NAN113: What Works, and What Doesn’t, in Network Automation Projects
Today we are joined by Matt Remke, who has spent years in the trenches of network automation projects as a consultant. Matt offers a unique, non-engineer perspective on scaling network automation in real-world, complex environments for some of the world’s largest companies. Matt shares what worked, what backfired, and the hard-earned lessons he has gained... Read more »netlab 26.02: KinD support, more EVPN/VXLAN
netlab release 26.02 is out, including the usual potpourri of goodies:
- Support for Kubernetes (KinD) clusters based on work by @wnagele
- Layer-2 EVPN/VXLAN support on Cat8000v, IOL, and IOLL2
- netlab graph command can create graphs from a subset of nodes or links
- You can specify the parameters of core links in the fabric plugin
- OSPFv3 reports
The fun part, however, are the new container configuration methods:
PP096: Taking Note of a Notepad++ Attack; Telnet and NTLM Are Still a Thing?
Everything old is new again in today’s Packet Protector news roundup, as a decade-old Telnet exploit resurfaces, and Microsoft unfolds its roadmap to phase out the ancient NTLM protocol. In other news, Google takes down a sprawling residential proxy network, the popular Notepad++ app takes steps to recover from a serious compromise, and a Polish... Read more »Cisco Doubles Up The Switch Bandwidth To Take On AI Scale Up And Scale Out
In the modern AI datacenter – really, a data galaxy at this point because AI processing needs have broken well beyond the bounds of a single datacenter or even multiple datacenters in a region in a few extreme cases – has two pinch points in the network. …
Cisco Doubles Up The Switch Bandwidth To Take On AI Scale Up And Scale Out was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
HS124: Administration DDoS on AI Regulation
The recent U.S. Executive Order 14365, Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, is the administration’s latest attempt to prevent the enforcement of most of the AI laws passed in individual US states. Because it is only an executive order (EO), it cannot directly nullify, supersede, forestall, or put a pause on state-level laws.... Read more »
The Greatest AI Show On Earth
The NVIDIA GTC conference has a reputation for delivering announcements that reshape industry roadmaps. …
The Greatest AI Show On Earth was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.
Multicast PIM Auto RP (V)
In the previous posts in this series, we covered the basics of multicast, IGMP, PIM Dense Mode, and PIM Sparse Mode. In the Sparse Mode post, we manually configured the RP address on every router in the network. This works fine in a small lab, but in a larger network with many routers, it becomes difficult to manage. If the RP changes, you have to update the configuration on every single router.
Multicast PIM Sparse Mode
Sparse Mode only sends traffic to parts of the network that explicitly request it. Routers with interested receivers send Join messages toward
Suresh Vinasiththamby
AutoRP solves this problem by allowing routers to dynamically learn the RP address. Instead of manually configuring the RP on each router, you configure one or more routers to announce themselves as Candidate RPs. A separate router (or the same as the Candidate RP router) called the Mapping Agent collects these announcements and distributes the RP information to all other routers in the network. This makes RP management much easier and also provides a way to implement RP redundancy.
There are two methods to dynamically learn the RP address, which are Auto-RP and Bootstrap Router (BSR). In this Continue reading
Open-Source Network Simulators (2026 Edition)
Brian Linkletter published an updated overview of open-source network simulators and emulators.
containerlab and GNS3 are clear leaders (no surprise there) with the original vrnetlab becoming abandonware (fortunately, we have Roman Dodin’s fork), which makes me think we should focus on using netlab primarily with containerlab and slowly sunset the Vagrant support, particularly considering some people actively hate the license change.
Also, if anyone feels like writing an interface (provider module) between netlab and GNS3, the pull request would be most welcome 😎
Any thoughts? Please leave a comment!
Datacenter Spending Forecast Revised Upwards – Yet Again
This is turning into a “dog bites man” story, but the forecasts for spending in the datacenter for this year keep going up and up, and a few days ago Gartner’s economists and prognosticators finished up their tea and looked at the leaves at the common of a cup through a polished crystal ball and predicted that datacenter spending this year would go up. …
Datacenter Spending Forecast Revised Upwards – Yet Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
NB561: Kubernetes Retires Ingress NGINX; Are Data Centers Headed for Orbit?
Take a Network Break! We start with a trio of follow-ups, including a correction regarding Mplify certifications, Cisco proposing new OSI layers, and free-space optics. Our Red Alert sounds off about a remote code execution vulnerability in the Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile agent. On the news front, Broadcom announces new silicon for wireless APs for... Read more »Fast Arista cEOS Container Configuration
After the enormous speedup I achieved with the FRR containers, I tried to do something similar with the Arista cEOS ones. After all, Arista’s pretty open about running its software on standard Linux, so it should be possible to map host-side configuration files into container-side scripts and execute them, right?
There was just one tiny gotcha: all netlab-generated EOS configuration files are device configuration snippets that are intended to be submitted via EOS CLI, and I didn’t feel like cracking open the netmiko documentation (that’s another backburner project).
However, Arista cEOS includes this magic command called FastCli ;)
From the Stupid DNS Tricks Department: ipasn.net
It's quite surprising what you can do in the DNS when you break out of the conventional contsraints and adopt a more flexible view of the DNS query/response model.The Twin Engine Strategy That Propels AWS Is Working Well
Like Google and Meta Platforms, Amazon knows exactly how to infuse AI into its business operations such as online retail, transportation, advertising, and even the Amazon Web Services cloud. …
The Twin Engine Strategy That Propels AWS Is Working Well was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Fragments of an adolescent web
I have unearthed a few old articles typed during my adolescence, between 1996 and 1998. Unremarkable at the time, these pages now compose, three decades later, the chronicle of a vanished era.1
The word “blog” does not exist yet. Wikipedia remains to come. Google has not been born. AltaVista reigns over searches, while already struggling to embrace the nascent immensity of the web2. To meet someone, you had to agree in advance and prepare your route on paper maps. 🗺️
The web is taking off. The CSS specification has just emerged, HTML tables still serve for page layout. Cookies and advertising banners are making their appearance. Pages are adorned with music and videos, forcing browsers to arm themselves with plugins. Netscape Navigator sits on 86% of the territory, but Windows 95 now bundles Internet Explorer to quickly catch up. Facing this offensive, Netscape opensource its browser.
France falls behind. Outside universities, Internet access remains expensive and laborious. Minitel still reigns, offering phone directory, train tickets, remote shopping. This was not yet possible with the Internet: buying a CD online was a pipe dream. Encryption suffers from inappropriate regulation: the DES algorithm is capped at 40 bits and Continue reading
Multicast PIM Sparse Mode (IV)
In the previous post, we covered PIM Dense Mode and mentioned that it is not widely used in production because of its flood and prune behaviour. Every router in the network receives the multicast traffic first, and then routers without interested receivers have to send prune messages. This is inefficient, especially in large networks.
Multicast PIM Dense Mode
PIM Dense mode assumes that every subnet in the network has interested receivers, so it floods multicast traffic everywhere first. Routers that
Suresh Vinasiththamby
In this post, we will look at PIM Sparse Mode, which takes the opposite approach. Instead of flooding traffic everywhere and pruning where it is not needed, Sparse Mode only sends traffic to parts of the network that explicitly request it. Routers with interested receivers send Join messages and only then does the multicast traffic start flowing. This makes Sparse Mode much more efficient and scalable, which is why it is the preferred mode in most production networks today.
PIM Spare Mode Overview
In Dense Mode, we saw two main problems. Multicast traffic is flooded everywhere, and every router has to maintain state for every multicast group, even if all its interfaces are pruned. Sparse Mode Continue reading