QO100 early success
I have heard and been heard via QO-100! As a licensed radio amateur have sent signals via satellite as far away as Brazil.
What it is
QO-100 is the first geostationary satellite with an amateur radio payload. A “repeater”, if you will. Geostationary means that you just aim your antenna (dish) once, and you can use it forever.
This is amazing for tweaking and experimenting. Other amateur radio satellites are only visible in the sky for minutes at a time, and you have to chase them across the sky to make a contact before it’s gone.
They also fly lower, meaning they can only see a small part of the world at a time. QO-100 can at all times see and be seen by all of Africa, Europe, India, and parts of Brazil.
Needs a bit more equipment, though
Other “birds” (satellites) can be accessed using a normal handheld FM radio and something like an arrow antenna. Well, you should actually have two radios, so that you can hear yourself on the downlink while transmitting.
There are also linear amateur radio satellites. For them you need SSB radios, which narrows down which radios you can use. And you still need Continue reading
AI network performance monitoring using containerlab
The screen capture is from a containerlab topology that emulates a AI compute cluster connected by a leaf and spine network. The metrics include:
- Total Traffic Total traffic entering fabric
- Operations Total RoCEv2 operations broken out by type
- Core Link Traffic Histogram of load on fabric links
- Edge Link Traffic Histogram of load on access ports
- RDMA Operations Total RDMA operations
- RDMA Bytes Average RDMA operation size
- Credits Average number of credits in RoCEv2 acknowledgements
- Period Detected period of compute / exchange activity on fabric (in this case just over 0.5 seconds)
- Congestion Total ECN / CNP congestion messages
- Errors Total ingress / egress errors
- Discards Total ingress / egress discards
- Drop Reasons Packet drop reasons
Note: Clicking on peaks in the charts shows values at that time.
This article gives step-by-step instructions to run the demonstration.
git clone https://github.com/sflow-rt/containerlab.gitDownload the sflow-rt/containerlab project from GitHub.
git clone https://github.com/sflow-rt/containerlab.git cd containerlab ./run-clabRun the above commands Continue reading
Laser-Based Compute Promises To Light The Way To Faster Physics Sims
While the world continues to fixate on AI, there are still plenty of high performance computing workloads that need doing and a speedup to any one part can have a big impact, whether it be computational fluid dynamics, material analysis, or something else. …
Laser-Based Compute Promises To Light The Way To Faster Physics Sims was written by Tobias Mann at The Next Platform.
Hedge 271: AI and Creativity
AI chatbots and image creators are all the rage right now–we are using them for everything from coding to writing books to creating short movies. One question we do not ask often enough, though, is how this impact human creators. How will these tools shape creativity and thinking skills?
HN785: How To Take Your First Steps Into Network Automation
There’s an old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. On today’s show, we talk about taking your first step into network automation with guest Joseph Nicholson. He’s been automating at NTT Data for many years now and has some perspective to share. He’s a network engineer by trade,... Read more »Finding Source Routing Paths
In the previous blog post, we discussed the generic steps that network devices (or a centralized controller) must take to discover paths across a network. Today, we’ll see how these principles are applied in source routing, one of the three main ways to move packets across a network.
Brief recap: In source routing, the sender has to specify the (loose or strict) path a packet should take across the network. The sender thus needs a mechanism to determine that path, and as always, there are numerous solutions to this challenge. We’ll explore a few of them, using the sample topology shown in the following diagram.
Cloudflare service outage June 12, 2025
On June 12, 2025, Cloudflare suffered a significant service outage that affected a large set of our critical services, including Workers KV, WARP, Access, Gateway, Images, Stream, Workers AI, Turnstile and Challenges, AutoRAG, Zaraz, and parts of the Cloudflare Dashboard.
This outage lasted 2 hours and 28 minutes, and globally impacted all Cloudflare customers using the affected services. The cause of this outage was due to a failure in the underlying storage infrastructure used by our Workers KV service, which is a critical dependency for many Cloudflare products and relied upon for configuration, authentication and asset delivery across the affected services. Part of this infrastructure is backed by a third-party cloud provider, which experienced an outage today and directly impacted availability of our KV service.
We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them.
