Arista EOS and Cisco Nexus OS got interface EBGP sessions years after Cumulus Linux. While they’re trivially easy to configure on FRRouting (the routing daemon used by Cumulus Linux), getting them to work on Arista EOS is a bit tricky.
To make matters worse, my Google-Fu failed me when I tried to find a decent step-by-step configuration guide; all I got was a 12-minute video full of YouTube ads. Let’s fix that.
I have written elsewhere about the danger of AI assistants leading to mediocrity. Humans tend to rely on authority figures rather strongly (see Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram as one example), and we often treat “the computer” as an authority figure.
The problem is, of course, Large Language Models—and AI of all kinds—are mostly pattern-matching machines or Chinese Rooms. A pattern-matching machine can be pretty effective at many interesting things, but it will always be, in essence, a summary of “what a lot of people think.” If you choose the right people to summarize, you might get close to the truth. Finding the right people to summarize, however, is beyond the powers of a pattern-matching machine.
Just because many “experts” say the same thing does not mean the thing is true, valid, or useful.
AI assistants can make people more productive, at least in terms of sheer output. Someone using an AI assistant will write more words per minute than someone who is not. Someone using an AI assistant will write more code daily than someone who is not.
But is it just more, or is it better?
Measuring the mediocratic effect of using AI systems, even as Continue reading
I usually say that you cannot run netlab on Apple Silicon because the vendors don’t provide ARM images. However, when I saw an ARM version of the FRRouting container, I wondered whether I could run the BGP labs (admittedly only on FRR containers) on my M2 MacBook Pro.
TL&DR: Yes, you can do that.
Now for the recipe:
I usually say that you cannot run netlab on Apple silicon because the vendors don’t provide ARM images. However, when I saw an ARM version of the FRRouting container, I started wondering whether I could run the BGP labs (admittedly only on FRR containers) on my M2 MacBook Pro.
TL&DR: Yes, you can do that.
Now for the recipe:
The March 2024 Internet Protocol Journal has a lengthy article on the history and “future” of Ethernet that might be worth reading (although it’s short on details) if you weren’t around when it all started.
The March 2024 Internet Protocol Journal has a lengthy article on the history and “future” of Ethernet that might be worth reading (although it’s short on details) if you weren’t around when it all started.
What if I tell you that all you need is just a YAML file with just a bunch of lines to create a Network Lab that can run easily on your laptop? You'd call me crazy, right?
Well, in this blog post, I'll walk you through what Containerlab is and how it can simplify creating and managing your labs with ease. Let's dive in.
What we will cover?
Suresh Vina
The official definition is "Containerlab provides a CLI for orchestrating and managing container-based networking labs. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create lab topologies of users choice and manages labs lifecycle."
Simply put, containerlab is a Lab-as-a-code tool that helps you set up and manage your network labs easily. Instead of dealing with complex setups and configurations, containerlab simplifies everything for you. Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #176! This Tech Short Take is a bit heavy on security-related links, but there’s still some additional content in a number of other areas, so you should be able to find something useful—or at least interesting—in here. Thanks for reading!
Urs Baumann invited me to have a guest lecture in his network automation course, and so I had the privilege of being in lovely Rapperswil last week, talking about the basics of real-life network automation.
Urs published the video recording of the presentation on YouTube; hope you’ll like it, and if you don’t get too annoyed by the overly pushy ads, watch the other videos from his infrastructure-as-code course.
Urs Baumann invited me to have a guest lecture in his network automation course, and so I had the privilege of being in lovely Rapperswil last week, talking about the basics of real-life network automation.
Urs published the video recording of the presentation on YouTube; hope you’ll like it, and if you don’t get too annoyed by the overly pushy ads, watch the other videos from his infrastructure-as-code course.
I recently read a very interesting post on LinkedIn in which Urs Hölzle, one of the original Google network engineers, celebrated twenty years of Google network innovation. He provided links to the recent paper from Google describing how Google developed its datacentre network and how it has evolved since then. The paper describes how Google applied the Clos network topology in its datacentres and the early implementations of software-defined-networking that controlled data flows across the network.
One point that was really interesting, which came up in the comments to the article, is that Google implemented the original network routing code in Python.
Mr. Hölzle also linked to an independant research report that came out at the time. It provided the initial view of what Google was developing and is interesting to read almost 20 years after it was written.
The post History of SDN in Google’s datacentre appeared first on Open-Source Routing and Network Simulation.