Responding to Readers: How are these thing discovered?
A while back I posted on section 10 routing loops; Daniel responded to the post with this comment:
I am curious how these things are discovered. You said that this is a contrived example, but I assume researchers have some sort of methodology to discover issues like this. I am sure some things have been found through operational mishap, but is there some “standardized” way of testing graph logic for the possibility of loops? I trust this is much easier to do today than even a decade ago.
You would think there would be some organized way to discover these kinds of routing loops, something every researcher and/or protocol designer might follow. The reality is far different—there is no systematic way that I know of to find this sort of problem. What happens, in real life, is that people with a lot of experience at the intersection of protocol design, the bounds of different ways of finding loop free paths (solving the loop free path problem), and a lot of experience in deploying and operating a network using these protocols, will figure these things out because they know enough about the solution space to look for them in the first Continue reading
Responding to Readers: Automated Design?
Deepak responded to my video on network commodization with a question:
What’s your thoughts on how Network Design itself can be Automated and validated. Also from Intent based Networking at some stage Network should re-look into itself and adjust to meet design goals or best practices or alternatively suggest the design itself in green field situation for example. APSTRA seems to be moving into this direction.
The answer to this question, as always, is—how many balloons fit in a bag? 
I think it depends on what you mean when you use the term design. If we are talking about the overlay, or traffic engineering, or even quality of service, I think we will see a rising trend towards using machine learning in network environments to help solve those problems. I am not convinced machine learning can solve these problems, in the sense of leaving humans out of the loop, but humans could set the parameters up, let the neural network learn the flows, and then let the machine adjust things over time. I tend to think this kind of work will be pretty narrow for a long time to come.
There will be stumbling blocks here that need to be Continue reading
History of Networking: The history of DNS with Paul Mockapetris
In this recording, Jordan, Donald, and I talk to Paul Mockapetris, who took on the problem of naming in the original Internet. Back when routers were called fuzzballs, and the only way to get to a destination was by referencing a host file…
Weekend Reads 011918: IoT, Cyberthreat Thinking, and Techlash
Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has given talks where he proposes that tech companies decrease their communications and device security for the benefit of the FBI. In a recent talk, his idea is that tech companies just save a copy of the Continue reading
On the ‘net: BGP Traffic Engineering at the Network Collective
Nick Russo and I stopped by the Network Collective last week to talk about BGP traffic engineering—and in the process I confused BGP deterministic MED and always compare MED. I’ve embedded the video below.
Cisco Live Barcelona 2018
I will be presenting at the CCDE Techtorial at Cisco Live in Barcelona on the 30th of January. This is a great opportunity to come out and learn about the Cisco Certified Design Expert from one of the best group of speakers around.
IETF 101
I will be at IETF 101 in London in March. If you have never been to an IETF before and live in the London area, this is a great chance to come see how the standardization process works, and even get involved for the long term.
