Tech Bytes: Smarter Networking and Automation With SuzieQ’s Network Observability (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast: network observability. SuzieQ is an open-source project that collects, normalizes, stores, and analyzes multi-vendor network data. This data becomes a foundation for network observability and automation. We talk with Dinesh Dutt, creator of SuzieQ and founder of Stardust Systems, which makes a commercial version of SuzieQ. Stardust Systems is... Read more »

PP029: Translating Security Objectives into Business Outcomes

On today’s Packet Protector we talk about how to talk about security objectives in ways that resonate with business and non-technical leaders in your organization. Tying security objectives to business outcomes can help you maintain (or increase) budgets, build trust and credibility with executives, and better align your risk management efforts with the organization’s broader... Read more »

Making progress on routing security: the new White House roadmap

The Internet can feel like magic. When you load a webpage in your browser, many simultaneous requests for data fly back and forth to remote servers. Then, often in less than one second, a website appears. Many people know that DNS is used to look up a hostname, and resolve it to an IP address, but fewer understand how data flows from your home network to the network that controls the IP address of the web server.

The Internet is an interconnected network of networks, operated by thousands of independent entities. To allow these networks to communicate with each other, in 1989, on the back of two napkins, three network engineers devised the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It allows these independent networks to signal directions for IP prefixes they own, or that are reachable through their network. At that time, Internet security wasn’t a big deal — SSL, initially developed to secure websites, wasn’t developed until 1995, six years later. So BGP wasn’t originally built with security in mind, but over time, security and availability concerns have emerged.

Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director issued the Roadmap to Enhancing Internet Routing Security, and Continue reading

Python OOP – Method vs Function and the Mystery of ‘self’

Python OOP - Method vs Function and the Mystery of ‘self’

I just realized how much I didn't know about Python Object-Oriented Programming. I thought I knew the basics, but a few days ago, while going through a Python course, I found out I was wrong. Before I forget what I’ve learned, I wanted to write this blog post and share it with you.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the difference between functions and methods, and what exactly ‘self’ means in Python. So, let’s get to it.

Functions vs Method

class MyClass:
    def say_hello():
        print('Hello')

In this snippet, we’ve defined a Class called MyClass with a function named say_hello. But here’s a question for you - what do you call say_hello? Is it a function or a method?

It’s a common misconception to think that simply defining a function inside a Class automatically makes it a method. However, the distinction lies in how the function is accessed.

Python OOP - Method vs Function and the Mystery of ‘self’
  1. Function - When you define a function inside a class, it’s just a regular function until it’s accessed through an instance of the class.
  2. Method - When you access that function via an instance of the class (e.g., `obj.say_hello'), it becomes a method. This is Continue reading

Poor man’s Traffic Engineering

Segment Routing allows the network operator to deploy Traffic Engineering even with the most basic routers that support the bare minimum of features.

What is traffic engineering

Traffic engineering is a set of techniques to influence the path a particular …

Napalm Configuration Management With Arista EOS

Napalm Configuration Management With Arista EOS

Hi all, welcome back to the Packetswitch blog. In today's post, we'll explore how to use NAPALM for managing device configurations. We'll focus on Arista EOS as our example. We'll cover the methods available in NAPALM and how to push, commit and revert configurations on Arista devices.

We'll start by explaining what NAPALM is and why you might want to use it. Then we'll move on to a few examples and take a look at what happens behind the scenes. This approach will give you a clear understanding of NAPALM's role in network configuration management and how it works with Arista EOS devices.

What is Napalm?

NAPALM stands for Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support. It's a Python library that helps network engineers manage and automate different network devices using a common set of functions. NAPALM solves the problem of dealing with multiple vendor-specific interfaces by providing a unified way to interact with network devices from various manufacturers. This means you can use the same code to manage devices from Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others, saving time and reducing the complexity of network automation tasks.

A Beginner’s Guide to NAPALM Network Automation
In this blog post, we Continue reading

An AX.25 implementation in Rust

After having written a user space AX.25 stack in C++, I got bitten by the Rust bug. So this is the third time I’ve written an AX.25 stack, and I’ve become exceedingly efficient at it.

Here it is:

The reason for a user space stack remains from last time, but this time:

  1. It’s written in Rust. Yay! I know people say Rust has a honeymoon period, but I guess that’s where I am, still.
  2. It’s a normal library first. The previous C++ implementation started off as microservices, which in retrospect was needlessly complex and put the cart before the horse.

I’ve added almost an excessive amount of comments to the code, to cross reference with the specs. The specs that have a few bugs, by the way.

Rust

I’m not an expert in Rust, but it allows for so much more confidence in your code than any other language I’ve tried.

I think I know enough Rust to know what I don’t fully know. Sure, I’ve successfully added lifetime annotations, created macros, and built async code, but I’m not fluent in those yet.

Interestingly, Continue reading

Fixing layout shifts caused by web fonts

In 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals metrics to measure some aspects of real-world user experience on the web. This blog has consistently achieved good scores for two of these metrics: Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint. However, optimizing the third metric, Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures unexpected layout changes, has been more challenging. Let’s face it: optimizing for this metric is not really useful for a site like this one. But getting a better score is always a good distraction. 💯

To prevent the “flash of invisible text” when using web fonts, developers should set the font-display property to swap in @font-face rules. This method allows browsers to initially render text using a fallback font, then replace it with the web font after loading. While this improves the LCP score, it causes content reflow and layout shifts if the fallback and web fonts are not metrically compatible. These shifts negatively affect the CLS score. CSS provides properties to address this issue by overriding font metrics when using fallback fonts: size-adjust, ascent-override, descent-override, and line-gap-override.

