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SONiC Deep Dive: BGP Update Message Processing

 

BGP Route Advertisement

The next step after configuring BGP peering using BGP Unnumbered with IPv6 link-local addresses is to advertise the host networks. The lower part of Figure 6-10 shows the sonic-cli configuration commands used to advertise the local VLAN subnet on each leaf. On Leaf-101, we advertise 10.0.10.0/24, which is the subnet for VLAN 10. On Leaf-102, we advertise 10.0.20.0/24, which is the subnet for VLAN 20.

By examining the BGP Loc-RIB on Leaf-102, for example, we can see that the next hop for 10.0.10.0/24, originated on Leaf-101, is the IPv6 link-local address of Spine-11's Ethernet0 interface.

Figure 6-10: IPv4 Routes Installed in the BGP Loc-RIB Table.

Figure 6-11 verifies that the host subnets learned through BGP have been installed in the IP routing table on all switches. For example, the destination prefix 10.0.10.0/24 is installed on Leaf-102 with the next hop fe80::e22:34ff:feb6:a and the outgoing interface Ethernet0.

This also illustrates the separation between the BGP control plane and the data plane. BGP uses IPv6 link-local addresses to establish the BGP session and exchange BGP messages carrying IPv4 NLRI, with an IPv6 link-local address specified as Continue reading

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TNO071: The Network Team Is Drowning. Is AI the Life Raft? (Sponsored)

Last year, 49,000 CVEs were published, more than 130 new vulnerabilities every day. So what actually happens with all of those CVEs in your network infrastructure? In this sponsored episode, Rekha Shenoy and Irfahn Khimji of BackBox join Scott Robohn to discuss why the math of manual network operations no longer works, where traditional tools... Read more »

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HN840: How to Make a Technology Buying Decision

When engineers look to buy new technology they tend to focus on features and functionality, but there’s more to it than that. Sian Morgan joins Drew and Ethan to discuss the best practices involved in making a good technology buying decision. Sian shares how engineers can align their technical focus with broader business objectives, calculate... Read more »

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Please Help Me Follow Your Content

Finding good content in the swamp of AI slop is hard, and whenever I find a blog post worth reading, I’d like to know when the author publishes the next one.

For stupid reasons (like a day having only 24 hours, and me having a life), I can’t periodically scan all websites I find interesting, but fortunately, I don’t have to. Two well-known mechanisms work reliably: email updates and RSS feeds.

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Nvidia Expands Its Open Source AI Presence With $12.9 Billion Hugging Face Buy

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Meet Mylo: An AI-native way to work with Calico

A library of Calico tools and skills — delivered through the Calico MCP Server

What if your hardest network question took ten minutes instead of ten days?

Anyone who has operated Kubernetes networking at scale knows the shape of a bad day. A request that should succeed is quietly failing. The application team swears nothing changed. Somewhere across a stack of tiers, selectors, and policies, some written last week and some inherited from an engineer who left two years ago, a rule is denying the traffic. Finding it means reading YAML, cross-referencing flow logs, and reconstructing the policy evaluation order in your head. For a genuinely knotty case, that work can stretch across days and pull in more than one team before anyone gets to the bottom of it.

I think that day is about to get a lot shorter. Today we’re introducing Mylo, an expert for Calico that works inside the AI tools your teams already use. Ask Mylo why a pod can’t reach a service, and it traces the path, points to the exact policy and rule doing the blocking, and explains why in plain language, in about the time it took you to read this paragraph. Mylo Continue reading

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IPB207: Flying Blind: Monitoring Might Not See IPv6

Is your current network monitoring infrastructure capable of seeing IPv6 traffic or are you flying blind in a dual-stack environment? Today Ed, Nick, and Tom explore the critical challenges surrounding IPv6 visibility such as the limitations of vendor tools and the complexities of maintaining observability as networks evolve.

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N4N063: Link Layer Discovery Protocol

Ethan and Holly tackle the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). They explain how this protocol helps network engineers map network topologies and validate wiring. They also discuss how LLDP devices use frames to send information, mandatory and optional type length values (TLVs), and why security on edge ports remains critical. Episode Links: Watch this episode... Read more »

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BGP-Free Core with SR-MPLS

The beauty of SR-MPLS is that it’s a drop-in replacement for the traditional (LDP- or RSVP-based) MPLS control plane. For example, you could replace LDP with SR-MPLS in a network using MPLS to implement a BGP-free transport core, and it just keeps working.

This scenario was the first “fun” scenario in the ITNOG10 Segment Routing workshop. The core network uses the same topology as in the previous examples; I added two hosts and BGP routing.

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TCG083: Superintelligence for Everyone: Who Actually Holds the Power?

