Arista EOS Hates a Routing Instance with No Interfaces

I always ask engineers reporting a netlab bug to provide a minimal lab topology that would reproduce the error, sometimes resulting in “interesting” side effects. For example, I was trying to debug a BGP-related Arista EOS issue using a netlab topology similar to this one:

defaults.device: eos
module: [ bgp ]
nodes:
  a: { bgp.as: 65000 }
  b: { bgp.as: 65001 }

Imagine my astonishment when the two switches failed to configure BGP. Here’s the error message I got when running the netlab’s deploy device configurations Ansible playbook:

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The RUM Diaries: enabling Web Analytics by default

Measuring and improving performance on the Internet can be a daunting task because it spans multiple layers: from the user’s device and browser, to DNS lookups and the network routes, to edge configurations and origin server location. Each layer introduces its own variability such as last-mile bandwidth constraints, third-party scripts, or limited CPU resources, that are often invisible unless you have robust observability tooling in place. Even if you gather data from most of these Internet hops, performance engineers still need to correlate different metrics like front-end events, network processing times, and server-side logs in order to pinpoint where and why elusive “latency” occurs to understand how to fix it.

We want to solve this problem by providing a powerful, in-depth monitoring solution that helps you debug and optimize applications, so you can understand and trace performance issues across the Internet, end to end.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the start of a major upgrade to Cloudflare’s performance analytics suite: Web Analytics as part of our real user monitoring (RUM) tools will soon be combined with network-level insights to help you pinpoint performance issues anywhere on a packet’s journey — from a visitor’s browser, through Cloudflare’s network, to your Continue reading

TCG058: Creating the Internet Layer That Should Have Been With Avery Pennarun

In this deep dive episode, we explore the evolution of networking with Avery Pennarun, Co-Founder and CEO of Tailscale. Avery shares his extensive journey through VPN technologies, from writing his first mesh VPN protocol in 1997 called “Tunnel Vision” to building Tailscale, a zero-trust networking solution. We discuss how Tailscale reimagines the OSI stack by... Read more »

NAN100: A Retrospective On 100 Episodes of Network Automation Nerds

Network Automation Nerds has reached a special milestone: episode 100! Eric Chou looks back on 5 years of conversations with network automation pioneers, practitioners, and visionaries. Drew Conry-Murray from the Packet Pushers joins Eric, along with online guest Ioannis Theodoridis, to find out why Eric started the podcast, his goals for all these conversations, a... Read more »

SwiNOG 40: When a Routing Control Functions Is Too Fresh

During integration testing, I find unexpected quirks in network devices way too often. However, that’s infinitely better than experiencing them in production (even after thoroughly testing stuff) while discovering that your peers don’t care about routing security, RPKI, and similar useless stuff.

For example, what happens if you define a new Routing Control Function (RFC) on Arista EOS and apply it to BGP routing updates in the same configuration session? You’ll find out in the Sorry We Messed Up (video) presentation Stefan Funke had at SwiNOG 40 (note: the bug has been fixed in the meantime).

Calico Whisker vs. Traditional Observability: Why Context Matters in Kubernetes Networking

Are you tired of digging through cryptic logs to understand your Kubernetes network? In today’s fast-paced cloud environments, clear, real-time visibility isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. Traditional logging and metrics often fall short, leaving you without the context needed to troubleshoot effectively.

That’s precisely what Calico Whisker’s recent launch (with Calico v3.30) aims to solve. This tool provides clarity where logs alone fall short. In the sections below, you’ll get a practical overview of how it works and how it fits into modern Kubernetes networking and security workflows.

If you’re relying on logs for network observability, you’re not alone. While this approach can provide some insights, it’s often a manual, resource-intensive process that puts significant load on your distributed systems. It’s simply not a cloud-native solution for real-time insights.

So are we doomed? No. Calico Whisker transforms network observability from a chore into a superpower.

What is Calico Whisker?

Calico Whisker is a free, lightweight, Kubernetes-native observability user interface (UI) created by Tigera and introduced with Calico Open Source v3.30. It’s designed to give you a simple yet powerful window into your cluster’s network traffic, helping you understand network flows and evaluate policy behavior in real-time.

