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Category Archives for "ipSpace.net"

Worth Reading: Another BGP Session Reset Bug

Emile Aben is describing an interesting behavior observed in the Wild West of the global Internet: someone started announcing BGP paths with an unknown attribute, which (regardless of RFC 7606) triggered some BGP session resets.

One would have hoped we learned something from the August 2010 incident (supposedly caused by a friend of mine 😜), but it looks like some things never change. For more details, watch the Network Security Fallacies and Internet Routing Security webinar.

Worth Reading: Another BGP Session Reset Bug

Emile Aben is describing an interesting behavior observed in the Wild West of the global Internet: someone started announcing BGP paths with an unknown attribute, which (regardless of RFC 7606) triggered some BGP session resets.

One would have hoped we learned something from the August 2010 incident (supposedly caused by a friend of mine 😜), but it looks like some things never change. For more details, watch the Network Security Fallacies and Internet Routing Security webinar.

Worth Reading: AI Does Not Help Programmers

On the Communications of the ACM web site, Bertrand Meyer argues that (contrary to the exploding hype) AI Does Not Help Programmers:

As a programmer, I know where to go to solve a problem. But I am fallible; I would love to have an assistant who keeps me in check, alerting me to pitfalls and correcting me when I err. A effective pair-programmer. But that is not what I get. Instead, I have the equivalent of a cocky graduate student, smart and widely read, also polite and quick to apologize, but thoroughly, invariably, sloppy and unreliable. I have little use for such supposed help.

Not surprisingly, my experience is pretty close to what he’s describing. AI is the way to go if you want something that looks reasonable (at a first glance), but not if you want to get something right. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a difference between marketing and engineering: networks that are configured 90% correctly sometimes fail to do what you expect them to do.

Worth Reading: AI Does Not Help Programmers

On the Communications of the ACM web site, Bertrand Meyer argues that (contrary to the exploding hype) AI Does Not Help Programmers:

As a programmer, I know where to go to solve a problem. But I am fallible; I would love to have an assistant who keeps me in check, alerting me to pitfalls and correcting me when I err. A effective pair-programmer. But that is not what I get. Instead, I have the equivalent of a cocky graduate student, smart and widely read, also polite and quick to apologize, but thoroughly, invariably, sloppy and unreliable. I have little use for such supposed help.

Not surprisingly, my experience is pretty close to what he’s describing. AI is the way to go if you want something that looks reasonable (at a first glance), but not if you want to get something right. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a difference between marketing and engineering: networks that are configured 90% correctly sometimes fail to do what you expect them to do.

Worth Reading: Always the Same Warning Signs

Found an interesting article describing the shenanigans of a biotech startup. Admittedly, it has nothing to do with networking apart from the closing paragraph…

But people will find all sorts of ways to believe what they want to believe, to avoid hearing things that they don’t want to hear, and to avoid thinking about things that are too worrisome to contemplate.

… which is a perfect description of why people believe in centralized control planes, flow-based forwarding, or long-distance vMotion.

Worth Reading: Always the Same Warning Signs

Found an interesting article describing the shenanigans of a biotech startup. Admittedly, it has nothing to do with networking apart from the closing paragraph…

But people will find all sorts of ways to believe what they want to believe, to avoid hearing things that they don’t want to hear, and to avoid thinking about things that are too worrisome to contemplate.

… which is a perfect description of why people believe in centralized control planes, flow-based forwarding, or long-distance vMotion.

Summer Break 2023

Long story short: it’s time for another summer break, as people reporting my bloopers – THANK YOU!!! – know only too well. I plan to be back in early autumn rolling out tons of new content.

I’ll do my best to reply to support requests (it will take longer than usual), and probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts. If you get bored there’s still over 400 hours of existing content, over 100 podcast episodes, and thousands of blog posts.

In the meantime, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!

Summer Break 2023

Long story short: it’s time for another summer break, as people reporting my bloopers – THANK YOU!!! – know only too well. I plan to be back in early autumn rolling out tons of new content.

I’ll do my best to reply to support requests (it will take longer than usual), and probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts. If you get bored there’s still over 400 hours of existing content, over 100 podcast episodes, and thousands of blog posts.

In the meantime, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!

When a Device Without an IP Address Wants to Play the IP Game

After I published the Source IP Address in Multicast Packets blog post, Erik Auerswald sent me several examples of network devices sending IP packets with source IP address set to 0.0.0.0:

When a Device Without an IP Address Wants to Play the IP Game

After I published the Source IP Address in Multicast Packets blog post, Erik Auerswald sent me several examples of network devices sending IP packets with source IP address set to 0.0.0.0:

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