N4N007: Performance vs. Cost
When building your network and buying equipment, is performance or cost more important? On today’s episode, we discuss the balance between performance and cost in selecting networking equipment. We also cover other considerations, including why you should understand client and network needs, the fluid nature of pricing, and the necessity of creative problem-solving. Bonus material: ... Read more »TNO011: Behind the NetOps Curtain at Cisco Live!
Ever wonder how large conferences such as Cisco Live! manage their on-site network operations? Today’s podcast guest, Jason Davis joins host Scott Robohn to discuss history of network operations at Cisco Live!, and the intricacies, challenges, and strategies involved in setting up and managing network operations for such a large event. Episode Guest: Jason Davis, ... Read more »HN761: Who Are You Building Automation For? An AutoCon2 Roundtable
Today’s Heavy Networking comes to you from the AutoCon2 tech event being held in Westminster, Colorado. This episode was recorded in conference room on site at AutoCon2 in November, 2024. The format? Roundtable. Four network automators have raised their hand and brought topics they want to discuss. Those topics include: Crafting tools to “listen” to... Read more »Use Disaggregated BGP Prefixes to Influence Inbound Internet Traffic
As much as I love explaining how to use BGP in an optimal way, sometimes we have to do what we know is bad to get the job done. For example, if you have to deal with clueless ISPs who cannot figure out how to use BGP communities, you might be forced to use the Big Hammer of disaggregated prefixes. You can practice how that works in the next BGP lab exercise.
Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to policy/b-disaggregate and execute netlab up.
TL009: Shifting to a Growth Mindset for Organizational Success
A growth mindset not only advances you, but can help to advance those around you. Today we delve into the concept of a growth mindset with guest Sasha Czarkowski. We contrast the growth mindset with a fixed mindset, highlighting the latter’s detrimental effects on creativity and learning. The discussion also highlights the importance of psychological... Read more »N4N006: Packet Analysis Basics
Packet analysis can be your friend for troubleshooting network problems. In this episode, hosts Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky explore packet analysis, They discuss tools such as Wireshark and Tcpdump, explain their functionalities, and talk about the importance of filtering data for effective analysis. Listeners are encouraged to engage with Wireshark and other tools themselves.... Read more »Video: Internet Routing Security (DEEP 2023)
My Internet Routing Security talk from last year’s DEEP conference (a shorter version of the Internet Routing Security webinar) is now available on YouTube.
Hope you’ll find it useful ;)
D2DO260: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: Humor and Threat Detection
Humor is the best medicine, so they say. In critical IT security jobs, a little humor could help you prevent burnout and maintain your mental equilibrium. Lydia Graslie, a Cloud Threat Detection Engineer at Edward Jones, shares her insights on the complexities of cloud security and the challenges posed by modern cloud platforms, as well... Read more »Getting Started with Infrahub
If you're in the Network Automation space or attended one of the last two Autocon events, you might have come across a new tool called 'Infrahub' from OpsMill. I've been keeping an eye on it and experimenting with the product for some time now. In this blog post, we'll cover how to install Infrahub, what it is, and walk through a simple example to get you started. Let's dive in.
Infrahub Installation
Installing Infrahub is straightforward if you're familiar with Docker and have it installed. For this example, I'm using an Ubuntu 22.04 server with Docker and Docker Compose already set up. Here's all I had to do.
- Clone the Infrahub repository
- Run a single docker command to bring up the services
suresh@infrahub:~$ git clone https://github.com/opsmill/infrahub.git
Cloning into 'infrahub'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 95389, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5707/5707), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2801/2801), done.
remote: Total 95389 (delta 3698), reused 4482 (delta 2877), pack-reused 89682
Receiving objects: 100% (95389/95389), 136.18 MiB | 40.26 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (69451/69451), done.suresh@infrahub:~$ cd infrahub/
suresh@infrahub:~/infrahub$ docker-compose up -d[+] Running 70/7
✔ message-queue 10 layers [⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿] 0B/0B Pulled
✔ task-manager 13 layers Continue readingPP043: The Perils and Perks of the CISO Track
A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) helps to architect and drive an organization’s security strategy. The role requires technical chops and business acumen. You also need strong communication skills to help executives understand risk and response, choose the right metrics to measure infosec effectiveness, and provide guidance to the technical teams actually running security operations.... Read more »HW042: The Past, Present, and Future of MetaGeek
In this episode of the Heavy Wireless podcast, host Keith Parsons interviews Brian Tuttle, co-founder of MetaGeek. Brian recounts the company’s origins, starting with the development of the WiSpy spectrum analyzer, and highlights key products like inSSIDer and Chanalyzer. The discussion covers MetaGeek’s mission to visualize wireless landscapes, the impact of their tools on network... Read more »Robotcop: enforcing your robots.txt policies and stopping bots before they reach your website
Cloudflare’s AI Audit dashboard allows you to easily understand how AI companies and services access your content. AI Audit gives a summary of request counts broken out by bot, detailed path summaries for more granular insights, and the ability to filter by categories like AI Search or AI Crawler.
