Routing Through the Forest of Trees

Some friends shared a Reddit post the other day that made me both shake my head and ponder the state of the networking industry. Here is the locked post for your viewing pleasure. It was locked because the comments were going to devolve into a mess eventually. The person making the comment seems to be honest and sincere in their approach to “layer 3 going away”. The post generated a lot of amusement from the networking side of IT about how this person doesn’t understand the basics but I think there’s a deeper issue going on.

Trails To Nowhere

Our visibility of the state of the network below the application interface is very general in today’s world. That’s because things “just work” to borrow an overused phrase. Aside from the occasional troubleshooting exercise to find out why packets destined for Azure or AWS are failing along the way when is the last time you had to get really creative in finding a routing issue in someone else’s equipment? We spend more time now trying to figure out how to make our own networks operate efficiently and less time worrying about what happens to the packets when they leave our organization. Continue reading

Upcoming Pearson Class: Modern Network Troubleshooting

On the 26th of January, I’ll be teaching a webinar over at Safari Books Online (subscription service) called Modern Network Troubleshooting. From the blurb:

The first section of this class considers the nature of resilience, and how design tradeoffs result in different levels of resilience. The class then moves into a theoretical understanding of failures, how network resilience is measured, and how the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) relates to human and machine-driven factors. One of these factors is the unintended consequences arising from abstractions, covered in the next section of the class.
The class then moves into troubleshooting proper, examining the half-split formal troubleshooting method and how it can be combined with more intuitive methods. This section also examines how network models can be used to guide the troubleshooting process. The class then covers two examples of troubleshooting reachability problems in a small network, and considers using ChaptGPT and other LLMs in the troubleshooting process. A third, more complex example is then covered in a data center fabric.

Register here.

The BGP Origin Attribute

Kristijan Taskovski asked an interesting question related to my BGP AS-prepending lab:

I’ve never personally done this on the net but….wouldn’t the BGP origin code also work with moving one’s ingress traffic similarly to AS PATH?

TL&DR: Sort of, but not exactly. Also, just because you can climb up ropes using shoelaces instead of jumars doesn’t mean you should.

Let’s deal with the moving traffic bit first.

Read more …

The BGP Origin Attribute

Kristijan Taskovski asked an interesting question related to my BGP AS-prepending lab:

I’ve never personally done this on the net but….wouldn’t the BGP origin code also work with moving one’s ingress traffic similarly to AS PATH?

TL&DR: Sort of, but not exactly. Also, just because you can climb up ropes using shoelaces instead of jumars doesn’t mean you should.

Let’s deal with the moving traffic bit first.

Read more …

Weekend Reads 120223


Yet despite the constant accretion of new tools to solve new problems, the most common root cause of serious cybersecurity incidents remains failed processes.


The House of Representatives’ failure to spike a federal “kill switch” mandate means that outside of a political miracle, all new vehicles from 2026 onward will be required to incorporate “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”


Gone are the days when a car was a dumb machine you turned on and drove from A to B. Today it’s a smartphone on wheels, and your data is possibly being taken for a ride.


APT29, believed to be an espionage group from Russia, became known for launching targeted attacks against organizations in Ukraine.


Mozilla has slapped its “Privacy Not Included” labels on several products from Google, Amazon and Microsoft – just in time for Christmas shopping.


Despite more than a decade of reminding, prodding, and downright nagging, a surprising number of developers still can’t bring themselves to keep their code free of credentials that provide the keys to their kingdoms to anyone who takes the time to look for them.


Special report Web advert blockers and other Chrome extensions will stop working by June 2024 unless Continue reading

If You Want To Sell AI To Enterprises, You Need To Sell Ethernet

Server makers Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, who are the three largest original manufacturers of systems in the world, ranked in that order, are adding to the spectrum of interconnects they offer to their enterprise customers. …

The post If You Want To Sell AI To Enterprises, You Need To Sell Ethernet first appeared on The Next Platform.

If You Want To Sell AI To Enterprises, You Need To Sell Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HN711: Get Cloud-Like Operation Of Your Data Center With Juniper Apstra And Terraform (Sponsored)

Public clouds abstract away much of the nitty-gritty work that goes into provisioning infrastructure, including networking. Application teams can quickly connect resources and deploy applications without having to know much about the plumbing that links everything together. When they compare the public cloud experience to standing up applications in an on-prem data center, the on-prem... Read more »

HN711: Get Cloud-Like Operation Of Your Data Center With Juniper Apstra And Terraform (Sponsored)

Today on Heavy Networking, sponsored by Juniper, we’ll talk about how Juniper’s Apstra software can help you operate your on-prem data center more like a public cloud; meaning service provisioning that’s repeatable, standardized, and straightforward to consume. We’ll also talk about how Apstra now works with Terraform to help streamline network self-service.

The post HN711: Get Cloud-Like Operation Of Your Data Center With Juniper Apstra And Terraform (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Meta Sees Little Risk in RISC-V Custom Accelerators

Many have waited years to hear someone like Prahlad Venkatapuram, Senior Director of Engineering at Meta, say what came out this week at the RISC-V Summit:

“We’ve identified that RISC-V is the way to go for us moving forward for all the products we have in the roadmap. …

The post Meta Sees Little Risk in RISC-V Custom Accelerators first appeared on The Next Platform.

Meta Sees Little Risk in RISC-V Custom Accelerators was written by Nicole Hemsoth Prickett at The Next Platform.

Cloudflare Gen 12 Server: Bigger, Better, Cooler in a 2U1N form factor

Two years ago, Cloudflare undertook a significant upgrade to our compute server hardware as we deployed our cutting-edge 11th Generation server fleet, based on AMD EPYC Milan x86 processors. It's nearly time for another refresh to our x86 infrastructure, with deployment planned for 2024. This involves upgrading not only the processor itself, but many of the server's components. It must be able to accommodate the GPUs that drive inference on Workers AI, and leverage the latest advances in memory, storage, and security. Every aspect of the server is rigorously evaluated — including the server form factor itself.

One crucial variable always in consideration is temperature. The latest generations of x86 processors have yielded significant leaps forward in performance, with the tradeoff of higher power draw and heat output. In this post we will explore this trend, and how it informed our decision to adopt a new physical footprint for our next-generation fleet of servers.

In preparation for the upcoming refresh, we conducted an extensive survey of the x86 CPU landscape. AMD recently introduced its latest offerings: Genoa, Bergamo, and Genoa-X, featuring the power of their innovative Zen 4 architecture. At the same time, Intel unveiled Sapphire Rapids as Continue reading

Security Solutions that Connect Remote Offices and Users

In this archived panel discussion, Cristina Raducanu, Nia F. Luckey, Rob Ferrill, and Tashya Denose connect to deliver an in-depth conversation detailing the importance of combining networking and security solutions during our ‘Connectivity Solutions’ live virtual event presented by Network Computing. This panel was moderated by Steve Hill on November 9, 2023.

30 Days Left to Buy ipSpace.net Subscription

When I announced the lifetime ipSpace.net subscription in early September, I also mentioned that you won’t be able to purchase any ipSpace.net subscription after December 31st, 2023.

As of today, you have 30 days left to decide, and don’t wait till the last minute – I plan to turn off the purchasing process sometime during the business hours of December 31st as I hope to have more interesting things to do in the evening.

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