This was not the result of an attack or other security event. No data was lost as a result of this incident. Cloudflare Magic Transit and Magic WAN, DNS, cache, proxy, Continue reading
IPB177: Introducing the IPv6 Compatibility Checker
The Hexabuild team is providing a new community resource, an IPv6 compatibility checker, for those trying to figure out IPv6 network hardware and software compatibility. It’s currently in an alpha version. We talk about what inspired it, what it does, and possible future updates. We also want to get your feedback on whether this is... Read more »AMD Plots Interception Course With Nvidia GPU And System Roadmaps
To a certain extent, Nvidia and AMD are not really selling GPU compute capacity as much as they are reselling just enough HBM memory capacity and bandwidth to barely balance out the HBM memory they can get their hands on, thereby justifying the ever-embiggening amount of compute their GPU complexes get overstuffed with. …
AMD Plots Interception Course With Nvidia GPU And System Roadmaps was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
TNO032: Automation First: NetOps at Megaport
Today we chat with Megaport’s Mitchell Warden, Founding Engineer; and Alexis Bertholf, Global Technical Evangelist, to find out what NetOps is like at Megaport, a company that provides scalable internet connections for all types of organizations. We look at the origins of Megaport and how the company started with the intention of network automation from... Read more »It’s Been Three Years, So It’s Time For Another PCI-Express Speed Bump
PCI-SIG, the organization that oversees the roadmap for the critical PCI-Express peripheral attachment specification, is continuing to keep to its three-year drumbeat for releasing the next iteration of the interconnect spec and already has its sights on the one after that, expected to be released in 2028 and appear in devices in 2030 or so. …
It’s Been Three Years, So It’s Time For Another PCI-Express Speed Bump was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
N4N030: Network Shapes and Sizes
What shape is your network? In other words, what is its topology? On today’s episode, we discover the different types of network topologies and designs used in the enterprise, data center, and service provider networks. We cover leaf/spine, hub and spoke, point to point, mesh, and others. We also talk about how topologies affect traffic... Read more »Cisco’s Hyperscale And Cloud AI Push Will Give It Enterprise Clout
Much of the business that Cisco Systems and others have been doing in the AI infrastructure field since OpenAI lit the generative AI fuse with ChatGPT in November 2022 has been deploying hardware and software with the hyperscalers, a lucrative business that led company executives to promise to sell as much as $1 billion in back-end network technology by the end of its fiscal year and then to blow past that a quarter early. …
Cisco’s Hyperscale And Cloud AI Push Will Give It Enterprise Clout was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Powering All Ethernet AI Networking
Artificial Intelligence (AI), powered by accelerated processing units (XPUs) like GPUs and TPUs, is transforming industries. The network interconnecting these processors is crucial for efficient and successful AI deployments. AI workloads, involving intensive training and rapid inferencing, require very high bandwidth interconnects with low and consistent latency, and the highest reliability to maximize XPU utilization and reduce AI job completion time (JCT). A best-of-breed network with AI-specific optimizations is critical for delivering AI applications, with any JCT slowdown leading to revenue loss. Typical workloads have fewer, very high-bandwidth, low-entropy flows that run for extended periods, exchanging large messages synchronously, necessitating advanced lossless forwarding and specialized operational tools. They differ from cloud networking traffic as summarized below:
Celebrating 11 years of Project Galileo’s global impact
June 2025 marks the 11th anniversary of Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s initiative to provide free cybersecurity protection to vulnerable organizations working in the public interest around the world. From independent media and human rights groups to community activists, Project Galileo supports those often targeted for their essential work in human rights, civil society, and democracy building.
A lot has changed since we marked the 10th anniversary of Project Galileo. Yet, our commitment remains the same: help ensure that organizations doing critical work in human rights have access to the tools they need to stay online. We believe that organizations, no matter where they are in the world, deserve reliable, accessible protection to continue their important work without disruption.
For our 11th anniversary, we're excited to share several updates including:
An interactive Cloudflare Radar report providing insights into the cyber threats faced by at-risk public interest organizations protected under the project.
An expanded commitment to digital rights in the Asia-Pacific region with two new Project Galileo partners.
New stories from organizations protected by Project Galileo working on the frontlines of civil society, human rights, and journalism from around the world.
Tracking and reporting on cyberattacks with the Project Galileo Continue reading
ArubaCX Cannot Count When Dealing with VXLAN
This blog post describes yet another bizarre example of how reliable digital twins are, but don’t worry; they all work great in PowerPoint.
After “fixing” the integration tests to deal with ArubaCX’s notion of VXLAN VNI having 16 bits, the bridging test worked, but the IRB tests kept failing.
In the IRB test, the lab has two layer-3 switches. Each of them should be able to bridge within a VLAN/VXLAN segment and route across the segments.
Peeling The Covers Off Germany’s Exascale “Jupiter” Supercomputer
The newest of the exascale-class supercomputer to be profiled in the Top500 rankings in the June list is the long-awaited “Jupiter” system at Forschungszentrum Jülich facility in Germany. …
Peeling The Covers Off Germany’s Exascale “Jupiter” Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
D2DO275: WebAssembly – The Next Big Thing?
Is WebAssembly the next big thing? Here to help us understand what WebAssembly (WASM) is and what it can and can’t do is Michael Levan, a consultant and WASM trainer. He also dives deeper into WASM details such as hosting, security, monitoring, and the ever-present influence of AI. AdSpot: Spacelift Founded by the creator of... Read more »We shipped FinalizationRegistry in Workers: why you should never use it
We’ve recently added support for the FinalizationRegistry API in Cloudflare Workers. This API allows developers to request a callback when a JavaScript object is garbage-collected, a feature that can be particularly relevant for managing external resources, such as memory allocated by WebAssembly (Wasm). However, despite its availability, our general advice is: avoid using it directly in most scenarios.
Our decision to add FinalizationRegistry — while still cautioning against using it — opens up a bigger conversation: how memory management works when JavaScript and WebAssembly share the same runtime. This is becoming more common in high-performance web apps, and getting it wrong can lead to memory leaks, out-of-memory errors, and performance issues, especially in resource-constrained environments like Cloudflare Workers.
In this post, we’ll look at how JavaScript and Wasm handle memory differently, why that difference matters, and what FinalizationRegistry is actually useful for. We’ll also explain its limitations, particularly around timing and predictability, walk through why we decided to support it, and how we’ve made it safer to use. Finally, we’ll talk about how newer JavaScript language features offer a more reliable and structured approach to solving these problems.
JavaScript relies on automatic memory management through a Continue reading