Two comprehensive articles explain each property and their computation methods in detail: Creating Perfect Font Fallbacks in CSS and Improved Continue reading

Weekend Reads 083024


Microsoft on Thursday disclosed four medium-severity security flaws in the open-source OpenVPN software that could be chained to achieve remote code execution (RCE) and local privilege escalation (LPE).


Cybersecurity researchers have discovered multiple critical flaws in Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings that, if successfully exploited, could result in serious consequences.


As many as 10 security flaws have been uncovered in Google’s Quick Share data transfer utility for Android and Windows that could be assembled to trigger remote code execution (RCE) chain on systems that have the software installed.


SiFive has announced the launch of its latest core for datacenters, the P870-D, and claims it has a leg up on Arm’s Neoverse N2 in density for AI.


Unstoppable Domains (UD), a provider of Web3 domain names and digital identities, has been officially accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).


CENTR, the association overseeing European country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries, has announced the public release of its Domain Crawler Project code.


Remote SIM provisioning (RSP) for consumer devices is the protocol specified by the GSM Association for downloading SIM profiles into a secure element in a mobile device. The process is commonly known as eSIM, and it Continue reading

HN747: Automate The Easy Things

Our Heavy Networking guest today is Hans Driessens, and we sat down at AutoCon1 to talk through some of his network automation projects. Hans shares his journey from a service engineer to a consultant specializing in network automation. We discuss the evolution of programming languages, the importance of foundational programming skills, and the practicalities of... Read more »

Explore ContainerLab: Simulate Complex Network Topologies with Docker Containers

I stumbled across this tool, while am always a fan of VRNET-LAB https://github.com/vrnetlab/vrnetlab and it operates on docker containers, i could not get it properly bridge it with Local network meaning reachability to internet is something that I never worked on.

A container lab is a virtualized environment that utilises containers to create and manage network testing labs. It offers a flexible and efficient way to simulate complex network topologies, test new features, and perform various network experiments.

One striking feature that i really liked about containerlab is that representation is in a straight yaml which most of the network engineers now a days are Familiar with and its easy to edit the representation.

Other advantages

  • host mappings are done automatically
  • Traffic capture is done with ease

Host mappings after spinning up the lab

Slide explaining the capture process – Courtesy Petr Ankudinov (https://arista-netdevops-community.github.io/building-containerlab-with-ceos/#1)

https://containerlab.dev/quickstart/ – Will give you how to do a quick start and install containerlab.

https://github.com/topics/clab-topo – Topologies contributed by community

https://github.com/arista-netdevops-community/building-containerlab-with-ceos/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file – Amazing Repo

https://arista-netdevops-community.github.io/building-containerlab-with-ceos/ -> This presentation has some a eVPN topology and also explain how to spin up a quick eVPN with ceos Continue reading

Network CI/CD Pipeline – GitLab Introduction

Network CI/CD Pipeline - GitLab Introduction

Hi all, welcome back to our Network CI/CD blog series. In this part, we’ll discuss what exactly GitLab is and the role it plays in the whole CI/CD process. We’ll explore how to use GitLab as a Git repository, how to install GitLab runners, and how to write a GitLab CI/CD pipeline, among other topics. So let’s get to it.

Prerequisites

Before we proceed, let’s go over some prerequisites. This part of the series assumes you have some familiarity with Git, Ansible, and basic Docker concepts. I’m not an expert in any of these, but I have a basic understanding of what each tool does and how to configure and use them. Even if you’re not very familiar, you can still follow along as we go step by step.

Using GitLab as a Git Repo

Git is a version control system that allows you to track changes to your code, collaborate with others, and manage different versions of your projects. It's a fundamental tool for network automation that works with code or configuration files.

Git for Network Engineers
As Network Engineers, we work with various text files such as network device configurations, scripts, and text-based documentation. Managing these Continue reading

Preloading Extra Images with Kubernetes Image Builder

The Image Builder project is a set of tools aimed at automating the creation of Kubernetes disk images—such as VM templates or Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). (Interesting side note: Image Builder is the evolution of a much older Heptio project where I was a minor contributor.) I recently had a need to build a custom AMI with some extra container images preloaded, and in this post I’ll share with you how to configure Image Builder to preload additional container images.

Image Builder isn’t a single binary; it’s a framework built on top of other tools such as Packer and Ansible. Although in this post I’m discussing Image Builder in the context of building an AMI, it’s not limited to use with AWS. You can use Image Builder for a pretty wide collection of platforms (check the Image Builder web site for more details).

To have Image Builder preload additional images into your disk image, there are three changes needed. All three of these changes belong in the images/capi/packer/config/additional_components.json file:

  1. Set load_additional_components to true. (The default value is false.)
  2. Set additional_registry_images to true. (This also defaults to false.)
  3. Set additional_registry_images_list to a comma-delimited list of fully-qualified image Continue reading
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