Daniel Dib wrote a nice article describing the history of the loopback interface1, triggering an inevitable mention of the role of a loopback interface in OSPF and related flood of ancient memories on my end.
Before going into the details, let’s get one fact straight: an OSPF router ID was always (at least from the days of OSPFv1 described in RFC 1133) just a 32-bit identifier, not an IPv4 address2. Straight from the RFC 1133:
Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank announced a $6.5 billion acquisition of Arm server CPU upstart Ampere Computing back in March, and that deal has not yet closed. …
“Polaris” AmpereOne M Arm CPUs Sighted In Oracle A4 Instances was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A while ago I wrote an article about linting Markdown files with markdownlint. In that article, I presented the use case of linting the Markdown source files for this site. While manually running linting checks is fine—there are times and situations when this is appropriate and necessary—this is the sort of task that is ideally suited for a Git pre-commit hook. In this post, I’ll discuss Git pre-commit hooks in the context of using them to run linting checks.
Before moving on, a disclaimer: I am not an expert on Git hooks. This post shares my limited experience and provides an example based on what I use for this site. I have no doubt that my current implementation will improve over time as my knowledge and experience grow.
As this page explains, a hook is a program “you can place in a hooks directory to trigger actions at certain points in git’s execution.” Generally, a hook is a script of some sort. Git supports different hooks that get invoked in response to specific actions in Git; in this particular instance, I’m focusing on the pre-commit hook. This hook gets invoked by git-commit (i.e. Continue reading
Today, I’ll focus on another feature of the new files plugin – you can use it to embed any (hopefully small) file in a lab topology (configlets are just a special case in which the plugin creates the relative file path from the configlets dictionary data).
You could use this functionality to include configuration files for Linux containers, custom reports, or even plugins in the lab topology, and share a complete solution as a single file that can be downloaded from a GitHub repository.
If Broadcom says that co-packaged optics is ready for prime time and can compete with other ways of linking switch ASICs to fiber optic cables, then it is very unlikely that Broadcom is wrong. …
The Third Time Will Be The Charm For Broadcom Switch Co-Packaged Optics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the basement of Connecticut’s Beneski Museum of Natural History sit the fossilized footprints of a small, chicken-sized dinosaur. …
How HPC Is Igniting Discoveries In Dinosaur Locomotion – And Beyond was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
We all know netops, NRE, and devops can increase productivity, increase Mean Time Between Mistakes (MTBM), and decrease MTTR–but how do we deploy and use these tools? We often think of the technical hurdles you face in their deployment, but most of the blockers are actually cultural. Chris Grundemann, Eyvonne, Russ, and Tom discuss the cultural issues with deploying netops on this episode of the Hedge.
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Modern applications are not monoliths. They are complex, distributed systems where availability depends on multiple independent components working in harmony. A web server might be running, but if its connection to the database is down or the authentication service is unresponsive, the application as a whole is unhealthy. Relying on a single health check is like knowing the “check engine” light is not on, but not knowing that one of your tires has a puncture. It’s great your engine is going, but you’re probably not driving far.
As applications grow in complexity, so does the definition of "healthy." We've heard from customers, big and small, that they need to validate multiple services to consider an endpoint ready to receive traffic. For example, they may need to confirm that an underlying API gateway is healthy and that a specific ‘/login’ service is responsive before routing users there. Until now, this required building custom, synthetic services to aggregate these checks, adding operational overhead and another potential point of failure.
Today, we are introducing Monitor Groups for Cloudflare Load Balancing. This feature provides a new way to create sophisticated, multi-service health assessments directly on our platform. With Monitor Groups, you can bundle Continue reading
Sometimes you want to assign IPv4/IPv6 subnets to transit links in your network (for example, to identify interfaces in traceroute outputs), but don’t need to have those subnets in the IP routing tables throughout the whole network. Like OSPF, IS-IS has a nerd knob you can use to exclude transit subnets from the router PDUs.
Want to check how that feature works with your favorite device? Use the Hide Transit Subnets in IS-IS Networks 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 feature/4-hide-transit and execute netlab up.
The world’s largest and one might argue most important chip foundry is telling Wall Street that its AI-related sales are running ahead of schedule. …
TSMC Is Running Ahead Of Forecasts On AI Growth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
[updated 25-Oct, 2025 - (RIs in the figure)]
In distributed AI workloads, each process requires memory regions that are visible to the fabric for efficient data transfer. The Job framework or application typically allocates these buffers in GPU VRAM to maximize throughput and enable low-latency direct memory access. These buffers store model parameters, gradients, neuron outputs, and temporary workspace, such as intermediate activations or partial gradients during collective operations in forward and backward passes.
Once memory is allocated, it must be registered with the fabric domain using fi_mr_reg(). Registration informs the NIC that the memory is pinned and accessible for data transfers initiated by endpoints. The fabric library associates the buffer with a Memory Region handle (fid_mr) and internally generates a remote protection key (fi_mr_key), which uniquely identifies the memory region within the Job and domain context.
The local endpoint binds the fid_mr using fi_mr_bind() to define permitted operations, FI_REMOTE_WRITE in figure 4-10. This allows the NIC to access local memory efficiently and perform zero-copy operations.
The application retrieves the memory key using fi_mr_key(fid_mr) and constructs a Resource Index (RI) entry. The RI entry serves as Continue reading
The web is the most powerful application platform in existence. As long as you have the right API, you can safely run anything you want in a browser.
Well… anything but cryptography.
It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful. The main problem is code distribution. Consider an end-to-end-encrypted messaging web application. The application generates cryptographic keys in the client’s browser that lets users view and send end-to-end encrypted messages to each other. If the application is compromised, what would stop the malicious actor from simply modifying their Javascript to exfiltrate messages?
It is interesting to note that smartphone apps don’t have this issue. This is because app stores do a lot of heavy lifting to provide security for the app ecosystem. Specifically, they provide integrity, ensuring that apps being delivered are not tampered with, consistency, ensuring all users get the same app, and transparency, ensuring that the record of versions of an app is truthful and publicly visible.
It would be nice if we could get these properties for our end-to-end encrypted web application, and the web as a whole, without requiring a single central authority like Continue reading