
Author Archives: Russ
Author Archives: Russ
I’m teaching a three hour webinar on network complexity on the 8th of February through Safari Books Online. This will likely be the last time I run this course over on the Safari side of things; I’m considering redoing it as a udemy course at some point, or something similar.
Much like most other problems in technology, securing the reachability (routing) information in the internet core as much or more of a people problem than it is a technology problem. While BGP security can never be perfect (in an imperfect world, the quest for perfection is often the cause of a good solution’s failure), there are several solutions which could be used to provide the information network operators need to determine if they can trust a particular piece of routing information or not. For instance, graph overlays for path validation, or the RPKI system for origin validation. Solving the technical problem, however, only carries us a small way towards “solving the problem.”
One of the many ramifications of deploying a new system—one we do not often think about from a purely technology perspective—is the legal ramifications. Assume, for a moment, that some authority were to publicly validate that some address, such as 2001:db8:3e8:1210::/64, belongs to a particular entity, say bigbank, and that the AS number of this same entity is 65000. On receiving an update from a BGP peer, if you note the route to x:1210::/64 ends in AS 65000, you might think you are safe in using this Continue reading
Rahul joins Donald and I on the History of Networking at the Network Collective to talk about the history of eVPNs.
Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
In the previous two parts of this series, I have looked at the reasons I think the networking ecosystem is bound to change and why I think disaggregation is going to play a major role in that change. If I am right about the changes happening, what will become of network engineers? The bifurcation of knowledge, combined with the kinds of networks and companies noted in the previous posts in this series, point the way. There will, I think, be three distinct careers where the current “network engineer” currently exists on the operational side:
In the first post of this series at the turn of 2019, I considered the forces I think will cause network engineering to radically change. What about the timing of these changes? I hear a lot of people say” “this stuff isn’t coming for twenty years or more, so don’t worry about it… there is plenty of time to adapt.” This optimism seems completely misplaced to me. Markets and ideas are like that old house you pass all the time—you know the one. No-one has maintained it for years, but it is so … solid. It was built out of the best timber, by people who knew what they were doing. The foundation is deep, and it has lasted all these years.
Then one day you pass a heap of wood on the side of the road and realize—this is that old house that seemed so solid just a few days ago. Sometime in the night, that house that was so solid collapsed. The outer shell was covering up a lot of inner rot. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argues this is the way ideas always go. They appear to be solid one day, and then Continue reading
An article on successful writers who end up driving delivery trucks. My current reading in epistemology for an upcoming PhD seminar. An article on the bifurcation of network engineering skills. Several conversations on various slacks I participate in. What do these things have in common? Just this:
What is to become of network engineering?
While it seems obvious network engineering is changing, it is not so easy to say how it is changing, and how network engineers can survive those changes. To better understand these things, it is good to back up and take in a larger view. A good place to start is to think about how networks are built today.
Networks today are built using an appliance and circuit model. To build a network, an “engineer” (we can argue over the meaning of that word) tries to gauge how much traffic needs to be moved between different points in the business’ geographical space, and then tries to understand the shape of that traffic. Is it layer 2, or layer 3? Which application needs priority over some other application?
Once this set of requirements is drawn up, a long discussion over the right appliances and circuits to purchase to Continue reading
We are now at the 22nd of December, and it is time to take a break to spend time with family and friends (as well as prepping up a lot of work for next year). From my family to yours, we wish you the merriest of Christmas’, and a very happy new year.
Remember, at this time of year, “He who made the blind men see, and the lame men walk,” as Tiny Tim would say.
A bit of retrospect from 2018, and prospect for 2019…
As Marley might say: “Look to see me no more, and expect the first post in the new year…”
Recently, I posted a video short take I did on BGP optimal route reflection. A reader wrote in the comments to that post:
…why can’t Router set next hop self to updates to router E and avoid this suboptimal path?
To answer this question, it is best to return to the scene of the suboptimality—
To describe the problem again: A and C are sending the same route to B, which is a route reflector. B selects the best path from its perspective, which is through B, and sends this route to each of its clients. In this case, E will learn the path with a next hop of A, even though the path through C is closer from E’s perspective. In the video, I discuss several ways to solve this problem; one option I do not talk about is allowing B to set the next hop to itself. Would this work?
Before answering the question, however, it is important to make one observation: I have drawn this network with B as a router in the forwarding path. In many networks, the route reflector is a virtual machine, or a *nix host, and is not capable of forwarding the traffic Continue reading