Networking Field Day: Service Provider – Arista VPLS

During the first networking field day: service provider one of the big topics was EVPN versus VPLS. Arista has put a lot of work into their EVPN deployment and this has give then a ton of success in the data center. However, a large portion of the provider space, especially last mile providers, rely on VPLS heavily. This naturally led to discussion about Arista VPLS support.

I’m pleased to see that there is now basic support in EOS as of EOS 4.27.2F and more on the roadmap. Hopefully, we’ll see the off ramp, RFC8560, from VPLS to EVPN which was a hot button topic throughout the week.

In the release notes for EOS 4.27.2F it calls our basic VPLS support. So I took a look. Reviewing the new 4.27.2F manual I found support for LDP PWs on RFC4447 which is virtual private wire support. This also appeared to be in EOS 4.26 but not earlier. I might have missed a different call out in the doc, if I did someone please point me in the right direction so I can update this post!

In the meantime lets review how this works:

mpls  Continue reading

Worth Reading: Higher Levels of Address Aggregation

Every now and then someone tells me how much better the global Internet would be if only we were using recursive layers (RINA) and hierarchical addresses. I always answer “that’s a business problem, not a technical one, and you cannot solve business problems by throwing technology at them”, but of course that has never persuaded anyone who hasn’t been running a large-enough business for long enough.

Geoff Huston is doing a much better job in the March 2022 ISP Column – read the Higher Levels of Address Aggregation, and if you still need more technical details, there’s 30+ pages of RFC 4984.

Worth Reading: Higher Levels of Address Aggregation

Every now and then someone tells me how much better the global Internet would be if only we were using recursive layers (RINA) and hierarchical addresses. I always answer “that’s a business problem, not a technical one, and you cannot solve business problems by throwing technology at them”, but of course that has never persuaded anyone who hasn’t been running a large-enough business for long enough.

Geoff Huston is doing a much better job in the March 2022 ISP Column – read the Higher Levels of Address Aggregation, and if you still need more technical details, there’s 30+ pages of RFC 4984.

What Cloudflare is Doing to Keep the Open Internet Flowing into Russia and Keep Attacks from Getting Out

What Cloudflare is Doing to Keep the Open Internet Flowing into Russia and Keep Attacks from Getting Out
What Cloudflare is Doing to Keep the Open Internet Flowing into Russia and Keep Attacks from Getting Out

Following Russia’s unjustified and tragic invasion of Ukraine in late February, the world has watched closely as Russian troops attempted to advance across Ukraine, only to be resisted and repelled by the Ukrainian people. Similarly, we’ve seen a significant amount of cyber attack activity in the region. We continue to work to protect an increasing number of Ukrainian government, media, financial, and nonprofit websites, and we protected the Ukrainian top level domain (.ua) to help keep Ukraine’s presence on the Internet operational.

At the same time, we’ve closely watched significant and unprecedented activity on the Internet in Russia. The Russian government has taken steps to tighten its control over both the technical components and the content of the Russian Internet. For their part, the people in Russia are doing something very different. They have been adopting tools to maintain access to the global Internet, and they have been seeking out non-Russian media sources. This blog post outlines what we’ve observed.

The Russian Government asserts control over the Internet

Over the last five years, the Russian government has taken steps to tighten its control of a sovereign Internet within Russia’s borders, including laws requiring Russian ISPs to install equipment allowing Continue reading

OSPF Area Types

OSPF Areas are used for OSPF Scalability. In this post, we will have a look at many different topics about OSPF Area Types, their usage, limitations, different router types, and so on.

In OSPF, we have in general two different Area Types. OSPF Backbone Area and OSPF Non-Backbone Area.

There are many different OSPF Non-Backbone Area types and we will cover each one of them, their use case, limitations, and benefits in this post.

OSPF Area 0 – OSPF Backbone Area

First of all, Let’s start with Area 0.

It is known as the Backbone area in OSPF and if there are many different areas, non-backbone areas can communicate with each other through OSPF Area 0.

Let’s use the below topology for the rest of the OSPF Area Types discussion.

OSPF Area Types

Figure – OSPF Area Types

In the above topology, OSPF Area 0, which is OSPF Backbone Area, physically connects different OSPF Non-Backbone Areas.

OSPF Router Types in OSPF Area 0 are known as Internal Backbone Routers. We don’t have OSPF LSA restrictions when it comes to OSPF Area 0, all the LSAs are allowed in this OSPF Area, except Type 4 and Type 7. Type 4 LSA is used for Continue reading

Introduction to Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code Deployments

Introduction I’ve been itching to introduce Pulumi to you all for the longest time. I heard about Pulumi in the mid-point of 2021. At the time I was going through Microsoft AZ-700 studies and figured it would be fun to double up the learning and get my hands on Pulumi. Long story short, I really […]

The post Introduction to Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code Deployments appeared first on Packet Pushers.

VPP Configuration – Part2

VPP

About this series

I use VPP - Vector Packet Processor - extensively at IPng Networks. Earlier this year, the VPP community merged the Linux Control Plane plugin. I wrote about its deployment to both regular servers like the Supermicro routers that run on our AS8298, as well as virtual machines running in KVM/Qemu.

