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Category Archives for "Networking"

Hedge 261: The NTIA, Spectrum, and Broadband

In the United States, the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration manages spectrum and researches the current state of Internet connectivity for policy makers. Henning Schulzrinne joins Tom and Russ to discuss the role of the NTIA, spectrum management, and broadband management.
 
You can read the NTIA’s reports here.
 

 
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HN770: Deploying A Global Network in Minutes With Megaport (Sponsored)

In our conversation today with CTO Cameron Daniel of Megaport, we discuss their global WAN architecture, PoPs, use cases, the Megaport Cloud Router, and more. Megaport is our sponsor today. It’s accurate to describe Megaport as providing Network-as-a-Service. Megaport’s automated connectivity solutions enable rapid provisioning of circuits, contrasting sharply with traditional telcos. The discussion also... Read more »

Cloudflare’s 2024 Transparency Reports – now live with new data and a new format

Cloudflare’s 2024 Transparency Reports are now live — with new topics, new data points, and a new format. For over 10 years, Cloudflare has published transparency reports twice a year in order to provide information to our customers, policymakers, and the public about how we handle legal requests and abuse reports relating to the websites using our services. Such transparency reporting is now recognized as a best practice among companies offering online services, and has even been written into law with the European Union’s Digital Service Act (DSA).

While Cloudflare has been publishing transparency reports for a long time, this year we chose to revamp the report in light of new reporting obligations under the DSA, and our goal of making our reports both comprehensive and easy to understand. Before you dive into the reports, learn more about Cloudflare’s longstanding commitment to transparency reporting and the key updates we made in this year’s reports.

Cloudflare’s approach to transparency reporting

Cloudflare started issuing transparency reports early on, because we have long believed that transparency is essential to earning trust. In addition to sharing data about the number and nature of requests we receive, our transparency reports have provided a forum Continue reading

Lab as Code – Part1

I wrote a post a while back about how the world of labbing changed during my time in networking, this is a follow on to see what options I have in terms of ‘labbing as Code’. I want a way to declaratively deploy the initial lab setup (devices, links, addressing, remote access, etc) so that I can concentrate on the features I am actually trying to lab. My idea is to try and use existing tools rather than writing my own, the following repo has all the code and files I used as part of this blog.

Palo Alto Automated Scheduled Configuration Backup

Palo Alto Automated Scheduled Configuration Backup

I'm writing this in February 2025, and as far as I know, Palo Alto firewalls (not Panorama) don’t have a built-in mechanism for automatic configuration backups. Panorama, on the other hand, supports scheduled backups and allows you to send them to various locations like an SCP or FTP server. I’m not sure why this feature isn’t available on standalone firewalls, but in any case, let’s look at how you can use the API to periodically fetch the configuration from the Palo Alto firewall.

As always, if you find this post helpful, press the ‘clap’ button. It means a lot to me and helps me know you enjoy this type of content.

Trying to Automate Palo Alto Firewall Objects/Rules Cleanup
In this blog post, we will walk you through how to clean up Palo Alto Firewall Objects and Rules using a Python script. The script is designed to search for a
Palo Alto Automated Scheduled Configuration Backup

Overview

The Palo Alto KB article explains how to use the XML API with cURL to fetch the configuration and then use a cron job to run it periodically. This method works, but I want to make some tweaks to ensure we have Continue reading

TNO018: The Network Engineer’s Evolution: Thinking Like a Product Owner (Sponsored)

What does it mean for a network engineer to develop a product mindset? And what does a product mindset have to do with network automation? Guest Peter Sprygada connects these concepts in today’s episode of Total Network Operations, sponsored by Itential. Peter says that as an organization advances its network automation capabilities, the impetus shifts... Read more »

Some TXT about, and A PTR to, new DNS insights on Cloudflare Radar

No joke – Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver was launched on April Fool's Day in 2018. Over the last seven years, this highly performant and privacy-conscious service has grown to handle an average of 1.9 Trillion queries per day from approximately 250 locations (countries/regions) around the world. Aggregated analysis of this traffic provides us with unique insight into Internet activity that goes beyond simple Web traffic trends, and we currently use analysis of 1.1.1.1 data to power Radar's Domains page, as well as the Radar Domain Rankings.

