This week's Network Break discusses NetBox Labs's $20 million funding round and why it spun itself out of NS1's IBM acquisition, Intel Foundry and Arm teaming up on SoC manufacturing, why Amazon sees headwinds for public cloud spending (and why the opportunity is still huge), how the juice-jacking threat got hyped, and more tech news.
The post Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs appeared first on Packet Pushers.
I already mentioned the introduction of VRF- and VLAN access links in netlab release 1.5.1. Let’s see how they can simplify your lab topologies.
I always tried to make lab topologies as concise as I could, sometimes cheating using JSON-in-YAML syntax. For example, the topology describing three routers running OSPF could be as simple as this:
module: [ ospf ]
nodes: [ r1, r2, r3 ]
links: [ r1-r2, r2-r3, r3-r1 ]
Let’s unravel that:
The BGP RFCs state that external BGP peers should insert their own AS into the AS PATH advertised to eBGP peers. Some peers strip their AS, generally for commercial gain. Juniper and Cisco have opposite default behaviors for handling this. Make sure you set bgp enforce-first-as
on Juniper routers. Caveats apply.
A few years ago I was looking at some traffic reporting anomalies. My IPFIX data said that traffic with next-hop AS <dodgy-AS> was around 3Gb. But my SNMP data showed that a PNI to that peer was doing 8-10Gb.
I first doubted my router, because I had issues with IPFIX in the past on that specific platform. I also wondered about sampling rates. I have high flow rates, and need to set the sampling to be more coarse. But it was a big anomaly.
Slicing & dicing the data different ways, and chatting to colleagues about it, we saw what was going on. IPFIX showed the right volumes when reporting on destination interface. But some prefixes received from the peer did not contain the peer’s AS. We still accepted them.
Huh? Isn’t it normal behavior, to insert your own AS into any prefixes you advertise to Continue reading
I mentioned in my last post that I would start updating practical use cases for generative AI. The first example use case is your project documentation. As software engineers, we spend days of our lives writing project docs. The reality is that people learn and consume data differently. Overly detailed docs may cause some people’s eyes to glaze over while ...
The post ChatGPT your Project Docs appeared first on NetworkStatic | Brent Salisbury's Blog.
I’ve been getting into RISC-V optimization recently. Partly because I got my SiFive VisionFive 2, and partly because unlike x86 the number of RISC-V instructions is so managable that I may actually have a chance at beating the compiler.
I’m optimizing the inner loops of GNURadio, or in other words the volk library. I’ve been getting up to a about a doubling of the speed compared to the compiled C code, depending on the function.
But it got me thinking how far I could tweak the compiler and its options, too.
Yes, I should have done this much sooner.
Many years ago now I built some data processing thing in C++, and thought it ran too slowly. Sure, I did a debug build, but how much slower could that be? Half speed? Nope. 20x slower.
Of course this time I never compared to a debug build, so don’t expect that kind of difference. Don’t expect that it’ll reach my hand optimized assembly either, imperfect as it may be.
This may look like a synthetic benchmark, in simplified C++:
complex volk_32fc_x2_dot_prod_32fc_generic(const vector<complex> &in1,
const vector<complex> &in2)
{
complex res;
for (unsigned int i = 0; i Continue reading
People keep telling me how well large language models like ChatGPT work for them, so now and then, I give it another try, most often resulting in another disappointment1. It might be that I suck at writing prompts2, or it could be that I have a knack for looking in the wrong places3.
This time4 I tried to “figure out5” why we need iSCSI checksums if we have iSCSI running over Ethernet which already has checksums. Enjoy the (ChatGPT) circular arguments and hallucinations with plenty of platitudes and no clear answer.
Bruce Davie continues documenting the tradeoffs we had to make in networking, this time with Was MPLS Traffic Engineering Worthwhile? I found this bit particularly familiar:
It wasn’t hard to make a theoretical argument that MPLS-TE could improve network performance and average link utilization, by moving traffic from congested links to uncongested ones. The hard part was proving that it would actually do a better job in practice than the more traditional methods such as using link weights and multipath routing to achieve the same ends.
This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure newsletter. You can subscribe and see all back issues here. Daniel Miessler says AI-powered chatbots will be the end of tech tutorial blogs. And at first glance, his argument seems sound. Prior to the rise of chatbots and digital assistants, […]
The post Will ChatGPT Make Tech Blogs Obsolete? appeared first on Packet Pushers.
On today’s Heavy Networking we get into IPv6 essentials for network engineers, including how to incorporate IPv6 support in upcoming projects, how IPv6 affects NAT and subnetting, what the heck Happy Eyeballs and nibble boundaries are, and why you should approach IPv6 with a mindset of abundance not scarcity.
The post Heavy Networking 674: IPv6 Essentials For Network Engineers – Think Abundance, Not Scarcity appeared first on Packet Pushers.
One of the true hidden gems of being a part of a big community is the ability to discuss ideas and see different perspectives. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy working at Tech Field Day and why I’m lamenting the death spiral of Twitter. My move to Mastodon is picking up steam and I’m slowly replicating the way that I consume content and interact there but it’s very much the same way I felt about Twitter thirteen years ago. There’s promise but it needs work.
As I thought about my journey with social media and discussed it with people in the community I realized that a large part of what has me so frustrated is the way in which my experience has been co-opted into a kind of performative mess. Social media is becoming less about idea exchange and more about broadcast.
When I first started out on Twitter I could post things that were interesting to me. I could craft the way I posted those short updates. Did I want to be factual and dry? Or should I be more humorous and snarky? I crafted my own voice as I shared with others. My Continue reading
The Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) exam was launched in 2007, but not many people know what the main objectives of the certification were at the time. Who better to enlighten us on some of the thought process and reasons behind the exam being created than one of the original development team? In this podcast, we are extremely humbled to be joined by networking industry legend, Russ White who spoke about his career, how he got into networking and some insights on the CCDE concept and how it came to fruition in the early 2000s!
One of the biggest advantages of IPv6, from a network administration perspective, is the ease of renumbering. While IPv4 networks can be renumbered using DHCP, the process of changing the address of every device on a network is always fraught with unexpected challenges. People (like me) have a habit of manually assigning printers and network attached storage devices a fixed address so they will be easy to find and use.