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 »

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.

How Long Before Broadcom Makes More AI Compute Engines Than Nvidia?

Chip maker and enterprise software player Broadcom announced its financial results for the final quarter of its fiscal 2024 today, which ended on November third, and all we kept thinking about as chief executive officer Hock Tan went over the numbers was the question in the title above.

How Long Before Broadcom Makes More AI Compute Engines Than Nvidia? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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 »

Getting Started with Infrahub

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.

  1. Clone the Infrahub repository
  2. 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 reading

PP043: 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. 

What is robots.txt?

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

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