Review: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen11

I’ve recently had the opportunity to start using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (X1C) Gen11 as my primary work system. Since I am not a Windows person—I don’t think I’ve used Windows as a daily driver since before the turn of the century—I’m running Linux on the X1C Gen11. Now that I’ve had a few weeks of regular use, in this post I’ll provide my review of this laptop.

This is my second ThinkPad X1 Carbon; my first was a Gen 5 that I received when I joined Heptio in 2018 (see my review of the X1C Gen5). I loved that laptop; my experience with the Gen5 was what made me choose the X1C Gen11 when given the opportunity. What I’ve found is that the Gen11 improves upon the X1C experience in some ways, but falls short in other ways.

Before getting into the details, here’s a quick rundown on the specifications:

  • 10-core Intel 13th generation Core i7-1365U (two performance cores and eight efficiency cores)
  • 32GB of RAM
  • 512GB NVMe storage
  • 2880×1800 display
  • Two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, and an HDMI port

As with the Gen5, I’m happy with the build quality and subjective “feel” of the laptop; Continue reading

Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types?

In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports, I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:

  • Ethernet II.
  • 802.2 LLC.
  • 802 SNAP.

Historically, there were even more than three, but we’re ignoring that for now. Why do we have three? To understand this, we need to go back in history.

The Origin of Ethernet

In the early 70’s, Robert Metcalfe, inspired by ARPANET and ALOHAnet had been working on developing what we today know as Ethernet. He published a paper in 1976, together with David Boggs, named Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Ethernet_paper_1975.png

In the paper, they describe the addressing used in Ethernet:

3.3 Addressing
Each packet has a source and destination, both of which are identified in the packet’s header.
A packet placed on the Ether eventually propagates to all stations. Any station can copy a packet
from the Ether into its local memory, but normally only an active destination station matching ‘its
address in the packet’s header will do so as the packet passes. By convention, a Continue reading

Testing bgpipe with netlab

Ever since Pawel Foremski talked about BGP Pipe @ RIPE88 meeting, I wanted to kick its tires in netlab. BGP Pipe is a Go executable that runs under Linux (but also FreeBSD or MacOS), so I could add a Linux VM (or container) to a netlab topology and install the software after the lab has been started. However, I wanted to have the BGP neighbor configured on the other side of the link (on the device talking with the BGP Pipe daemon).

I could solve the problem in a few ways:

Read more …

NIST’s first post-quantum standards

On August 13th, 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the first three cryptographic standards designed to resist an attack from quantum computers: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. This announcement marks a significant milestone for ensuring that today’s communications remain secure in a future world where large-scale quantum computers are a reality.

In this blog post, we briefly discuss the significance of NIST’s recent announcement, how we expect the ecosystem to evolve given these new standards, and the next steps we are taking. For a deeper dive, see our March 2024 blog post.

Why are quantum computers a threat?

Cryptography is a fundamental aspect of modern technology, securing everything from online communications to financial transactions. For instance, when visiting this blog, your web browser used cryptography to establish a secure communication channel to Cloudflare’s server to ensure that you’re really talking to Cloudflare (and not an impersonator), and that the conversation remains private from eavesdroppers.

Much of the cryptography in widespread use today is based on mathematical puzzles (like factoring very large numbers) which are computationally out of reach for classical (non-quantum) computers. We could likely continue to use traditional cryptography for decades to Continue reading

Supermicro Financials Get Better As The Company Gets Bigger

It’s still Ketchup Week here at The Next Platform, and we are going to be circling back to look at the financials of a number of bellwether datacenter companies that we could not get to during a number of medical crisis – including but not limited to our family catching COVID when we took a week of vacation at a lake in Michigan. …

Supermicro Financials Get Better As The Company Gets Bigger was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HW034: Fixing Your Indoor Cellular Coverage

In this episode of the Heavy Wireless podcast, we talk with Howard Buzick from American Bandwidth about the evolution and current state of wireless connections, particularly in guest network environments. We explore advancements in Wi-Fi technologies, the workings of Passpoint (formerly Hotspot 2.0), and the differences between Passpoint and Open Roaming.  Howard explains how American... Read more »

NIST’s first post-quantum standards

On August 13th, 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the first three cryptographic standards designed to resist an attack from quantum computers: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. This announcement marks a significant milestone for ensuring that today’s communications remain secure in a future world where large-scale quantum computers are a reality.

In this blog post, we briefly discuss the significance of NIST’s recent announcement, how we expect the ecosystem to evolve given these new standards, and the next steps we are taking. For a deeper dive, see our March 2024 blog post.

Why are quantum computers a threat?

Cryptography is a fundamental aspect of modern technology, securing everything from online communications to financial transactions. For instance, when visiting this blog, your web browser used cryptography to establish a secure communication channel to Cloudflare’s server to ensure that you’re really talking to Cloudflare (and not an impersonator), and that the conversation remains private from eavesdroppers.