Now that I’ve been running VPP in production for about half a year, I can’t help but notice one specific drawback: VPP is a programmable dataplane, and by design it does not include any configuration or controlplane management stack. It’s meant to be integrated into a full stack by operators. For end-users, this unfortunately means that typing on the CLI won’t persist any configuration, and if VPP is restarted, it will not pick up where it left off. There’s one developer convenience in the form of the exec command-line (and startup.conf!) option, which will read a file and apply the contents to the CLI line by line. However, if any typo is made in the file, processing immediately stops. It’s meant as a convenience for VPP developers, and is certainly not a useful configuration method for all but the simplest topologies.

Luckily, VPP comes Continue reading

Moonlander Keyboard

For the past year and a half or so, I have been using the Keycaps I didn't like they keycaps that shipped with the board (although they were fine). I swapped them out for these retro gaming style XDA profile keycaps. XDA profile keys are all the same height and shape. Key Switches I...continue reading

Heavy Networking 624: Solving Network Problems With Opmantek’s NMIS (Sponsored)

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we speak with Opmantek, a FirstWave company. Opmantek's NMIS is a suite of network monitoring applications for managing fault, performance, configuration, compliance and automation. It supports multi-vendor, multi-tenant and multi-server solutions. We discuss the latest features and real-world use cases.

The post Heavy Networking 624: Solving Network Problems With Opmantek’s NMIS (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Fast Friday Thoughts on Leadership

I’m once more taking part in the BSA Wood Badge leadership course for my local council. I enjoy the opportunity to hone my skills when it comes to leading others and teaching them how to train their own leaders. A lot of my content around coaching, mentoring, and even imposter syndrome has come from the lessons I’ve learned during Wood Badge. It sounds crazy but I enjoy taking vacation time to staff something that looks like work because it feels amazing!

A few random thoughts from the week:

  • You need a sense of urgency in everything you do. You may not know exactly what’s coming or how to adjust for what needs to be done but you need to be moving with purpose to get it done. Not only does that help you with your vision to make things happen but it encourages others to do the same.
  • Team building happens when you’re not focused entirely on the goal. It doesn’t take much for your group to come together but it can only happen when they aren’t charging toward the finish line. Remember that taking a few moments here and there to reinforce the group dynamic can do a lot Continue reading

Weekend Reads 040122


An FBI intelligence memo from March 18 obtained by CBS has revealed that currently 140 or more Russian–based IP addresses are conducting “abnormal scanning activity” of companies in the U.S. energy sector.


In this second part, I lay out a set of recommendations for ways to help ensure that these entanglements of industry and academia don’t grant companies undue influence over the conditions of knowledge creation and exchange.


AvosLocker is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang that first appeared in mid-2021. It has since become notorious for its attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, including the sectors of financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities.


NVIDIA today unveiled powerful new hardware to serve as the key building blocks for its vision to transform data centers into “AI factories,” unleashing new frontiers in technical computing.


More recently, there’s been a growing trend across government and regulatory bodies in the United States towards shorter timeframes for reporting of cybersecurity incidents. Here’s a brief rundown of the recent activity.


Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. Despite all the incredible things computers can do, they are still not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word.


The technique for adding 3D vertical L3 cache Continue reading

Spectrum-4 Ethernet Leaps To 800G With Nvidia Circuits

When Nvidia announced a deal to buy Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion in March 2019, everyone spent a lot of time thinking about the synergies between the two companies and how networking was going to become an increasingly important part of the distributed systems that run HPC and AI workloads. …

Spectrum-4 Ethernet Leaps To 800G With Nvidia Circuits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs
The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

There is no point in rehashing the fact that CAPTCHA provides a terrible user experience. It's been discussed in detail before on this blog, and countless times elsewhere. One of the creators of the CAPTCHA has publicly lamented that he “unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles.” We don’t like them, and you don’t like them.

So we decided we’re going to stop using CAPTCHAs. Using an iterative platform approach, we have already reduced the number of CAPTCHAs we choose to serve by 91% over the past year.

Before we talk about how we did it, and how you can help, let's first start with a simple question.

Why in the world is CAPTCHA still used anyway?

If everyone agrees CAPTCHA is so bad, if there have been calls to get rid of it for 15 years, if the creator regrets creating it, why is it still widely used?

The frustrating truth is that CAPTCHA remains an effective tool for differentiating real human users from bots despite the existence of CAPTCHA-solving services. Of course, this comes with a huge trade off in terms Continue reading

Video: Combining Data-Link- and Network Layer Addresses

The previous videos in the How Networks Really Work webinar described some interesting details of data-link layer addresses and network layer addresses. Now for the final bit: how do we map an adjacent network address into a per-interface data link layer address?

If you answered ARP (or ND if you happen to be of IPv6 persuasion) you’re absolutely right… but is that the only way? Watch the Combining Data-Link- and Network Addresses video to find out.

Watch the video
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