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Events. My first MPLS World Congress: Impressions, Feelings, and Raise of AI.

Hello my friend,

This year I had an incredible opportunity to attend an event, which I wanted to attend for quite a bit back in past, when I was working for service providers (e.g., Vodafone, A1 BLR / Telekom Austria Group). The full name of the event is MPLS SDN and AI World Congress 2022, or simply #mplswc22.


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Thanks

I’m very helpful to my friends and colleagues Pau Nadeu Rabat and Jose Manuel Roman Fernandez Checa for inviting me to take part in the event.

Brief History of the Event

MPLS SDN AI World Congress is one of the biggest events in the networking industry in the Europe. Originally it was called simple MPLS World Congress (hence, the name #mplswc22) and was aiming to bring together the biggest service providers (like the guys I worked for before, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, etc) and vendors of telecom equipment and software (like, Nokia, which I also Continue reading

BGP LU – Labeled Unicast – RFC 3107

BGP LU – BGP Labeled Unicast was defined in RFC 3107. BGP LU is used so commonly in many different network architectures and frameworks. In this post, BGP LU is explained with its use cases.

BGP LU – Labeled Unicast allows BGP to advertise an MPLS Label for the IPv4 and IPv6 Unicast prefixes.

Those who know MPLS may know but let me remind you if an IP prefix is learned via IGP routing protocols such as OSPF and IS-IS, then LDP, RSVP, and Segment Routing can assign an MPLS Label. But if the prefix is learned via BGP, only BGP can assign an MPLS Label. Assigning a label by BGP for the IPv4 or IPv6 Unicast prefix is known as BGP Labeled Unicast.

It is quite easy to understand what is BGP LU but at the beginning of the post, as I said, let’s have a look at its use cases.

BGP LU – RFC 3107 in Inter-AS MPLS VPN

It is used in Inter-AS MPLS VPN Option C, between the ASBRs (Autonomous System Boundary Routers).

In Inter-AS Option C, infrastructure prefixes of ASes are exchanged and for those prefixes, MPLS Label is assigned by BGP. Inter-AS MPLS Continue reading

Worth Reading: Full-Stack Network Automation

Lívio Zanol Puppim published a series of blog posts describing a full-stack network automation, including GitOps with GitLab, handling secrets with Hashicorp Vault, using Ansible and AWX to run automation scripts, continuous integration with Gitlab CI Runner, and topped it off with a REST API and React-based user interface.

You might not want to use the exact same components, but it’s probably worthwhile going through his solution and explore the source code. He’s also looking for any comments or feedback you might have on how to improve what he did.

Worth Reading: Full-Stack Network Automation

Hedge: April Update

You can register for my network troubleshooting course here.

Information about the IEEE Network Softwarification Conference can be found here.

Our upcoming episodes for this month are George Michaelson on the death of ISDN and old networks; an update on the FR Routing project; and Rick Graziani on college and network engineering. Thanks for listening to the Hedge!

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Unicast Multicast Broadcast Anycast and Incast Traffic Types

Unicast Multicast Broadcast Anycast and Incast Traffic Types will be explained in this post. Traffic flow/traffic types are important information that needs to be considered in Network Design, thus understanding each one of them by every IT Engineer is critical and Important for Application requirements, Security, and Performance of the overall system.

In this blog post, Unicast, Multicast, Broadcast, and Anycast traffic types/patterns will be explained with examples and the topologies.

Unicast Traffic Flow

Unicast traffic type is a point-to-point communication type. Usually from a scalability perspective, Unicast is not the desired traffic type. But if there are only two points that communicate with each other, Unicast is an optimal choice.

Multicast Traffic Flow

Point to Multipoint or Multi-Point to Multi-Point Traffic type. If the communication is targeted to a group of recipients, then the Multicast traffic type is more suitable. Multicast source/sender, receivers, and multicast groups are the components of Multicast communication. A classical example is IPTV – IP Television.

One multicast group is assigned for each IPTV channel and only interested receivers get the stream.