Much of the cryptography in widespread use today is based on mathematical puzzles (like factoring very large numbers) which are computationally out of reach for classical (non-quantum) computers. We could likely continue to use traditional cryptography for decades to Continue reading

Summer 2024 weather report: Cloudflare with a chance of Intern-ets

During the summer of 2024, Cloudflare welcomed approximately 60 Intern-ets from all around the globe on a mission to #HelpBuildABetterInternet. Over the course of their internships, our wonderful interns tackled real-world challenges from different teams all over the company and contributed to cutting-edge projects. As returning interns, we – Shaheen, Aaron, and Jada – would like to show off the great work our cohort has done and experiences we’ve had throughout our time here.

Austin Interns after volunteering at the Central Texas Food Bank.

Putting the SHIP in internSHIP

Cloudflare interns take pride in driving high-impact initiatives, playing a vital role in advancing Cloudflare's mission. With our diverse roles and projects this summer, we'd love to highlight some of the exciting work we've been involved in:

Rahul, a Software Engineer intern, built a system to autograde intern application assignments for future students looking to join Cloudflare. It was built entirely on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, using Cloudflare Access, Browser Rendering, D1, Durable Objects, R2, and Workers!

Jessica, a Software Engineer intern, created a new threads api for the Workers AI team that automatically recalls past messages when running inference, helping developers to Continue reading

Istio 1.23 Drops the Sidecar for a Simpler ‘Ambient Mesh’

Louis Ryan, CTO, Solo.io The Istio service mesh software offers a potentially big change in how to handle Kubernetes traffic, with the introduction of an ambient mesh option. Although the technology has been offered as an experimental feature for several releases, the core development team taking feedback from users, this is the first release to offer the feature as a production-grade capability. It’s a new architecture entirely, explained Solo.io, as well as a member of Idit Levine, founder and CEO of Solo.io. Once applications are decomposed into individual services, these services require a way to communicate. Hence it made sense to festoon each Continue reading

NB491: Cisco Revenues Drop 10% in Q4; Texas Instruments Get $1.6 Billion for Chip Factories

Take a Network Break! Hackers may have stolen millions of US Social Security numbers, HPE acquires a multi-cloud management company, and Cisco announces plans to lay off 7% of its employees. Pure Storage joins industry efforts to make Ethernet suitable for AI workloads by signing on to the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Texas Instruments will add... Read more »

Dropped packet metrics with Prometheus and Grafana

Dropped packets due to black hole routes, buffer exhaustion, expired TTLs, MTU mismatches, etc. can result in insidious connection failures that are time consuming and difficult to diagnose. Dropped packet notifications with Arista Networks, VyOS dropped packet notifications and Using sFlow to monitor dropped packets describe implementations of the sFlow Dropped Packet Notification Structures extension for Arista Networks switches, VyOS routers, and Linux servers respectively, providing end to end visibility into packet drop events (including switch port, drop reason and packet header for each dropped packet).

Flow metrics with Prometheus and Grafana describes how define flow metrics and create dashboards to trend the flow metrics over time. This article describes how the same setup can be used to define and trend metrics based on dropped packet notifications.

  - job_name: sflow-rt-drops
    metrics_path: /app/prometheus/scripts/export.js/flows/ALL/txt
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['sflow-rt:8008']
    params:
      metric: ['dropped_packets']
      key:
        - 'node:inputifindex'
        - 'ifname:inputifindex'
        - 'reason'
        - 'stack'
        - 'macsource'
        - 'macdestination'
        - 'null:vlan:untagged'
        - 'null:[or:ipsource:ip6source]:none'
        - 'null:[or:ipdestination:ip6destination]:none'
        - 'null:[or:icmptype:icmp6type:ipprotocol:ip6nexthdr]:none'
      label:
        - 'switch'
        - 'port'
        - 'reason'
        - 'stack'
        - 'macsource'
        - 'macdestination'
        - 'vlan'
        - 'src'
        - 'dst'
        - 'protocol'
      value: ['frames']
      dropped: ['true']
      maxFlows: ['20']
      minValue: ['0.001']

The Prometheus scrape configuration above is used to Continue reading

Summer 2024 weather report: Cloudflare with a chance of Intern-ets

During the summer of 2024, Cloudflare welcomed approximately 60 Intern-ets from all around the globe on a mission to #HelpBuildABetterInternet. Over the course of their internships, our wonderful interns tackled real-world challenges from different teams all over the company and contributed to cutting-edge projects. As returning interns, we – Shaheen, Aaron, and Jada – would like to show off the great work our cohort has done and experiences we’ve had throughout our time here.

