WanAware: 21 Packets’ Affordable Observability Play

21Packets’ infrastructure and customers. The company’s founders promise extensive integration capabilities, significantly reducing the costs organizations typically incur when integrating observability or telemetry data feeds with other sources. The platform extends and integrates with not only multiple data sources but at a significantly lower cost. This aspect of the offering is critical for those organizations that have numerous data feeds that might also be spread around the world geographically, WanAware, chief strategy officer/CISO and CEO of 21Packets, who holds other executive positions concurrently, said. “The reason why customers often come to us is they have resources all over the globe and they don’t have the ability to scale their observability platforms to support their environment. They don’t have teams that can operate it and they don’t have subject matter experts,” Collins said. “So, they need the ability to use an IT generalist and have an Continue reading

Capture to pcap file using sflowtool


Replay pcap files using sflowtool describes how to capture sFlow datagrams using tcpdump and replay them in real time using sflowtool. However, using tcpdump for the capture has the downside of requiring root privileges. A recent update to sflowtool now makes it possible to use sflowtool to capture sFlow datagrams in tcpdump pcap format without the need for root access. 
docker run --rm -p 6343:6343/udp sflow/sflowtool -M > sflow.pcap
Either compile the latest version of sflowtool or, as shown above, use Docker to run the pre-built sflow/sflowtool image. The -M option outputs whole UDP datagrams received to standard output. In either case, type CNTRL + C to end the capture.

Transforming Cloud with Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud Innovations

Image – https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/dedicated-region/

Note : All opinions and writings are of my own understanding and may not represent latest or historical product development facts, please consult Oracle Documentation and Sales teams for accurate information.

Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC) has emerged as a transformative solution for organisations requiring cloud capabilities within their own data centers. Recent advancements in DRCC, particularly those announced in 2024 and 2025, have introduced groundbreaking features that redefine network architecture, scalability, and edge computing. This article delves into the technical nuances of these innovations, focusing on their implications for network engineers tasked with designing, deploying, and managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Architectural Evolution of DRCC: From Regional Deployment to Edge Scalability

Dedicated Region25: Compact Footprint and Modular Scalability

Oracle’s introduction of Dedicated Region25 marks a significant shift in on-premises cloud deployment. With a 75% smaller physical footprint compared to previous iterations, this configuration starts at three racks and scales incrementally, enabling organizations to deploy cloud infrastructure in constrained spaces while maintaining access to over 150 OCI services. For network engineers, this modularity necessitates a reevaluation of data center design principles.

The reduced footprint simplifies integration into existing network topologies but requires meticulous planning for Continue reading

Calico eBPF Source IP Preservation: The Unexpected Story of High Tail Latency

The Calico eBPF data plane is your choice if latency is your primary concern. It was very disturbing that some benchmarking brought to our attention that eBPF had higher tail latency than iptables. The 99+% percentiles were higher by as much as a few hundred milliseconds. We did a whole bunch of experiments and we could not crack the nut until we observed that there are some occasional and unexpected TCP reset (RST) packets, but no connections were reset.

We noticed that the RST belongs to a connection that was already completed and finished a while ago. That was strange, but it pointed us in the right direction. We also knew that this happens only if the benchmark uses a LoadBalancer and we have connections going through multiple nodes to the same backend pod. That was enough to get to the root cause, but let’s start at the beginning…

External Clients and Kubernetes Services

One of the shortcomings of iptables/nftables based networking in Kubernetes is that if an external client connects to your cluster via a NodePort or a LoadBalancer, you may lose its IP address along the way. The reason for this is that the client may connect to Continue reading

Capturing Traffic in Virtual Networking Labs

When I announced the Stub Networks in Virtual Labs blog post on LinkedIn, I claimed it was the last chapter in the “links in virtual labs” saga. I was wrong; here comes the fourth part of the virtual links trilogy – capturing “on the wire” traffic in virtual networking labs.

While network devices provide traffic capture capabilities (usually tcpdump in disguise generating a .pcap file), it’s often better to capture the traffic outside of the device to see what the root cause of the problems you’re experiencing might be.

