NB492: AMD Spends Big For Engineering Talent; FCC Cracks Down on AI-Faked Robocalls
Take a Network Break! A US appeals court will let a privacy lawsuit against Google go forward, striking telecom workers are a reminder to test your resiliency planning, and AMD spends nearly $5 billion to acquire systems engineering talent from ZT Systems. Juniper Networks offers deep discounts and other enticements to get network engineers to... Read more »Tech Bytes: Why It’s Time To Say Goodbye To NFS (Sponsored)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk cloud storage. More specifically, we dive into why it’s time for NFS to sail off into the sunset, particularly for cloud datasets. Our guest is Tom Lyon, an industry legend who has delivered a talk entitled “NFS Must Die.” We talk with Tom about the strengths and weaknesses of NFS, the... Read more »August Rule 11 Academy Update
I’ve been working on new material over at Rule 11 Academy. This month’s posts are:
- BGP Route Reflector Lab
- The Clos Fabric (history)
- The Default Free Zone
- Network Addresses
- BGP Policy Entrance Selection (2)
- Interview Rubric Sample
- BGP Policy Entrance Select (1)
- Interviewing Background
This brings us up to a total of 39 lessons. Each lesson should be about 15 minutes, so about 10 hours of material so far. The trial membership will take you through the end of the year. After the first of the year, the trial membership will last 2 months.
Repost: The Benefits of SRv6
I love bashing SRv6, so it’s only fair to post a (technical) counterview, this time coming as a comment from Henk Smit.
There are several benefits of SRv6 that I’ve heard of.
Network CI/CD Pipeline – What’s the Point?
Hi all, welcome to the 'Network CI/CD' blog series. To kick things off, let's ask the question, "Why do we even need a CI/CD pipeline for networks?" Instead of diving straight into technical definitions or showing you how to build a CI/CD pipeline, which might make you lose interest, we’ll focus on the reasons behind it. Why should network teams even consider implementing CI/CD?
In this post, we’ll talk about the benefits and the problems it solves, so you can see why it's worth learning. Let's get to it.
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Throughout this blog post, I’ll use a simple scenario of configuring VLANs. I chose VLANs because it’s something everyone is familiar with, and it’s easy to understand. I could have gone for something more complicated, like BGP or OSPF, but I don’t want to sidetrack our main focus - understanding Network CI/CD pipeline.
Making Network Changes - The Traditional Way
Even though I call it the “traditional way,” most of us (myself included) still make changes via the CLI. So, let’s imagine you and two colleagues are managing a campus network with 10 access switches. One of your tasks is to configure VLANs on all of Continue reading
Hedge 240: Build or Buy?
Many network operators think the idea of building rather than buying is something that’s out of reach–but is it? Join Steve Dodd, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ as we discuss the positive and negative aspects of build versus buy, what operators get wrong, and what operators don’t often expect.
TNO001: Your Team Matters as Much as Your Tech and Tools
Your team is just as important as your tech and tools in any environment, including NetOps. Garrett Nowak, Senior Director of Network Architecture at 11:11 Systems shares his journey from tier one help desk to a leadership role. He discusses the importance of teamwork, community, and effective leadership in network operations and how he works... Read more »Delegation And You
I once again loved this episode of the Art of Network Engineering featuring Mike Bushong. He is a very astute judge of character as well as how to apply social skills to your tech role. Definitely listen to the above episode if you’re interested in countering cognitive biases.
In the episode, he told a great story of how he had a pivotal career moment with one of his managers that led to some important introspection. I won’t tell his story but the summary is that he had taken on way too much work and way too many roles and he blew up at his manager because of the stress. She leveled him with a quote that rang true for me:
“No one knows everything you’re working on. They just see that the thing that’s important to them is late.”
That’s not the verbatim quote but that’s how I remember it. It’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about since the previous episode when he mentioned it the first time.
Load Bearing and Busting
The odds are good that we’re all doing way too many things right now. Whether it’s doing more work in our role or taking on way Continue reading
Exploring Internet and security trends during the 2024 U.S. Democratic National Convention
The 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) wrapped up on Thursday, August 22, in Chicago, Illinois. Since our blog post about Internet trends during the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on June 27, the presidential race has fundamentally changed. We experienced the attempted assassination of Trump, the Republican National Convention (RNC), Biden’s late July withdrawal from the race, and Vice President Kamala Harris being selected as the Democratic nominee and participating in her party’s convention this week. Here, we’ll examine trends more focused on DNS traffic to news and candidate-related sites, cyberattacks targeting politically-related organizations, and spam and malicious emails mentioning the candidates’ names.
Over 60 more national elections are scheduled to take place across the world this year, and we have been monitoring them as they occur. Our goal is to provide a neutral analysis of their impact on Internet behavior, which often mirrors human activities. Significant events, such as the total eclipse in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and the Paris 2024 Olympics, have had an impact on Internet traffic. Our ongoing election report on Cloudflare Radar includes updates from recent elections in the European Union, France, Continue reading
Using No-Export Community to Filter Transit Routes
The very first BGP Communities RFC included an interesting idea: let’s tag paths we don’t want to propagate to other autonomous systems. For example, the prefixes received from one upstream ISP should not be propagated to another upstream ISP (sadly, things don’t work that way in reality).
