Interface MAC Address in IOS Layer-2 Images

Here’s another “You can’t make this up, but it sounds too crazy to be true” story: Cisco IOS layer-2 images change the interface MAC address when you change the interface switchport status.

Let me start with a bit of background:

  • IOL Layer 2 image starts with interfaces enabled and in bridged (switchport) mode (details)
  • netlab has to run a normalize script (applicable to IOLL2, IOSv L2, and Arista EOS) before configuring anything else to ensure all interfaces are shut down.
  • The IOLL2 normalize Jinja template had a bug – when setting the interface MAC address, it checked l.mac_address instead of intf.mac_address. Nevertheless, everything worked because the MAC addresses were also set during the initial device configuration.
Read more …

NB560: Microsoft Doubles Down on Custom AI Chip; CrowdStrike Brandishes Big Bucks for Browser Security

Take a Network Break! We’ve got Red Alerts for HPE Juniper Session Smart Routers and SolarWinds. In this week’s news, Microsoft debuts its second-generation AI inferencing chip, Mplify rolls out a new Carrier Ethernet certification for supporting AI workloads, and AWS upgrades its network firewall to spot GenAI application traffic and filter Web categories. Google... Read more »

S3 is the new network: Rethinking data architecture for the cloud era

For decades, distributed databases have been built around the assumption that storage will live close to compute. The farther data travels over the network, the reasoning goes, the greater the potential for delay. Local RAID (redundant array of independent disks) arrays, network-attached storage (NAS), and cluster file systems keep data close, making it quick and easy to access. But in a distributed system, keeping the entire data store close to compute makes scaling slow, cumbersome, and expensive. Each time a node or cluster is replicated, its associated data must be replicated as well. It isn’t ideal, but until recently, there wasn’t any reasonable alternative. Databases had to scale. Service-level agreements (SLAs) had to be met. Wide-area networks weren’t reliable enough to support high-performance databases at scale. Database designers accordingly spent a great deal of energy solving problems related to coordination, consistency, and replication logic. But imagine things were different. What if they didn’t have to worry about the network, where their data lived, or how to get it from Point A to Point B? How would they design a database then? That’s the intriguing question raised by the advent of cloud object storage services like AWS S3, Google Cloud Continue reading

Fast FRR Container Configuration

After creating the infrastructure that generates the device configuration files within netlab (not in an Ansible playbook), it was time to try to apply it to something else, not just Linux containers. FRR containers were the obvious next target.

netlab uses two different mechanisms to configure FRR containers:

  • Data-plane features are configured with bash scripts using ip commands and friends.
  • Control-plane features are configured with FRR’s vtysh

I wanted to replace both with Linux scripts that could be started with the docker exec command.

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Ultra Ethernet: NSCC Destination Flow Control

Figure 6-14 depicts a demonstrative event where Rank 4 receives seven simultaneous flows (1). As these flows are processed by their respective PDCs and handed over to the Semantic Sublayer (2), the High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Controller becomes congested. Because HBM must arbitrate multiple fi_write RMA operations requiring concurrent memory bank access and state updates, the incoming packet rate quickly exceeds HBM’s transactional retirement rate. 

This causes internal buffers at the memory interface to fill, creating a local congestion event (3). To prevent buffer overflow, which would lead to dropped packets and expensive RMA retries, the receiver utilizes NSCC to move the queuing "pain" back to the source. This is achieved by using pds.rcv_cwnd_pend parameter of the ACK_CC header (4). The parameter operates on a scale of 0 to 127; while zero is ignored, a value of 127 triggers the maximum possible rate decrement. In this scenario, a value of 64 is utilized, resulting in a 50% penalty relative to the newly acknowledged data.

Rather than directly computing a new transport rate, the mechanism utilizes a three-phase process to define a restricted Congestion Window (CWND). This reduction in CWND inherently forces the source to drain its inflight bucket to Continue reading

Introducing the New Tigera & Calico Brand

Same community. A clearer, more unified look.

Today, we are excited to share a refresh of the Tigera and Calico visual identity!

This update better reflects who we are, who we serve, and where we are headed next.

If you have been part of the Calico community for a while, you know that change at Tigera is always driven by substance, not style alone. Since the early days of Project Calico, our focus has always been clear: Build powerful, scalable networking and security for Kubernetes, and do it in the open with the community.

Built for the Future, With the Community

Tigera was founded by the original Project Calico engineering team and remains deeply committed to maintaining Calico Open Source as the leading standard for container networking and network security.

“Tigera’s story began in 2016 with Project Calico, an open-source container networking and security project. Calico Open Source has since become the most widely adopted solution for containers and Kubernetes. We remain committed to maintaining Calico Open Source as the leading standard, while also delivering advanced capabilities through our commercial editions.”
—Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO, Tigera

A Visual Evolution

This refresh is an evolution, not a reinvention. You Continue reading

TNO054: AI Skills for CCIEs

Let’s talk about AI for NetOps: It’s not just coming, it’s here. There are tools to use, skills to acquire, and we want to talk about what’s needed for highly certified network engineers to skill up in AI. What certification opportunities or paths exist? What developments do we think we’re going to see here? And... Read more »

Google’s AI advantage: why crawler separation is the only path to a fair Internet

Earlier this week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened its consultation on a package of proposed conduct requirements for Google. The consultation invites comments on the proposed requirements before the CMA imposes any final measures. These new rules aim to address the lack of choice and transparency that publishers (broadly defined as “any party that makes content available on the web”) face over how Google uses search to fuel its generative AI services and features. These are the first consultations on conduct requirements launched under the digital markets competition regime in the UK. 

We welcome the CMA’s recognition that publishers need a fairer deal and believe the proposed rules are a step into the right direction. Publishers should be entitled to have access to tools that enable them to control the inclusion of their content in generative AI services, and AI companies should have a level playing field on which to compete. 

But we believe the CMA has not gone far enough and should do more to safeguard the UK’s creative sector and foster healthy competition in the market for generative and agentic AI. 

CMA designation of Google as having Strategic Market Status 

In January Continue reading

Building vertical microfrontends on Cloudflare’s platform

Updated at 6:55 a.m. PT

Today, we’re introducing a new Worker template for Vertical Microfrontends (VMFE). This template allows you to map multiple independent Cloudflare Workers to a single domain, enabling teams to work in complete silos — shipping marketing, docs, and dashboards independently — while presenting a single, seamless application to the user.

Most microfrontend architectures are "horizontal", meaning different parts of a single page are fetched from different services. Vertical microfrontends take a different approach by splitting the application by URL path. In this model, a team owning the `/blog` path doesn't just own a component; they own the entire vertical stack for that route – framework, library choice, CI/CD and more. Owning the entire stack of a path, or set of paths, allows teams to have true ownership of their work and ship with confidence.

Teams face problems as they grow, where different frameworks serve varying use cases. A marketing website could be better utilized with Astro, for example, while a dashboard might be better with React. Or say you have a monolithic code base where many teams ship as a collective. An update to add new features from several teams can get frustratingly rolled back because Continue reading

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