripts, leaving only the netlab command. I also found an old bash script that enabled LLDP passthrough on Linux bridges and made it part of netlab up process; your libvirt-based labs will have LLDP enabled by default.

Interested? Install the tools and follow the tutorials to get started.

netsim-tools Release 1.0

It looks like netsim-tools reached a somewhat stable state, so it was time to do a cleanup and publish release 1.0 (also available on PyPi, use pip3 install –upgrade netsim-tools to fetch it).

During the cleanup, I removed all references to the obsolete scripts, leaving only the netlab command. I also found an old bash script that enabled LLDP passthrough on Linux bridges and made it part of netlab up process; your libvirt-based labs will have LLDP enabled by default.

Interested? Install the tools and follow the tutorials to get started.

Worth Reading: Operators and the IETF

Long long time ago (seven years to be precise), ISOC naively tried to bridge the gap between network operators and Internet Vendor Engineering Task Force¹. They started with a widespread survey asking operators why they’re hesitant to participate in IETF mailing lists and meetings.

The result: Operators and the IETF draft that never moved beyond -00 version. A quick glimpse into the Potential Challenges will tell you why IETF preferred to kill the messenger (and why I published this blog post on Halloween).

Worth Reading: Operators and the IETF

Long long time ago (seven years to be precise), ISOC naively tried to bridge the gap between network operators and Internet Vendor Engineering Task Force¹. They started with a widespread survey asking operators why they’re hesitant to participate in IETF mailing lists and meetings.

The result: Operators and the IETF draft that never moved beyond -00 version. A quick glimpse into the Potential Challenges will tell you why IETF preferred to kill the messenger (and why I published this blog post on Halloween).

Worth Reading: Programming Sucks

Just FYI: if you’re wondering about the wisdom of every networking engineer should become a programmer religion, you might benefit from the Programming Sucks reality check. I had just enough exposure to programming to realize how spot-on it is (and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry).

Worth Reading: Programming Sucks

Just FYI: if you’re wondering about the wisdom of every networking engineer should become a programmer religion, you might benefit from the Programming Sucks reality check. I had just enough exposure to programming to realize how spot-on it is (and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry).

Nonlinear Effects of Optimization-Induced Complexity

We have school holidays this week, so I’m reposting wonderful comments that would otherwise be lost somewhere in the page margins. Today: Minh Ha on recent Facebook failure and overly complex systems (slightly edited).

I incidentally commented on your NSF post some 3 weeks before […the Facebook outage…] happened, on the unpredictable nature of nonlinear effects resulting from optimization-induced complexity. Their outage just drives home the point that optimization is a dumb process and leads to combinations of circular dependency that no one can account for and test.

Nonlinear Effects of Optimization-Induced Complexity

We have school holidays this week, so I’m reposting wonderful comments that would otherwise be lost somewhere in the page margins. Today: Minh Ha on recent Facebook failure and overly complex systems (slightly edited).

I incidentally commented on your NSF post some 3 weeks before […the Facebook outage…] happened, on the unpredictable nature of nonlinear effects resulting from optimization-induced complexity. Their outage just drives home the point that optimization is a dumb process and leads to combinations of circular dependency that no one can account for and test.

Big Picture: BFD, Non-Stop Forwarding, and Graceful Restart

We have school holidays this week, so I’m reposting wonderful comments that would otherwise be lost somewhere in the page margins. Today: Erik Auerswald’s excellent summary of BFD, NSF, and GR.

I’d suggest to step back a bit and consider the bigger picture: What is BFD good for? What is GR/NSF/NSR/SSO good for?

BFD and GR/NSF/NSR/SSO have different goals: one enables quick fail over, the other prevents fail over. Combining both promises to be interesting.

Big Picture: BFD, Non-Stop Forwarding, and Graceful Restart

We have school holidays this week, so I’m reposting wonderful comments that would otherwise be lost somewhere in the page margins. Today: Erik Auerswald’s excellent summary of BFD, NSF, and GR.

I’d suggest to step back a bit and consider the bigger picture: What is BFD good for? What is GR/NSF/NSR/SSO good for?

BFD and GR/NSF/NSR/SSO have different goals: one enables quick fail over, the other prevents fail over. Combining both promises to be interesting.