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Asking The Right Question About The Wireless Future

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a piece about how Wi-Fi 6E isn’t going to move the needle very much in terms of connectivity. I stand by my convictions that the technology is just too new and doesn’t provide a great impetus to force users to upgrade or augment systems that are already deployed. Thankfully, someone at the recent Mobility Field Day 10 went and did a great job of summarizing some of my objections in a much simpler way. Thanks to Nick Swiatecki for this amazing presentation:

He captured so many of my hesitations as he discussed the future of wireless connectivity. And he managed to expand on them perfectly!

New Isn’t Automatically Better

Any time I see someone telling me that Wi-Fi 7 is right around the corner and that we need to see what it brings I can’t help but laugh. There may be devices that have support for it right now, but as Nick points out in the above video, that’s only one part of the puzzle. We still have to wait for the clients and the regulatory bodies to catch up to the infrastructure technology. Could you imagine if we did the same Continue reading

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Can a Router Use the Default Route to Reach BGP Next Hops?

TL&DR: Yes.

Starting with RFC 4271, Route Resolvability Condition:

• A route without an outgoing interface is resolvable if its next hop is resolvable without recursively using the same route.
• A route with an outgoing interface is always considered resolvable.
• BGP routes can be resolved through routes with just a next hop or an outgoing interface.

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Can a Router Use the Default Route to Reach BGP Next Hops?

TL&DR: Yes.

Starting with RFC 4271, Route Resolvability Condition:

• A route without an outgoing interface is resolvable if its next hop is resolvable without recursively using the same route.
• A route with an outgoing interface is always considered resolvable.
• BGP routes can be resolved through routes with just a next hop or an outgoing interface.

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Weekly Roundup: NVIDIA Addresses AI Infrastructure Issues

NVIDIA announcements this week, like other industry efforts this year, aim to speed up Ethernet networking in an AI infrastructure.

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Worth Reading: Network Automation with GitHub Actions

George Davitiani put together a lovely proof-of-concept using GitHub actions to deploy modified configurations to network devices. Even better, he documented the whole setup, and the way to reproduce it. I’m positive you’ll find a few ideas browsing through what he did.

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Worth Reading: Network Automation with GitHub Actions

George Davitiani put together a lovely proof-of-concept using GitHub actions to deploy modified configurations to network devices. Even better, he documented the whole setup, and the way to reproduce it. I’m positive you’ll find a few ideas browsing through what he did.

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Worth Reading: Going CCNP Emeritus

Daniel Teycheney decided not to renew his CCNP status and used this opportunity to publish his thoughts on IT certifications. Not surprisingly, I agree with most of the things he said, but I never put it in writing so succinctly.

Red Pill Warning: Reading his blog post might damage your rosy view of the networking industry. You’ve been warned ;)

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Worth Reading: Going CCNP Emeritus

Daniel Teycheney decided not to renew his CCNP status and used this opportunity to publish his thoughts on IT certifications. Not surprisingly, I agree with most of the things he said, but I never put it in writing so succinctly.

Red Pill Warning: Reading his blog post might damage your rosy view of the networking industry. You’ve been warned ;)

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Do hackers eat turkey? And other Thanksgiving Internet trends

Thanksgiving is a tradition celebrated by millions of Americans across six time zones and 50 states, usually involving travel and bringing families together. This year, it was celebrated yesterday, on November 23, 2023. With the Internet so deeply enmeshed into our daily lives, anything that changes how so many people behave is going to also have an impact on online traffic. But how big an impact, exactly?

At a high level: a 10% daily decrease in Internet traffic in the US (compared to the previous week). That happens to be the exact same percentage decrease we observed in 2022. So, Thanksgiving in the US, at least in the realm of Internet traffic, seems consistent with last year.

Let’s dig into more details about how people deal with cooking (or online ordering!) and whether family gatherings are less online, according to our Cloudflare Radar data. We’ll also touch on whether hackers stop for turkey, too.

The Thanksgiving hour: around 15:00 (local time)

While we can see a 10% overall daily drop in US traffic due to Thanksgiving, the drop is even more noticeable when examining traffic on an hour-by-hour basis. Internet activity began to decrease significantly after 12:00 EST, persisting Continue reading

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Video: Language Models in AI/ML Landscape

In September 2023, Javier Antich extended the AI/ML in Networking webinar with a new section describing large language models (LLMs), starting with how do the LLMs fit into the AI/ML landscape?

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Video: Language Models in AI/ML Landscape

In September 2023, Javier Antich extended the AI/ML in Networking webinar with a new section describing large language models (LLMs), starting with how do the LLMs fit into the AI/ML landscape?