In Continue reading

Nvidia Takes The Commanding Lead In Datacenter Ethernet Switching

Well, that didn’t take long. In April 2020, Nvidia completed its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies for its InfiniBand and Ethernet switching, and a little more than five years and a GenAI boom later Nvidia has been crowned the leading revenue generator for Ethernet switching in the datacenter by IDC. …

Nvidia Takes The Commanding Lead In Datacenter Ethernet Switching was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

PP078: Using Free Tools for Detection Engineering

You can build effective, scalable detection pipelines using free and open-source tools like Zeek, Suricata, YARA, and Security Onion. Today on Packet Protector we welcome Matt Gracie, Senior Engineer at Security Onion Solutions — the team behind the open-source platform used for detection engineering, network security monitoring, and log management. Matt has over 15 years... Read more »

HS112: Standardizing NaaS Service Definitions

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) promises enterprises the ability to set up and configure connectivity and network security with a couple of clicks. But for NaaS to truly transform enterprise networking, one thing has been missing: standards. Enter Mplify (formerly the Metro Ethernet Forum), a non-profit focused on standardizing NaaS service definitions. Mplify’s CTO, Pascal Menezes, joins Johna... Read more »

Configuring Palo Alto Administrator Authentication with Cisco ISE (Radius)

Configuring Palo Alto Administrator Authentication with Cisco ISE (Radius)

Let’s assume a simple scenario. You have two different teams managing your Palo Alto firewalls. One team is made up of network administrators who need full access to the firewalls. The other team only needs limited access and should not be able to make any configuration changes.

A common way to handle this is by using Admin Roles and a remote Radius server. You can assign different admin roles based on who is logging in, without creating local users on every firewall. In this post, we will look at how to achieve this using Cisco ISE and Radius. You do not have to use Cisco ISE, any Radius server can do the job, but this post focuses on Cisco ISE since it is commonly used in enterprise environments.

FortiGate Radius Administrator Login with Cisco ISE
You can assign different admin profiles based on who is logging in, without creating local users on every firewall. In this post, we will look at
Configuring Palo Alto Administrator Authentication with Cisco ISE (Radius)PacketswitchSuresh Vinasiththamby
Configuring Palo Alto Administrator Authentication with Cisco ISE (Radius)

Overview

For this example, we will have two users, each belonging to a different group with different access requirements. In most environments, group membership is managed by something like Active Directory. For the sake of simplicity, Continue reading

Integrating CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR with Cloudflare’s SASE platform

The challenge of manual response

Security teams know all too well the grind of manual investigations and remediation. With the mass adoption of AI and increasingly automated attacks, defenders cannot afford to rely on overly manual, low priority, and complex workflows.

Heavily burdensome manual response introduces delays as analysts bounce between consoles and high alert volumes, contributing to alert fatigue. Even worse, it prevents security teams from dedicating time to high-priority threats and strategic, innovative work. To keep pace, SOCs need automated responses that contain and remediate common threats at machine speed before they become business-impacting incidents.

Expanding our capabilities with CrowdStrike Falcon® Fusion’ SOAR

That’s why today, we’re excited to announce a new integration between the Cloudflare One platform and CrowdStrike's Falcon® Fusion SOAR.

As part of our ongoing partnership with CrowdStrike, this integration introduces two out-of-the-box integrations for Zero Trust and Email Security designed for organizations already leveraging CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR or CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM.

This allows SOC teams to gain powerful new capabilities to stop phishing, malware, and suspicious behavior faster, with less manual effort.

Out-of-the-box integrations

Although teams can always create custom automations, we’ve made it simple to get started with two Continue reading

[FATAL] Ansible Release 12.0 Breaks netlab Jinja2 Templates

On September 9th, the ansible release 12.0 appeared on PyPi. It requires ansible-core release 2.19, which includes breaking changes to Jinja2 templating. netlab Jinja2 templates rely on a few Ansible Jinja2 filters; netlab thus imports and uses those filters, and it looks like those imports pulled in the breaking changes that consequently broke the netlab containerlab configuration file template (details).

netlab did not check the Ansible core version (we never had a similar problem in the past), and the installation scripts did not pin the Ansible version (feel free to blame me for this one), which means that any new netlab installation created after September 9th crashed miserably on the simplest lab topologies.

This is the workaround we implemented in netlab release 25.09-post1 (released earlier today):

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