Austin Interns after volunteering at the Central Texas Food Bank.

Putting the SHIP in internSHIP

Cloudflare interns take pride in driving high-impact initiatives, playing a vital role in advancing Cloudflare's mission. With our diverse roles and projects this summer, we'd love to highlight some of the exciting work we've been involved in:

Rahul, a Software Engineer intern, built a system to autograde intern application assignments for future students looking to join Cloudflare. It was built entirely on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, using Cloudflare Access, Browser Rendering, D1, Durable Objects, R2, and Workers!

Jessica, a Software Engineer intern, created a new threads api for the Workers AI team that automatically recalls past messages when running inference, helping developers to Continue reading

Why Are OSPF Type 5 LSAs Flooded?

I recently saw a great question on Reddit, on why Type-5 (AS-external) LSAs are flooded, in comparison to Type-3 (Summary) that are regenerated at the ABR. To investigate this, we’ll use the following simple topology where R2 and R3 are ABRs:

OSPF Behavior Type-3 LSAs

Let’s see how OSPF handles Summary LSAs. Let’s first look at Area 1, where R4 is advertising 169.254.0.0/24 into it. This can be seen in the LSDB of R2:

R2#show ip ospf data router 203.0.113.4

            OSPF Router with ID (203.0.113.2) (Process ID 1)

                Router Link States (Area 1)

  LS age: 74
  Options: (No TOS-capability, DC)
  LS Type: Router Links
  Link State ID: 203.0.113.4
  Advertising Router: 203.0.113.4
  LS Seq Number: 80000009
  Checksum: 0x1DF0
  Length: 84
  Number of Links: 5

    Link connected to: a Stub Network
     (Link ID) Network/subnet number: 169.254.0.0
     (Link Data) Network Mask: 255.255.255.0
      Number of MTID metrics: 0
       TOS 0 Metrics: 1

    Link connected to: another Router (point-to-point)
     (Link ID) Neighboring Router ID: 203.0.113.3
     (Link Data) Router Interface address: 192.0.2.14
      Number of MTID metrics: 0
       TOS 0  Continue reading

BGP Session and Address Family Parameters

As I was doing the final integration tests for netlab release 1.9.0, I stumbled upon a fascinating BGP configuration quirk: where do you configure the allowas-in parameter and why?

A Bit of Theory

BGP runs over TCP, and all parameters related to the TCP session are configured for a BGP neighbor (IPv4 or IPv6 address). That includes the source interface, local AS number (it’s advertised in the per-session OPEN message that negotiates the address families), MD5 password (it uses MD5 checksum of TCP packets), GTSM (it uses the IP TTL field), or EBGP multihop (it increases the IP TTL field).

Read more …

Linux: Display and Manage IP Address Settings

Modern computers and their users rely on network connectivity for nearly everything, including cloud-based applications, software access, data access and communication. It seems that every aspect of computing relies on networking. Linux workstations and servers are no different in this necessity than Windows or macOS systems. One of a Linux sysadmin’s primary responsibilities is ensuring network connectivity. This requires understanding the system’s identity on the network and configuring it to participate in network data exchanges. Linux systems have three identities on a network. Various network devices use each identity differently. Here are the three identities with a summary of their use: Hostname: A human-friendly name providing users and administrators with an easy way to identify a node. IP address: A logical address routers and network configuration tools use to identify the system. MAC address: A physical address on the network interface card (NIC) that uniquely identifies it to switches and other Layer 2 devices. For example, a computer’s three identities might look like this: Hostname: computer27 IP address: 192.168.2.200 MAC address: 00:1c:42:73:8d:f2 The use and function of these three network identities are assumed knowledge for this article. Be sure to review basic network information Continue reading

How to Create VyOS Firewall Rules?

How to Create VyOS Firewall Rules?

Hi all, welcome back to another blog post on VyOS. In the previous post, we covered how to install VyOS and set up the initial configurations. In this blog post, we'll cover how to configure firewall rules in VyOS. To demonstrate, we'll create a hypothetical office setup with a VyOS router/firewall. The router will have two interfaces - one facing the Users and another facing the Internet. Our goal is to allow the Users subnet to access the Internet for ICMP, DNS, and general web traffic.

Diagram

Our example is based on the following diagram. I don't have a public IP address on my lab but just play along and pretend that 10.10.0.7 is a public IP 😊 (This IP is behind my ISP's router)

How to Create VyOS Firewall Rules?

As you can see in the diagram, the VyOS router has two interfaces. The interface connected to the Users subnet (Eth1) has an IP address of 10.1.1.1/24. There's also a test machine in this subnet with the IP address 10.1.1.15. Our goal is to ensure that this test machine can successfully ping an Internet IP address and browse the general Internet.

VyOS Firewall Basics

I Continue reading

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