HS102: IT’s Role In AI (Sponsored)
AI can impact an enterprise in several ways: making individuals more productive, making products and services more effective, and making it easier for customers and partners to do business. IT plays a critical role in enabling AI to have these impacts. On today’s sponsored Heavy Strategy, Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn explains how to locate AI use... Read more »
HW051: How Wi-Fi Devices Handle Roaming On 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz Bands
Today on Heavy Wireless we welcome Jerry Olla to give us details from his talk “Roaming Wars: How Wi-Fi Devices Handle 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz”. Jerry tested the roaming behavior of popular Wi-Fi clients across 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz. He explains his testing protocol and results, and answers questions such as whether tri-band... Read more »Jevons Paradox and Internet Centrality
William Stanley Jevons was one of the founders of neoclassical economics in the mid-nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the great railway mania of the mid 19th century he observed that the total consumption of coal had actually increased when technological progress improved the efficiency of steam engines. Jevons Paradox observes that that improvements in efficiency of resource utilisation can act as a positive incentive to increased resource consumption, exceeding the reductions that would be anticipated due to this greater efficiency. How does this relate to the Internet and the current issues relating to Internet Centrality?Breaking APIs or Data Models Is a Cardinal Sin
Imagine you decide to believe the marketing story of your preferred networking vendor and start using the REST API to configure their devices. That probably involves some investment in automation or orchestration tools, as nobody in their right mind wants to use curl or Postman to configure network devices.
A few months later, after your toolchain has been thoroughly tested, you decide to upgrade the operating system on the network devices, and everything breaks. The root cause: the vendor changed their API or the data model between software releases.
If NSF Snoozes, Then TACC’s “Horizon” Supercomputer Loses
It is a tumultuous time for any agency in the US government or any company or organization that depends on the US government for a sizable portion of its funding or revenue. …
If NSF Snoozes, Then TACC’s “Horizon” Supercomputer Loses was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
NB524: Forward Networks Adds Endpoint Discovery; Intel Forecasts Q2 Layoffs
Take a Network Break! We start with a Red Alert for SAP NetWeaver’s Visual Composer Metadata Uploader, and then dive into a new endpoint discovery feature from Forward Networks, and Ericsson adding clientless ZTNA to its SASE offering. Aviatrix adds a Secure NAT Gateway for Microsoft Azure as a way to help Azure customers navigate... Read more »ChatGPT on OSPF Area Ranges and Summary LSAs
I wanted to test a loop prevention when propagating summary LSA across areas scenario (more about that in another blog post) using the lab topology I developed for the When OSPF Becomes a Distance Vector Protocol article.
I started the lab with the FRRouting routers and configured OSPF area ranges. Astonishingly, I discovered that the more-specific prefixes from an area appear as summary routes in the backbone area even when the area range is configured. When I tried to reproduce the scenario a few days later, it turned out to be a timing quirk (I didn’t wait long enough), but my squirrelly mind was already investigating.
Boat Monitoring System
As I travel further north on the canals the mobile signal coverage is gradually getting worse so I decided to build a monitoring solutions to help with deciding where to moor. My initial idea was to use an Intel NUC or RaspberryPi with a 12v PSU, but then a friend told me about how he was monitoring his home lab using kubernetes on an old android phone, it sounded like the perfect solution.
Targeted by 20.5 million DDoS attacks, up 358% year-over-year: Cloudflare’s 2025 Q1 DDoS Threat Report
Welcome to the 21st edition of the Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report. Published quarterly, this report offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network. In this edition, we focus on the first quarter of 2025. To view previous reports, visit www.ddosreport.com.
While this report primarily focuses on 2025 Q1, it also includes late-breaking data from a hyper-volumetric DDoS campaign observed in April 2025, featuring some of the largest attacks ever publicly disclosed. In a historic surge of activity, we blocked the most intense packet rate attack on record, peaking at 4.8 billion packets per second (Bpps), 52% higher than the previous benchmark, and separately defended against a massive 6.5 terabits-per-second (Tbps) flood, matching the highest bandwidth attacks ever reported.
In the first quarter of 2025, Cloudflare blocked 20.5 million DDoS attacks. That represents a 358% year-over-year (YoY) increase and a 198% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) increase.
Around one third of those, 6.6 million, targeted the Cloudflare network infrastructure directly, as part of an 18-day multi-vector attack campaign.