Broadcast Traffic Flow

If traffic is sent to everyone, regardless of considering if there is an uninterested receiver, then it is a broadcast Continue reading

Worth Reading: The AI Illusion

Russ White’s Weekend Reads are full of gems, including a recent pointer to the AI Illusion – State-of-the-Art Chatbots Aren’t What They Seem article. It starts with “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.” and it only gets better.

While the article focuses on natural language processing (GPT-3 model), I see no reason why we should expect better performance from AI in networking (see also: AI/ML in Networking – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

Worth Reading: The AI Illusion

Heavy Networking 625: Home IoT Networking At Scale

Today's Heavy Networking dives into home IoT at scale. We’re going to get into the weeds with two network engineers who’ve gone way beyond lighting and a few smart plugs in their home automation setup. We'll talk devices, protocols, security, and more.

Heavy Networking 625: Home IoT Networking At Scale

The post Heavy Networking 625: Home IoT Networking At Scale appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Stacking Up L2 Cache, RIKEN Shows 10X Speedup For A64FX By 2028

Let the era of 3D V-Cache in HPC begin.

Inspired by the idea of AMD’s “Milan-X” Epyc 7003 processors with their 3D V-Cache stacked L3 cache memory and then propelled by actual benchmark tests pitting regular Milan CPUs against Milan-X processors using real-world and synthetic HPC applications, researchers at RIKEN Lab in Japan, where the “Fugaku” supercomputer based on Fujitsu’s impressive A64FX vectorized Arm server chip, have fired up a simulation of a hypothetical A64FX follow-on that could, in theory, be built in 2028 and provide nearly an order of magnitude more performance than the current A64FX. …

Stacking Up L2 Cache, RIKEN Shows 10X Speedup For A64FX By 2028 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Weekend Reads 040822

These guidelines are not about finding a perfectly secure solution but about practical, immediate possible actions with respect to email, instant messaging, voice and video chats, and other important security measures to consider.

The governance of an IXP can deeply affect its development. The difficulty of stating a clear management policy for IXP is the main challenge that limits the growth, sustainability and success of IXPs. In the past years, there have not been enough initiatives that support creating such policies for IXP management.

European telecommunication service providers are being pushed to pick up the pace regarding 5G adoption. However, the next-gen technology requires immense data capacity and transmission speeds, thus setting up the new infrastructure is no easy task for telcos.

With businesses around the globe—especially in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe—bracing for potential cyber-attacks orchestrated by Russia or its hackers, a leading cyber security firm is warning most software upgrades are not adequately addressing the most vulnerable component of the “modern cyber-attack surface.”

Now, a new lawsuit is giving consumers an unprecedented peek into this opaque world, and illuminating just how easily a data broker can lose control of the user information it collects.

Sure, Continue reading

MPLS Benefits 4 Very important things to understand!

MPLS Benefits and Advantages, Network Engineers should understand MPLS. In this post, we will look at what are the benefits of deploying MPLS in the Network, and the advantages of having MPLS-enabled infrastructure.

MPLS is Multi-Protocol Label Switching as you might know already. Multi-Protocol because we can carry many different types of traffic over MPLS.

MPLS is Multi-Protocol Technology

Layer 2 and Layer 3 network traffic Ethernet, Frame Frame-Relay, ATM, TDM different types of traffic was carried over MPLS. Because it provides an abstraction layer for the protocols, it is possible to carry many different types of traffic that couldn’t be possible with other technologies easily.

MPLS is a Scalable Protocol

If we talk about MPLS benefits, probably one of the most important ones would be MPLS Scalability. There is a popular belief that MPLS was invented because the packet processing resource requirement and lookup speed are faster with MPLS, compare to IP destination-based lookup.