Read more …

Anthropic Raises 285 Million GPU-Hours Equivalent In Series E Funding

Rather than measure the funding rounds and valuations of AI startups building foundation models in US dollars, perhaps we should just convert that right into GPU-hours rented to train models, since this accounts for the vast majority of spending that OpenAI, Anthropic, and a handful of others do in their day to day operations. …

Anthropic Raises 285 Million GPU-Hours Equivalent In Series E Funding was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Banish bots from your Waiting Room and improve wait times for real users

With Cloudflare Waiting Room, you can safeguard your site from traffic surges by placing visitors in a customizable, virtual queue. Previously, many site visitors waited in the queue alongside bots, only to find themselves competing for inventory once in the application. This competition is inherently unfair, as bots are much faster and more efficient than humans. As a result, humans inevitably lose out in these high-demand situations, unable to secure inventory before bots sweep it all up. This creates a frustrating experience for real customers, who feel powerless against the speed and automation of bots, leading to a diminished experience overall. Those days are over! Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of two Waiting Room solutions that significantly improve the visitor experience.

Now, all Waiting Room customers can add an invisible Turnstile challenge to their queueing page, robustly challenging traffic and gathering analytics on bot activity within their queue. With Advanced Waiting Rooms, you can select between an invisible, managed, or non-interactive widget mode. But, we won’t just block these bots! Instead, traffic with definite bot signals that have failed the Turnstile challenge can be sent to an Infinite Queue, a completely customizable page that mimics a real Continue reading

Training Neural Networks: Backpropagation Algorithm

 Introduction 


The previous chapter explained the operation of a single artificial neuron. It covered how input values are multiplied by their respective weight parameters, summed together, and combined with a bias term. The resulting value, z, is then passed through a non-linear sigmoid function, which squeezed a neuron’s output value y ̂ between 0 and 1.

In this chapter, we form the smallest possible Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) model using only two neurons. While this is far from a Deep Neural Network (DNN), a simple NN with two neurons is sufficient to explain the Backpropagation algorithm, which is the focus of this chapter.

The goal is to demonstrate the training process and illustrate how the Forward Pass (computation phase) first generates a model output, y ̂. The algorithm then evaluates the model’s accuracy by computing the error term using Mean Squared Error (MSE). The first training iteration rarely, if ever, produces a perfect output. To gradually bring the training result closer to the expected value, the Backward Pass (adjustment and communication phase) calculates the magnitude and direction by which the weight values should be adjusted. The Backward Pass is repeated as many times as necessary until an acceptable model Continue reading

Weekend Reads 022825


Over time, experience—and sometimes hard lessons—have shown that security is more than just technology, processes, or a team of IT specialists. Without a strong corporate culture that prioritizes cybersecurity, even the best efforts can be overlooked or misunderstood.


Perhaps this is more important: Did you hear that many scientists are “sceptical”? Perhaps not; the headline wouldn’t sound as good.


ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are very much like a magic act in that their confident responses to almost any query conceal the fact that they are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word.


The market for dielectric liquid required for immersion cooling is dominated by a small number of players that are aware of their market power.


Analysis AI models like OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking can mimic human reasoning through a process called chain of thought.

Hedge 261: The NTIA, Spectrum, and Broadband

In the United States, the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration manages spectrum and researches the current state of Internet connectivity for policy makers. Henning Schulzrinne joins Tom and Russ to discuss the role of the NTIA, spectrum management, and broadband management.
 
You can read the NTIA’s reports here.
 

 
download

HN770: Deploying A Global Network in Minutes With Megaport (Sponsored)

In our conversation today with CTO Cameron Daniel of Megaport, we discuss their global WAN architecture, PoPs, use cases, the Megaport Cloud Router, and more. Megaport is our sponsor today. It’s accurate to describe Megaport as providing Network-as-a-Service. Megaport’s automated connectivity solutions enable rapid provisioning of circuits, contrasting sharply with traditional telcos. The discussion also... Read more »
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