Running Large Language Models (LLM) on Your Own Machine Using Ollama

I’m going to start by saying I’m totally new to LLMs and running them locally, so I’m not going to pretend like I know what I am doing. I’ve been learning about Ollama for some time now and thought I would share it with my readers as always. This is such an interesting topic and I’m ready to go into the rabbit hole.

As always, if you find the content useful, don’t forget to press the ‘clap’ button to your left. This is one way for me to know that you like this type of content, which means a lot to me. So, let's get started.

Large Language Models (LLMs)

LLMs, or Large Language Models, are a type of artificial intelligence designed to process and generate natural language. They are trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to understand context, identify patterns, and produce human-like responses. These models can perform various tasks such as answering questions, translating languages, summarising text, generating creative content, and assisting with coding. LLMs have gained significant attention in recent years due to their impressive performance and versatility.

N4N011: What’s the Difference Between LAG, MLAG, MC-LAG, and Stacking?

IBM Takes The Patient Path To Future GenAI Profits

While the hyperscalers and cloud builders provide the best indicator of what it takes to create state of the art GenAI models and the infrastructure to train them as well as to put them into production for practical use through an API interface, perhaps IBM is one of the best leading indicators for how GenAI will slowly be adopted by the enterprises of the world within their own organizations. …

IBM Takes The Patient Path To Future GenAI Profits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

New Year, New Data Strategy: How AI And Scalable Storage Shape 2025’s Resolutions

COMMISSIONED: The new year has arrived, bringing with it the usual resolutions: get fitter, read more books, maybe finally tackle that ever-growing email backlog. …

New Year, New Data Strategy: How AI And Scalable Storage Shape 2025’s Resolutions was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Curious Case of the BGP Connect State

I got this question from Paul:

Have you ever seen a BGP peer in the “Connect” state? In 20 years, I have never been able to see or reproduce this state, nor any mention in a debug/log. I am starting to believe that all the documentation is BS, and this does not exist.

The BGP Finite State Machine (FSM) (at least the one defined in RFC 4271 and amended in RFC 9687) is “a bit” hard to grasp but the basics haven’t changed from the ancient days of RFC 1771:

The Road Ahead For Datacenter Compute Engines: The CPUs

It is often said that companies – particularly large companies with enormous IT budgets – do not buy products, they buy roadmaps. …

The Road Ahead For Datacenter Compute Engines: The CPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Azure Can’t Make Up For On Premise Profit Decline At Microsoft

If you think it might be difficult to sell companies general purpose servers when they are frenzied about GenAI and trying to figure out how to get GPU-accelerated systems, you ought to try to convince the same companies to upgrade to Windows Server 2025, which launched last November. …

Azure Can’t Make Up For On Premise Profit Decline At Microsoft was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Install OLLAMA and deepseek-r1 ON GOOGLE CO-LAB

This should summarise it all.

Colab Notebook – https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1WV6J8IqEfYbn__H2g9-hOoHqfx-YD5iA?usp=sharing

NAN084: From GitNops Zero to Hero

ByteDance to Network a Million Containers with Netkit

Engineers from the Chinese social media conglomerate ByteDance are taking early advantage of a recently released feature of the Linux kernel called netkit that provides a faster way for containers to communicate with each other across a cluster. First released in Linux kernel 6.7 in December 2023, netkit is a now-discontinued Netkit that was used to create virtual networks on a single server) and has been touted as a way to streamline container networking. Like the rest of the cloud native world, ByteDance uses Virtual Ethernet (had a number bottlenecks that slowed communication rates across containers. In fact, veth requires each packet to traverse two network stacks — one of the sender and the other of the recipient — even if the two containers communicating were on the same Continue reading

Cisco Modeling Labs and Infrastructure-as-Code

Dalton Ortega, Cisco Modeling Labs Product Manager, sent me the following email as a response to my Configuring IP Addresses Won't Make You an Expert blog post:

First, your statement on Autonetkit is indeed correct. We had removed that from the product due to lack of popularity. That being said, in our roadmap we are looking at methods to reintroduce on-the-fly configuration as well as enhancing our sample labs library to make getting started with CML easier.

