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:
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.
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.
This should summarise it all.
Colab Notebook – https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1WV6J8IqEfYbn__H2g9-hOoHqfx-YD5iA?usp=sharing
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:
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.
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
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 readingGeorge 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 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
January 27 marks the International Holocaust Remembrance Day — a solemn occasion to honor the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, along with countless others who fell victim to the Nazi regime's campaign of hatred and intolerance. This tragic chapter in human history serves as a stark reminder of the catastrophic consequences of prejudice and extremism.
The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of this infamous extermination camp.
As the world reflects on this dark period, a troubling resurgence of antisemitism underscores the importance of vigilance. This growing hatred has spilled into the digital realm, with cyberattacks increasingly targeting Jewish and Holocaust remembrance and educational websites — spaces dedicated to preserving historical truth and fostering awareness.
For this reason, here at Cloudflare, we began to publish annual reports covering cyberattacks that target these organizations. These cyberattacks include DDoS attacks as well as bot and application attacks. The insights and trends are based on websites protected by Cloudflare. This is our fourth report, and you can view our previous Holocaust Continue reading
Maybe they should have called it DeepFake, or DeepState, or better still Deep Selloff. …
How Did DeepSeek Train Its AI Model On A Lot Less – And Crippled – Hardware? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Let me start by saying that I usually run Containerlab on a dedicated Ubuntu 22.04 VM, which sits on top of Proxmox. All my labs run on this setup. However, I recently wanted to try running Containerlab directly on my MacBook (M3 Pro with 18GB of RAM) for a few reasons. For example, I might need to run labs while I’m away, work offline, or use a MacBook at work where I can’t access my home network. So, I decided to test whether I could run Cisco IOL and Arista EOS on macOS. The answer is yes, and here’s how you can do it.
As always, if you find this post helpful, press the ‘clap’ button on the left. It means a lot to me and helps me know you enjoy this type of content.
If you’re new to Containerlab and trying to understand what it is, I highly recommend checking out my introductory post, which is linked below. It covers the basics and will help you get started.