Docs Spotlight: Keeping the FM in RTFM
Crafting and maintaining high quality documentation is something we all know is very important. Reputable documentation is much more than the result of fantastic product or project management - especially when we're talking about community-driven documentation. Open source communities in particular like to reference "RTFM" (Read the Fine Manual, for the cleaner acronym explanation), but that's only helpful when the "Fine Manual" contains quality documentation. For projects like Ansible, it is our active users that make all the difference, and with their contributions and efforts we are able to help provide the great documentation that supports Ansible. But, that also comes with some caveats.
Many people contribute to open source projects so that they may "scratch their own itch." Whether this works well or creates clunky and cluttered code is not up for debate in this blog post, but how well it works in relation to open source documentation is debatable. Often contributions boil down to very bare bones coverage of a feature or implementation, other times the only contribution made is a typo fix. And while even the small fixes are helpful, these are not the contributions that make the docs great (better, yes, but not yet reaching Continue reading
Docs Spotlight: Keeping the FM in RTFM
Crafting and maintaining high quality documentation is something we all know is very important. Reputable documentation is much more than the result of fantastic product or project management - especially when we're talking about community-driven documentation. Open source communities in particular like to reference "RTFM" (Read the Fine Manual, for the cleaner acronym explanation), but that's only helpful when the "Fine Manual" contains quality documentation. For projects like Ansible, it is our active users that make all the difference, and with their contributions and efforts we are able to help provide the great documentation that supports Ansible. But, that also comes with some caveats.
Many people contribute to open source projects so that they may "scratch their own itch." Whether this works well or creates clunky and cluttered code is not up for debate in this blog post, but how well it works in relation to open source documentation is debatable. Often contributions boil down to very bare bones coverage of a feature or implementation, other times the only contribution made is a typo fix. And while even the small fixes are helpful, these are not the contributions that make the docs great (better, yes, but not yet reaching Continue reading
OED Tools: NetSetMan
The problem I manage many networks and quite often I work at customer site. For every site I need and IP address, gateway, Wi-Fi network, sometimes proxy, a printer and many other unique network settings. Change IP address on Windows is a process that takes too much time and many clicks. The automation I used […]What’s inside net/http? Late binding in the Go standard library
It's well known that we're heavy users of the Go programming language at CloudFlare. Our work often involves delving into the standard library source code to understand internal code paths, error handling and performance characteristics.
Recently, I looked at how the standard library's built-in HTTP client handles connections to remote servers in order to provide minimal roundtrip latency.
CC By 2.0 Image by Dean Hochman
Connection pooling
A common pattern that aims to avoid connection setup costs (such as the TCP handshake and TLS setup) and confer control over the number of concurrently established connections is to pool them. net/http maintains a pool of connections to each remote host which supports Connection: keep-alive. The default size of the pool is two idle connections per remote host.
More interestingly, when you make a request with net/http, a race happens. Races in code are often an unwanted side effect, but in this case it's intentional. Two goroutines operate in parallel: one that tries to dial a connection to the remote host, and another which tries to retrieve an idle connection from the connection pool. The fastest goroutine wins.
To illustrate, let's look at the code executed when transport.RoundTrip(req) is Continue reading
Merry Christmas!
I’m taking a little break from the blog ’til the beginning of the year… See you on the front side of 2016.
The post Merry Christmas! appeared first on 'net work.
IT Pros Brace For Holiday Nightmares
While other employees are taking time off or partying it up during the holiday season, IT teams are busy fixing problems, according to an Ipswitch poll.OpenConfig, Data Models, and APIs
[Special thanks to Rob Shakir for taking the time to talk about OpenConfig and the related work he has going on. He definitely helped make the second half of this post happen- thank you, Rob. Note: all of the BGP code examples are borrowed from Rob and his original work can be found here.]
Introduction
As more devices continue to add support for APIs, and the industry migrates from CLI to API, the question often arises, “is there ever going to be a common multi-vendor network device API?”
Let me answer that for you, “No!” Why? Think about it. What’s in it for the vendors?
If you keep reading, you may see that there is in fact a reason for vendors to develop a common API.
That said, this is the reason I initiated CPAL almost 2 years ago, which didn’t go anywhere for a number of reasons, and as an aside, we are re-visiting the idea beyond CPAL, and you should see something within a few weeks! And this is also the reason we have projects such as netmiko, ntc-ansible, NAPALM, and one that is the focus of this post, OpenConfig.
This Continue reading
Why It’s Time to Build a Zero Trust Network
Network security, for a long time, has worked off of the old Russian maxim, “trust but verify.” Trust a user, but verify it’s them. However, today’s network landscape — where the Internet of Things, the Cloud, and more are introducing new vulnerabilities — makes the “verify” part of “trust but verify” difficult and inefficient. We need a simpler security model. That model: Zero Trust. Continue reading