Because MPLS is just a switching operation on the Mid-Label Switch Routers – LSR, and MPLS Label is 20 bits long, compared to IP which is 32 bits long with IPv4 and 128 bits long with IPv6, MPLS was considered a better performance protocol, Continue reading

Helpdesk Skills Fit the Bill

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I saw a great tweet yesterday from Swift on Security that talked about helpdesk work and how it’s nothing to be ashamed of:

In past I was afraid to reference me working in Helpdesk. Now I advertise it. You'd be surprised where the highest echelons of tech started, especially in a world where there was no career track much less a degree. People who actually get shit done don't shit on people for sport.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 8, 2022

I thought it was especially important to call this out for my readers. I’ve made no secret that my first “real” job in IT was on the national helpdesk for Gateway Computers through a contractor. I was there for about six months before I got a job doing more enterprise-type support work. And while my skills today are far above what I did when I started out having customers search for red floppy disks and removing helper apps in MSCONFIG, the basics that I learned there are things I still carry with me today.

Rocket Science

Most people have a negative outlook on helpdesk work. They see it as entry-level and not worth admitting to. They also don’t quite understand Continue reading

The Performance Of MLPerf As A Ubiquitous Benchmark Is Lacking

Industry benchmarks are important because, no matter that comparisons are odious, IT organizations nonetheless have to make them to plot out the architectures of their future systems. …

The Performance Of MLPerf As A Ubiquitous Benchmark Is Lacking was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Intel claims sustainability for its custom chip that mines bitcoins faster than GPUs

Intel this week announced details of its new Blockscale ASIC chip designed specifically for more efficient blockchain computing than CPUs or GPUs. It first said it was making such a chip just two months ago.Blockscale is specifically designed to process the Secure Hash Algorithm-256 (SHA-256), which is used by blockchain, and the performance is phenomenal, at least on paper. Blockscale has a hash rate operating speed of up to 580GH/s, or gigahashes per second.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel claims sustainability for its custom chip that mines bitcoins faster than GPUs

IGP vs BGP Explained – 3 Most important things to know!

IGP vs BGP is one of the topics every Network Engineer want to learn in their career. In this post, without going into each IGP protocol detail, where and why IGP or BGP is used and should be used will discuss. As usual, we will look at it from a design aspect and understand the reasons for the protocol selection.

IGP vs BGP comparison from a design perspective using a comparison chart

IGP vs BGP

Although I will not explain the above chart in this blog post in detail, I would like to share it for completeness. Also, please note that we compared BGP with each IGP protocol from a design point of view on the website in different blog posts already.

IGP vs. BGP – BGP is the most scalable routing protocol!

When igp vs BGP is compared, the first thing we should understand is that BGP is the most scalable routing protocol and it is used for the Global Internet.

Global Internet, as of 2022, carries almost a million IPv4 Unicast prefixes.

When we talk about IGP scaling, OSPF, IS-IS, or EIGRP, can carry couple of tens of thousand prefixes, and after that, we may start seeing meltdowns, even in well-designed Continue reading

OSPF LSA Types Explained 11 Types of LSA in OSPF!

OSPF LSA Types is the first topic you need to understand if you are trying to understand OSPF routing protocol. There are 11 different types of LSA in OSPF and we will look at each one of them, why do we have many different LSA in OSPF, we will discuss the topologies and the examples to make it more clear for everyone.

What is LSA in OSPF?

We should start asking the most fundamental question first about OSPF. What is LSA?. LSA stands for Link State Advertisement and it carries, prefix information, interface cost, if advanced technologies such as Traffic Engineering are enabled, can carry link color information, used bandwidth, available bandwidth, and so on.

When a router receives an LSA, it is stored in the Link State Database (LSDB) of OSPF. Once the LSDBs between the routers are synchronized, OSPF uses the SPF/Dijkstra algorithm to calculate the best path for each destination network.

OSPF LSAs are information about a route that is transported inside OSPF Link State Update (LSU) packets.

We can only have scalable, resilient, fast-converged OSPF design when we understand OSPF LSAs and Area types and their restrictions

OSPF LSA Types

Figure -11 Different LSA Types is OSPF v2

OSPF LSA Type Continue reading

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