Want to try out that concept? Start the Using No-Export Community to Filter Transit Routes lab in GitHub Codespaces.
IPB158: “IPv6 Mostly”: A Strategy to Balance Legacy and Modern Networking Needs
The move from IPv4 to IPv6 is not straightforward. In a world where use cases for both protocols exist, there needs to be some sort of transition. Dual stack is one option but “IPv6 mostly” is another. On today’s show, guest Ondřej Caletka from RIPE NCC explores transitioning to an IPv6-centric network while retaining IPv4... Read more »Go wild: Wildcard support in Rules and a new open-source wildcard crate
Back in 2012, we introduced Page Rules, a pioneering feature that gave Cloudflare users unprecedented control over how their web traffic was managed. At the time, this was a significant leap forward, enabling users to define patterns for specific URLs and adjust Cloudflare features on a page-by-page basis. The ability to apply such precise configurations through a simple, user-friendly interface was a major advancement, establishing Page Rules as a cornerstone of our platform.
Page Rules allowed users to implement a variety of actions, including redirects, which automatically send visitors from one URL to another. Redirects are crucial for maintaining a seamless user experience on the Internet, whether it's guiding users from outdated links to new content or managing traffic during site migrations.
As the Internet has evolved, so too have the needs of our users. The demand for greater flexibility, higher performance, and more advanced capabilities led to the development of the Ruleset Engine, a powerful framework designed to handle complex rule evaluations with unmatched speed and precision.
In September 2022, we announced and released Single Redirects as a modern replacement for the URL Forwarding feature of Page Rules. Built on top of the Ruleset Engine, this Continue reading
Better IX network quality monitoring
Better IX network quality monitoring
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at the first NetUK. You can watch the talk on YouTube that was recorded by the wonderful AV team below if that’s your preferred medium:
Using Multiple Transit VNIs per EVPN VRF
After reading the Layer-3-Only EVPN: Behind the Scenes blog post, one might come to an obvious conclusion: the per-VRF EVPN transit VNI must match across all PE devices forwarding traffic for that VRF.
Interestingly, at least some EVPN implementations handle multiple VNIs per VRF without a hitch; I ran my tests in a lab where three switches used unique per-switch VNI for a common VRF.
The rest of this blog post describes Arista cEOS behavior; please feel free to use the same netlab topology to run similar tests on other devices.
D2DO249: The Anatomy of TLS 1.3 and Why You Should Risk It
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is today’s topic with guest Ed Harmoush. TLS plays a critical role in Internet security, and we dive into the differences between versions 1.2 and 1.3 In addition, Ed shares his journey into TLS, explains its components, and addresses common misconceptions about certificates and their validation processes. The episode also highlights... Read more »NAN071: Understanding the Infrastructure Requirements for AI Workloads (Sponsored)
On today’s Network Automation Nerds, we get into the infrastructure required to support AI workloads. We discuss key considerations including bandwidth, the substantial power and cooling requirements of AI infrastructure, and GPUs. We also talk about InfiniBand and Ethernet as network fabrics for AI workloads, cabling considerations, and more. This is a sponsored episode. Our... Read more »Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types?
In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports, I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:
- Ethernet II.
- 802.2 LLC.
- 802 SNAP.
Historically, there were even more than three, but we’re ignoring that for now. Why do we have three? To understand this, we need to go back in history.
The Origin of Ethernet
In the early 70’s, Robert Metcalfe, inspired by ARPANET and ALOHAnet had been working on developing what we today know as Ethernet. He published a paper in 1976, together with David Boggs, named Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks:
In the paper, they describe the addressing used in Ethernet:
3.3 Addressing
Each packet has a source and destination, both of which are identified in the packet’s header.
A packet placed on the Ether eventually propagates to all stations. Any station can copy a packet
from the Ether into its local memory, but normally only an active destination station matching ‘its
address in the packet’s header will do so as the packet passes. By convention, a Continue reading
Testing bgpipe with netlab
Ever since Pawel Foremski talked about BGP Pipe @ RIPE88 meeting, I wanted to kick its tires in netlab. BGP Pipe is a Go executable that runs under Linux (but also FreeBSD or MacOS), so I could add a Linux VM (or container) to a netlab topology and install the software after the lab has been started. However, I wanted to have the BGP neighbor configured on the other side of the link (on the device talking with the BGP Pipe daemon).
I could solve the problem in a few ways:
NIST’s first post-quantum standards
On August 13th, 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the first three cryptographic standards designed to resist an attack from quantum computers: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. This announcement marks a significant milestone for ensuring that today’s communications remain secure in a future world where large-scale quantum computers are a reality.
In this blog post, we briefly discuss the significance of NIST’s recent announcement, how we expect the ecosystem to evolve given these new standards, and the next steps we are taking. For a deeper dive, see our March 2024 blog post.
Why are quantum computers a threat?
Cryptography is a fundamental aspect of modern technology, securing everything from online communications to financial transactions. For instance, when visiting this blog, your web browser used cryptography to establish a secure communication channel to Cloudflare’s server to ensure that you’re really talking to Cloudflare (and not an impersonator), and that the conversation remains private from eavesdroppers.
Much of the cryptography in widespread use today is based on mathematical puzzles (like factoring very large numbers) which are computationally out of reach for classical (non-quantum) computers. We could likely continue to use traditional cryptography for decades to Continue reading