Mark Zuckerberg argues that broadly distributed personal AI, or a “superintelligence” in his parlance, can increase prosperity and counter the risks of AI being controlled by a handful of government and corporate entities. Drew Conry-Murray joins Eyvonne and William to engage in a lively roundtable where they examine whether distributing access meaningfully distributes power when... Read more »

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NAN130: Network Automation Forum: From Simple Survey to Global Community

Eric Chou welcomes guest co-host William Collins as well as Network Automation Forum founders Scott Robohn and Chris Grundemann to discuss how their community emerged from a simple question: Why haven’t we seen full adoption of network automation? They discuss the growth of AutoCon and how its practitioner-focused, vendor-neutral approach has fostered a unique environment... Read more »

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Optics Still Driving Marvell’s AI Business More Than Custom Chips

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Networking Aspects of Running VMs in Containers

The vrnetlab project and its containerlab fork implement a wonderful idea: let’s package virtual machines (primarily network devices that cannot be containerized) as containers to use reliable orchestration tools like containerlab to provision network topologies.

That approach might have a few drawbacks (depending on how the container images are built), but the obvious elephant in the room is: how do you make the virtual network plumbing work?

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HS141: EA vs AI

What does Enterprise Architecture (EA) mean when AI is everywhere in the stack? Enterprise Architecture is about nailing down relationships and functions while AI pushes back with dynamic processes and probabilistic results. Join Johna and John as they discuss the possibilities for EA: does it prevail, adapt, or die? Episode Links: Watch this episode on... Read more »

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PP124: How Coruna, DarkSword, and Other Exploits Slice Up Apple iPhones

Coruna and DarkSword are exploit frameworks that have successfully targeted Apple iPhones to steal cryptocurrency and harvest data including messages, email, location data, and browsing history. On today’s show we trace the provenance of these exploits (Coruna was originally developed by a contractor for the US government), their rapid evolution in the cyber underworld, and... Read more »

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Worth Reading 090126

The central question is therefore not whether AI should be regulated. It should. The question is what happens when regulation itself becomes a bottleneck to technological progress.

 

Does AI increase or reduce technical debt? Join Johna Johnson and John Burke as they discuss how to make strategy in environments in which AI fuels untrammeled growth in enterprise complexity–but also points the way to automated optimization (and concomitant technical debt reduction).

 

Red Hat published a benchmark analysis on June 15, 2026, that puts numbers behind a question occupying many IT departments.

 

Recent industry momentum behind open AI models reflects a growing recognition that openness is essential for accelerating innovation, broadening participation, and strengthening the global AI ecosystem.

 

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss how the DNS behaves during a ‘cold start’, when a resolver’s cache contains no data from previous queries.

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How to Set TorBox wlan1 as WAN on RPi 3B

The goal of this guide is to explain how to configure TorBox to use a […]

The post How to Set TorBox wlan1 as WAN on RPi 3B first appeared on Brezular's Blog.

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Aching for Engagement

I’ve noticed something in the last few weeks that might drive me crazy. I’m sure you noticed it too. There are people talking about things and they’re ready to join your community. Just click on this notification to learn more!

Paying Attention

Earlier this year I talked about how everything seems to be geared to disrupt our attention. At that time, I thought it would get better by just ignoring the notifications and removing them from my devices to reduce it to the minimum. I think the providers read my post because they found even more ways to get to me. I think they have it out for me.

Attention is a resource like money or oil or the amount of hydrogen atoms in the sun. It has a finite limit and we only have so much to work with. Every disruption causes us to switch contexts and try to manage it. As I mentioned, I went about removing as much of that distraction as I could. Because having my focus be on a task and not on a cute popup banner is important for work and the other things that I do.

Thankfully, the social media apps found a Continue reading

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SONiC Deep Dive: BGP Peer Configuration – BGP Unnumbered

 

After enabling IPv6 on the Ethernet0 interface, we can configure BGP peering. Instead of statically defining a peer IP address and AS number, the BGP neighbor is defined at the interface level. This tells BGP to expect a neighbor and initialize the BGP peering over Ethernet0. Because our intent is to transport IPv4 traffic over the IPv6 network, we activate both the IPv4 and IPv6 address families. We also configure the peer as an external BGP (eBGP) neighbor by using a command remote-as external. This tells BGP that the peer must use an AS number different from the local AS number.

Because the network uses IPv6 as the transport for IPv4 traffic, IPv4 Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) exchanged through BGP use IPv6 next-hop addresses. BGP therefore needs the Extended Next Hop Encoding capability to support IPv4 routes with IPv6 next hops. In this configuration, the capability is explicitly enabled with the capability extended-nexthop command.

In FRRouting, the v6only option controls which IP version is used for interface-based BGP Unnumbered peering. Without v6only, FRR uses the interface's IPv6 link-local address for peering only when no suitable IPv4 address is configured on the interface. With v6only, FRR skips Continue reading

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MUST READ: Git – Going Pro

I sure wish Tony Mattke had started publishing his Git-related blog posts in 2017 when I was still struggling with the basics. In his latest Going Pro article he covers:

• Using SSH keys with Git and GitHub
• Pre-commit hooks
• GitHub Actions and linting
• GitHub Branch protection
• PR reviews
• gh CLI

Absolutely worth every second you’ll spend reading the article!