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Candy Alexander Explains Why Bandwidth and Security are Both in High Demand

Learn why today’s changes in the way businesses operate require the use of new, secure, high-bandwidth connectivity options.

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RustRadio improved API 0.4

Since last time, I’ve improved the API a bit. That last post was about API version 0.3. Now it’s on 0.4, and I think it’s getting pretty decent.

0.3 could never have worked very well. The API was VecDeque-based, which means it could not provide a linear view (a slice) of all the data in the buffer.

The 0.4 API is simpler. You get a typed slice, and you read or write to, it as appropriate. Because all streams are currently single writer, single reader, the code is simple, and requires minimal amount of locking.

It’s simpler, but I switched to using memory mapped circular buffers, with a slice as the stream interface. This means that the buffer is allocated only once, yet both reader and writer can use all space available to them, linearly, without having to worry about wrapping around.

The code is still at https://github.com/ThomasHabets/rustradio. I registered the github org rustyradio, too. rustradio was taken. I sent a message to the owner, since it seems to not have any real content, but have not heard back.

Unsafe code

To make this multiuser stream I did have to write some Continue reading

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Network Courses and Certifications to Consider for 2024

There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.

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Workers AI Update: Stable Diffusion, Code Llama + Workers AI in 100 cities

Thanksgiving might be a US holiday (and one of our favorites — we have many things to be thankful for!). Many people get excited about the food or deals, but for me as a developer, it’s also always been a nice quiet holiday to hack around and play with new tech. So in that spirit, we're thrilled to announce that Stable Diffusion and Code Llama are now available as part of Workers AI, running in over 100 cities across Cloudflare’s global network.

As many AI fans are aware, Stable Diffusion is the groundbreaking image-generation model that can conjure images based on text input. Code Llama is a powerful language model optimized for generating programming code.

For more of the fun details, read on, or head over to the developer docs to get started!

Generating images with Stable Diffusion

Stability AI launched Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL) this past summer. You can read more about it here, but we’ll briefly mention some really cool aspects.

First off, “Distinct images can be prompted without having any particular ‘feel’ imparted by the model, ensuring absolute freedom of Continue reading

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BGP Labs: AS-Path Prepending

In the previous lab, you learned how to use BGP Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) to influence incoming traffic flow. Unfortunately, MED works only with parallel links to the same network. In a typical Redundant Internet Connectivity scenario, you want to have links to two ISPs, so you need a bigger hammer: AS Path Prepending.

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BGP Labs: AS-Path Prepending

In the previous lab, you learned how to use BGP Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) to influence incoming traffic flow. Unfortunately, MED works only with parallel links to the same network. In a typical Redundant Internet Connectivity scenario, you want to have links to two ISPs, so you need a bigger hammer: AS Path Prepending.

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A Bright Forecast for Single-Vendor SASE Solutions. What’s Fueling Their Emergence?

The continued rise of single-vendor SASE offerings promises benefits to businesses. What are the pros and cons of the security architecture option?

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Nvidia Proves The Enormous Potential For Generative AI

The exorbitant cost of GPU-accelerated systems for training and inference and latest to rush to find gold in mountains of corporate data are combining to exert tectonic forces on the datacenter landscape and push up a new Himalaya range – with Nvidia as its steepest and highest peak. …

The post Nvidia Proves The Enormous Potential For Generative AI first appeared on The Next Platform.

Nvidia Proves The Enormous Potential For Generative AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Cisco Intent-Based Networking: Part II – Cisco ISE and Catalyst Center Migration

Cisco Identity Service Engine (ISE) and Catalyst Center Integration

Before you can add Cisco ISE to Catalyst Center’s global network settings as an Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting server (AAA) for clients and manage the Group-Based access policy implemented in Cisco ISE, you must integrate them. 

This post starts by explaining how to activate the pxGrid service on ISE, which it uses for pushing policy changes to Catalyst Center (steps 1a-f). Next, it illustrates the procedure to enable  External RESTful API (ERS) read/write on Cisco ISE to allow external clients to Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) processes on ISE. Catalyst Center uses ERS for pushing configuration to ISE. After starting the pxGrid service and enabling ERS, this post discusses how to initiate the connection between ISE and Catalyst Center (steps 2a-h and 3a-b). The last part depicts the Group-Based Access Control migration processes (4a-b).

Step-1: Start pxGrid Service and Enabling ERS on ISE

Open the Administrator tab on the main view of Cisco ISE. Then, under the System tab, select the Deployment option. The Deployment Nodes section displays the Cisco ISE Node along with its personas. In Figure 1-3, a standalone ISE Node is comprised of three personas: Policy Continue reading