Today, we're going one step further. You can now quickly see which AI services are honoring your robots.txt policies, which aren’t, and then programmatically enforce these policies.
Robots.txt is a plain text file hosted on your domain that implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard that has been around since 1994. This file tells crawlers like Google, Bing, and many others which parts of your site, if any, they are allowed to access.
There are many reasons why site owners would want to define which portions of their websites crawlers are allowed to access: they might not want certain content available on search engines or social networks, they might trust one platform more than another, or they might simply want to reduce automated traffic to their servers.
With the advent of generative AI, AI services have started crawling the Internet to Continue reading
IBGP Source Interface Selection Still Requires Configuration
A fellow networking engineer recently remarked, “FRRouting automatically selects the correct [IBGP] source interface even when not configured explicitly.”
TL&DR: No, it does not. You were just lucky.
Basics first1. BGP runs over TCP sessions. One of the first things a router does when establishing a BGP session with a configured neighbor is to open a TCP session with the configured neighbor’s IP address.
Tech Bytes: Protecting OT/IoT Devices With FortiLink NAC (Sponsored)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Fortinet, we talk about IoT and OT risks and how to mitigate them. One option from Fortinet is FortiLink NAC, a free feature that can help you segment and protect IoT and OT devices and can even help deploy virtual patches. Another option is FortiNAC, a full-bore... Read more »NB507: Arista Announces Stackable Switches; FBI Recommends Encrypted Messaging
Take a Network Break! This week we warn of significant vulnerabilities in WhatsUp Gold and Cisco NX-OS. We also discuss US federal reaction to the penetration of US telco networks by Chinese state actors. These reactions include network and visibility hardening guidelines from CISA, the FBI (reluctantly) recommending the use of encrypted messaging apps, and... Read more »From ChatGPT to Temu: ranking top Internet services in 2024
Since the late 1990s, millions have relied on the Internet for searching, communicating, shopping, and working, though 2.6 billion people (about 31% of the global population) still lack Internet access. Over the years, use of the Internet has evolved from email and static sites to social media, streaming, e-commerce, cloud tools, and more recently AI chatbots, reflecting its constant adaptation to users' needs. This post explores how people interacted online in 2024, based on Cloudflare’s observations and a review of the year’s DNS trends.
Building on similar reports we’ve done over the past several years, we have compiled a ranking of the top Internet properties of 2024, with the same categories included in 2023, including Generative AI. In addition to our overall ranking, we chose 9 categories to focus on:
As we have done since 2022, our analysis uses anonymized DNS query data from our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, used by millions globally. We aggregate domains for each service (e.g., twitter.com, t.co, and x.com for X) and identify the sites that Continue reading
Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review
The 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is our fifth annual review of Internet trends and patterns observed throughout the year at both a global and country/region level across a variety of metrics. In this year’s review, we have added several new traffic, adoption, connectivity, and email security metrics, as well as the ability to do year-over-year and geographic comparisons for selected metrics.
Below, we present a summary of key findings, and then explore them in more detail in subsequent sections.
Global Internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024. 🔗
Google maintained its position as the most popular Internet service overall. OpenAI remained at the top of the Generative AI category. Binance remained at the top of the Cryptocurrency category. WhatsApp remained the top Messaging platform, and Facebook remained the top Social Media site. 🔗
Global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, in line with last year’s growth rate. After initiating service in Malawi in July 2023, Starlink traffic from that country grew 38x in 2024. As Starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. 🔗
Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, was responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Continue reading
Netlab Is Four Years Old
On December 9th, 2020, I created a new GitHub repository and pushed the first commit of my “I hate creating Vagrantfiles by hand” tool. It could create Vagrantfile and Ansible inventory from a (very rudimentary) network topology and deploy handcrafted device configurations on Cisco IOS and Arista EOS.