Russ

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Computer Network Design Complexity and Tradeoffs Training

I’m teaching a “one off” special event class over on O’Reilly’s platform (via Pearson) this coming Friday, the 5th of December. From the Description:

Join networking engineer and infrastructure expert Russ White for this exclusive, one-time event exploring the critical role of tradeoffs in network design. We’ll begin by unpacking how complexity shapes the decisions architects and designers must make, and how tradeoffs are often an unavoidable part of navigating that complexity. Through real-world examples, you’ll learn how different network design choices impact overall system complexity, and how to approach these decisions with greater clarity and confidence. We’ll wrap up with an in-depth discussion of unintended consequences—how they arise, how to anticipate them, and how they relate to designing in complex, adaptive environments.

As always, if you register for the course you can watch later.

Register here.

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An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown.


Until recently, many professionals, including many doctors, thought they needed to become more machine-like to keep their jobs. Such worry contributed to the specialization trend of the last century.


In an era of growing cyber threats, traditional defensive measures can be insufficient in the face of sophisticated or novel tactics. As a result, the question of whether private or public entities should engage in active defense or offensive “hack back” tactics has taken on greater urgency.


In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables.


By 1990 it was clear that IP had a problem. It was still a tiny Internet at the time, but the growth patterns were exponential, doubling in size every 12 months. We were stressing out the pool of Class B IPv4 addresses and in the absence of any corrective measures this address pool would be fully depleted in 1994.

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If you’re using IP address truncation thinking it makes data “anonymous” or “non-personal,” you’re creating a false sense of security.


With distressingly typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you make-it bravado, LLM creators have been telling investors that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner (or has already been achieved!). The problem the promoters blithely ignore is that LLMs do not know how the words they input and output relate to the real world.


Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often “offshore or at lower salary.”


While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.


There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter.

Hedge 288: Loneliness

Sometimes we just like to talk about “life issues” as they relate to network engineering and technology career fields. Loneliness seems to especially plague network engineering and other “small” IT fields, where communities are small, change is rapid, and stress is high. Loneliness expert Lucy Rose joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to discuss loneliness.

Check out the Cost of Loneliness here.

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SpaceX has surpassed 10,000 satellite launches in its Starlink programme, following the deployment of 56 additional units on Sunday. The milestone highlights the rapid expansion of satellite-based broadband infrastructure and its increasing role in global connectivity.


While x86 has been dominant for decades, a new migration project at Google represents a significant shift to more mixed architectures.


The proliferation of data centers needed to support AI development, along with myriad announcements to onshore manufacturing supply chains, are leading to surging energy demand.


Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever.


But is the AI being used for this actually intelligent or just very, very good at faking it? This is not a new question. American philosopher John Searle came up with the Chinese Room, aka the “Chinese Box” argument, all the way back in 1980. He argued that while a computer could eventually simulate understanding – i.e. it could pass the Turing Test – that doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.

Hedge 286: Roundtable

It’s time again for Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about current articles they’ve run across in their day-to-day reading. This time we talk about WiFi in the home, how often users think a global problem is really local, and why providers have a hard time supporting individual homes and businesses. The second topic is one no one really cares about … apathy. What causes apathy? How can we combat it? Join us for this episode of the Hedge … if you can bring yourself to care!
 

 
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I get the sense that hosting a ccTLD today is challenging, not because of the technical stack, but due to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) concerns


In times of major change–whether in IT or the economy–organizations should take a fresh look at their sourcing strategy. Companies outsourcing key functions need to re-examine the reasoning and scrutinize the results.


Another multivendor development group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) consortium, recently published its first specification aimed at delivering an open standard interconnect for AI clusters.


The company conducted a nationwide survey of 3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.


DNS was not originally designed with security in mind, making it easy for common threats such as DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks to reroute unsuspecting users to malicious sites, often without detection.

Hedge 285: Post Quantum Crypto

Is quantum really an immediate and dangerous threat to current cryptography systems, or are we pushing to hastily adopt new technologies we won’t necessarily need for a few more years? Should we allow the quantum pie to bake a few more years before slicing a piece and digging in? George Michaelson joins Russ and Tom to discuss.

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Hedge 284: Netops and Corporate Culture

We all know netops, NRE, and devops can increase productivity, increase Mean Time Between Mistakes (MTBM), and decrease MTTR–but how do we deploy and use these tools? We often think of the technical hurdles you face in their deployment, but most of the blockers are actually cultural. Chris Grundemann, Eyvonne, Russ, and Tom discuss the cultural issues with deploying netops on this episode of the Hedge.
 

 
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The ease with which those images and videos traveled, the thoughtless way in which we shared them, reveals the sinister side of technological advancement. It exposes the degree to which social media has desensitized us, stripped us of the natural horror that ought to accompany the spectacle of death, and conditioned us to consume human suffering as one more item in an endless buffet of digital content.


It’s normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement.


Not that many years ago, telephone and broadband networks were structured in such a way that most outages were local events. A fiber cut might kill service to a neighborhood; an electronics failure might kill service to a larger area, but for the most part, outages were contained within a discrete and local area.


Far from a future concern, AI is already the single largest uncontrolled channel for corporate data exfiltration—bigger than shadow SaaS or unmanaged file sharing.


A new security risk has recently been brought to my attention. I was on a Teams call that included an attorney who would not let the call continue while Continue reading

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A number of recent changes have helped to push Ethernet forward, advancing its capabilities to better meet the needs of AI.


Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform’s dashboard and many of its APIs.


Working with MikroTik and IP Infusion’s OcNOS to interop EVPN/VxLAN has been on my wish list for a long time.


Have you heard about MRT dumps, but never tried to use them because the bar seems too high? Or are you tired of doing “parse -> grep -> process” every time you touch BGP MRT dumps?


Unfortunately, history is again being rewritten. It is rapidly becoming clear that LLMs are not economical.


As part of our research into post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for DNSSEC, we test PQC as a drop-in replacement for classical algorithms. We explore a transition where both run simultaneously, analysing how resolvers validate records, edge cases, and the feasibility and impact of such a period.


In much of the world, we are in an era that I like to call the “post-gigabit era”. Many users have access to gigabit connections—or at least hundreds of Continue reading

Hedge 283: Technical Planning

We network engineers often find ourselves without a viable plan–our plans always seem to go awry, to the point that many network engineers just give up on planning. Is “giving up” the right solution? Or can we learn to be better planners? Jonathan Adams and Tim McConnaughy join Russ to discussion planning for network engineers.

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“Classic” TCP uses an extremely simple loss-based congestion detection algorithm that is intended to save networks from collapsing under extreme overload.


The endgame is a society where corporate algorithms make decisions about employment, education, and social interaction with no accountability.


The rise of Agentic AI, the emergence and adoption of AI agents and agent-to-agent networking to autonomously perform tasks on behalf of humans, has introduced unique challenges for existing security products.


In the landscape of organizational management, a distinction exists between teams that (a.) efficiently deliver a high-quality service or product, and (b.) those that innovate and develop their thought leadership in an area of emerging technology.


Broadcom CEO Hock Tan delivered a rather defiant keynote to open the VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas recently, telling the audience they are better off using the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on-premises than hyperscale cloud service providers.


The public is told that AI systems are super smart and have the world’s info at their electronic beck and call. At the same time, it is humans and human organizations who claim professional expertise and so deliver their “truth” via media and Internet.


While Eutelsat’s OneWeb operates the second-largest Continue reading

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