Secondly, CML can be run in full IaC mode because of the API-first build. In fact, many of our customers are using CML as an automated test/validation bed for their CI/CD pipelines. Tools like Ansible and Terraform are available to facilitate this inside CML too. For more details, read:

• Get Started With Terraform and Cisco Modeling Labs
• How to Use Ansible with CML

PP047: Why Packet Analysis (and Wireshark) Should Be In Your Security Toolkit

NB511: Cisco Sells Security Blanket for AI Nightmares; Stratoshark Captures System Calls

HS093: Strategic Trust-Building Among Ops, Engineering, Architecture – and Leadership

HW044: Unpacking NETGEAR’s Enterprise Wireless and Wired Portfolio (Sponsored)

The Coming Age Of The Internet Of Agents

Almost a year ago, executives, researchers, and developers within the Outshift group of Cisco Systems – an incubation unit focused on such advanced technologies as AI and quantum computing – began batting about the idea of a network infrastructure connecting vast numbers of AI agents from multiple vendors or organizations, allowing those AI agents to automatically communicate, work together, and solve complex problems for enterprises. …

The Coming Age Of The Internet Of Agents was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A diversity of downtime: the Q4 2024 Internet disruption summary

Cloudflare’s network spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries, where we interconnect with over 13,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions at both a local and national level, as well as at a network level.

As we have noted in the past, this post is intended as a summary overview of observed and confirmed disruptions, and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter. A larger list of detected traffic anomalies is available in the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center.

In the third quarter we covered quite a few government-directed Internet shutdowns, including many intended to prevent cheating on exams. In the fourth quarter, however, we only observed a single government-directed shutdown, this one related to protests. Terrestrial cable cuts impacted connectivity in two African countries. As we have seen multiple times before, both unexpected power outages and rolling power outages following military action resulted in Internet disruptions. Violent storms and an earthquake Continue reading

Deepseek-r1 – reasoning and Chain of thought – Network Engineers

https://www.deepseek.com/ – DeepSeek has taken the AI world by storm. Their new reasoning model, which is open source, achieves results comparable to OpenAI’s O1 model but at a fraction of the cost. Many AI companies are now studying DeepSeek’s white paper to understand how they achieved this.

This post analyses reasoning capabilities from a Network Engineer’s perspective, using a simple BGP message scenario. Whether you’re new to networking or looking to refresh your reasoning skills for building networking code, DeepSeek’s model is worth exploring. The model is highly accessible – it can run on Google Colab or even a decent GPU/MacBook, thanks to DeepSeek’s focus on efficiency.

For newcomers: The model is accessed through a local endpoint, with queries and responses handled through a Python program. Think of it as a programmatic way to interact with a chat interface.

Code block

Simple code. One function block has prompt set to LLM to be a expert Network engineer. We are more interested in the thought process. The output of the block is a sample BGP output from a industry standard device, nothing fancy here.

import requests
import json

def analyze_bgp_output(device_output: str) -> str:
    url = "<http://localhost:11434/api/chat>"
    
    # Craft prompt  Continue reading

Worth Reading: Drunken Plagiarists

George V. Neville-Neil published a fantastic, must-read summary of the various code copilots’ usefulness on ACM Queue: The Drunken Plagiarists.

It pretty much mirrors my experience (plus, I got annoyed when the semi-relevant suggestions kept kicking me out of the flow) and reminds me of the early days of OpenFlow, when nobody wanted to listen to old grunts like myself telling the world it was all hype and little substance.

Cloudflare meets new Global Cross-Border Privacy standards

Cloudflare proudly leads the way with our approach to data privacy and the protection of personal information, and we’ve been an ardent supporter of the need for the free flow of data across jurisdictional borders. So today, on Data Privacy Day (also known internationally as Data Protection Day), we’re happy to announce that we’re adding our fourth and fifth privacy validations, and this time, they are global firsts! Cloudflare is the first organisation to announce that we have been successfully audited against the brand new Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules (Global CBPRs) for data controllers and the Global Privacy Rules for Processors (Global PRP). These validations demonstrate our support and adherence to global standards that provide for privacy-respecting data flows across jurisdictions. Organizations that have been successfully audited will be formally certified when the certifications officially launch, which we expect to happen later in 2025. 

Our participation in the Global CBPRs and Global PRP joins our roster of privacy validations: we were one of the first cybersecurity organizations to certify to the international privacy standard ISO 27701:2019 when it was published, and in 2022 we also certified to the cloud privacy certification, ISO 27018:2019. In 2023, we added our third Continue reading