Furthermore, in the first quarter of 2025, Cloudflare blocked approximately Continue reading
How the April 28, 2025, power outage in Portugal and Spain impacted Internet traffic and connectivity
A massive power outage struck significant portions of Portugal and Spain at 10:34 UTC on April 28, grinding transportation to a halt, shutting retail businesses, and otherwise disrupting everyday activities and services. Parts of France were also reportedly impacted by the power outage. Portugal’s electrical grid operator blamed the outage on a "fault in the Spanish electricity grid”, and later stated that "due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kilovolts), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'" and that "These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network." However, the operator later denied these claims.
The breadth of Cloudflare’s network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the Internet impact of this power outage at both a local and national level, as well as at a network level, across traffic, network quality, and routing metrics.
In Portugal, Internet traffic dropped as the power grid failed, with traffic immediately dropping by half as compared to the Continue reading
Backend Network Topologies for AI Fabrics
Although there are best practices for AI Fabric backend networks, such as Data Center Quantized Congestion Control (DCQCN) for congestion avoidance, rail-optimized routed Clos fabrics, and Layer 2 Rail-Only topologies for small-scale implementations, each vendor offers its own validated design. This approach is beneficial because validated designs are thoroughly tested, and when you build your system based on the vendor’s recommendations, you receive full vendor support and avoid having to reinvent the wheel.
However, instead of focusing on any specific vendor’s design, this chapter explains general design principles for building a resilient, non-blocking, and lossless Ethernet backend network for AI workloads.
Before diving into backend network design, this chapter first provides a high-level overview of a GPU server based on NVIDIA H100 GPUs. The first section introduces a shared NIC architecture, where 8 GPUs share two NICs. The second section covers an architecture where each of the 8 GPUs has a dedicated NIC.
Shared NIC
Figure 13-1 illustrates a shared NIC approach. In this example setup, NVIDIA H100 GPUs 0–3 are connected to NVSwitch chips 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, and 1-4 on baseboard-1, while GPUs 4–7 are connected to NVSwitch chips 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, and 2-4 on baseboard-2. Each GPU connects Continue reading
GPT PROMPT AND IDEAS FOR NETWORK ENGINEERS Along with some function calling with gemini
LLM is a technology which needs no introduction.
LLMs + Networking = Awesome! 
Just dropped a playlist with the 9 key prompting bits that’ll help you organize and understand your network stuff way better. You know what to do!
One of the most important aspect is function calling where you can use the power of structured data and calling a specific tool to help you get the information in a right format. Let me know your thoughts.
TNO026: Gain Confidence in AI for NetOps with Juniper Networks (Sponsored)
Confidence in a new technology is one of the greatest barriers to adoption of that technology. If you don’t believe it will improve your NetOps, why would you adopt it? This is especially true of AI products. On today’s show, we’re joined by Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer of Mist/Juniper to make the case for... Read more »“No Quick Fixes” As Intel Losses And Restructurings Continue
Intel’s new chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, has his work cut out for him, just like his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, did several years ago. …
“No Quick Fixes” As Intel Losses And Restructurings Continue was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
HN778: Understanding Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Selector (Sponsored)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a very new protocol that provides a standard way to link AI models to a variety of data sources and tools. As the industry heads toward agentic AI–in which an AI agent interacts with disparate applications, data sources, and other agents to achieve a task–MCP provides the protocol glue. On... Read more »Hedge 267: Can modularization solve people problems?
Solving technology problems often involves breaking a problem into multiple smaller problems, build interaction surfaces between the pieces, and glue the pieces back into a larger system. We also know every technology problem is actually a people problem–whether in the past, the present, or the future.
Given these two points, can we say something like: “If technology and people problems are interchangeable, we should be able to solve people problems the way we solve technology problems–via modularization?”
Join us as Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss how this might–or might not–apply to the real world. The second trend we’re discussing on this episode of the Hedge is the apparent movement towards government telling data center operators to “bring your own power.”
Switching, Routing, and Bridging Terminology
After discussing networking layers and addressing, it’s time to focus on moving packets across a network. Vendors love to use ill-defined terms like switching instead of forwarding, routing, or bridging, so let’s start with the terminology.
Connecting all relevant devices to a single cable would indubitably simplify any networking stack, but unfortunately, we’re almost never that lucky. We need devices in the network (typically with multiple interfaces) that perform packet forwarding between end nodes.