In December 2022, Cloudflare joined the AS112 Project, which helps the Internet deal with misdirected DNS queries. In March 2023, we launched an AS112 statistics page on Radar, providing insight into traffic trends and query types for this misdirected traffic. Extending the basic analysis presented on that page, and building on the analysis of resolver data used for the Domains page, today we are excited to launch a dedicated DNS page on Cloudflare Radar to provide increased visibility into aggregate traffic and usage trends seen across 1.1.1.1 resolver traffic. In addition to looking at global, location, and autonomous system (ASN) traffic trends, Continue reading

Notes from OARC44

The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two or three times a year in a workshops format. The most recent workshop was held in Atlanta, in February 2025. Here are my thoughts on some of the material that was presented and discussed at this workshop where too much DNS is barely enough!

Rebuilding FRR with pim6d

Short post today.

Turns out that Debian, in its infinite wisdom, disables pim6d in frr. Here’s a short howto on how to build it fixed.

$ sudo apt build-dep frr
[…]
$ apt source frr
[…]
$ cd frr-8*
$ DEB_BUILD_PROFILES=pkg.frr.pim6d dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b
$ sudo dpkg -i ../frr_*.deb

Then you can enable pim6d in /etc/frr/daemons and restart frr.

Not that I managed to get IPv6 multicast routing to to work over wireguard interfaces anyway. Not sure what’s wrong. Though it didn’t fix it, here’s an interesting command that made stuff like ip -6 mroute look like it should work:

$ sudo smcroutectl  add LAN ff38:40:fd11:222:3333:44:0:1122 wg-foo

Keep AI interactions secure and risk-free with Guardrails in AI Gateway

The transition of AI from experimental to production is not without its challenges. Developers face the challenge of balancing rapid innovation with the need to protect users and meet strict regulatory requirements. To address this, we are introducing Guardrails in AI Gateway, designed to help you deploy AI safely and confidently. 

Why safety matters

LLMs are inherently non-deterministic, meaning outputs can be unpredictable. Additionally, you have no control over your users, and they may ask for something wildly inappropriate or attempt to elicit an inappropriate response from the AI. Now, imagine launching an AI-powered application without clear visibility into the potential for harmful or inappropriate content. Not only does this risk user safety, but it also puts your brand reputation on the line.

To address the unique security risks specific to AI applications, the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications was created. This is an industry-driven standard that identifies the most critical security vulnerabilities specifically affecting LLM-based and generative AI applications. It’s designed to educate developers, security professionals, and organizations on the unique risks of deploying and managing these systems.

The stakes are even higher with new regulations being introduced:

Making Cloudflare the best platform for building AI Agents

As engineers, we’re obsessed with efficiency and automating anything we find ourselves doing more than twice. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the happy path is always easy, but the second the inputs get complex, automation becomes really hard. This is because computers have traditionally required extremely specific instructions in order to execute.

The state of AI models available to us today has changed that. We now have access to computers that can reason, and make judgement calls in lieu of specifying every edge case under the sun.

That’s what AI agents are all about.

Today we’re excited to share a few announcements on how we’re making it even easier to build AI agents on Cloudflare, including:

  • agents-sdk — a new JavaScript framework for building AI agents

  • Updates to Workers AI: structured outputs, tool calling, and longer context windows for Workers AI, Cloudflare’s serverless inference engine

  • An update to the workers-ai-provider for the AI SDK

We truly believe that Cloudflare is the ideal platform for building Agents and AI applications (more on why below), and we’re constantly working to make it better — you can expect to see more announcements from us in this space in the future.

Continue reading

Stub Networks in Virtual Labs

The previous blog posts described how virtualization products create LAN segments and point-to-point links.

However, sometimes we need stub segments – segments connected to a single router or switch – because we don’t want to waste resources creating hosts attached to a network device, but would still prefer a more realistic mechanism than static routes to inject IP subnets into routing protocols.

NB515: Quantum Computing’s Future Looking More Certain; Arista Posts Record 2024 Revenues

Lots of good stuff in this week’s Network Break. Microsoft announces an 8-qubit quantum chip and declares that practical quantum computing is years, not decades, away. D-Wave says its quantum computers are now commercially available for research facilities, academic institutions, and governments. Apple rolls its own 5G modem into its iPhone 16e. Meta announces its... Read more »