2022 Goals
In 2021, the pandemic managed to get to me. It seemed
like alot of curve balls came my way. But, myself and
my family came out the other end healthy and in relatively
good spirits.
2022 is going to be a bit of a do-over in terms of my goals
for the year.
Without further...continue reading
I just noticed that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new spec for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a fan of referring to technology by the standard, not by a catch term that serves as a way to trademark something, like Pentium. Anyway, this updated new standard for wireless communications was announced on January 5th at CES and seems to be an entry in the long line of embarrassing companies that forget to think ahead when naming things.
Standards Bodies Suck
Let’s look at what’s included in the new release for Wi-Fi 6. The first and likely biggest thing to crow about is uplink multi-user MIMO. This technology is designed to enhance performance and reduce latency for things like video conferencing and uploading data. Essentially, it creates multi-user MIMO for data headed back the other direction. When the standard was first announced in 2018 who knew we would have spent two years using Zoom for everything? This adds functionality to help alleviate congestion for applications that upload lots of data.
The second new feature is power management. This one is aimed primarily at IoT devices. The combination of broadcast target wake Continue reading
I’ve recently finished my 16th book (according to Goodreads, at any rate). This one is a little different than my normal fare—it’s essentially an expanded and revised version of the dissertation. Rather than being about technology proper, this latest is an examination of the history and philosophy of the superset of social media, which I’ve dubbed neurodigital media.
Fair warning, some readers might find this book a little … controversial.
This Heavy Networking episode focuses on building a data center fabric. Pluribus Networks is our sponsor. Pluribus brought along a customer to talk about their active/active DC deployment. We’ll get into stretching layer 2 safely, Pluribus's L3 capabilities, operational concerns of active/active when the DCs are many hundreds of miles apart, and the pressure of delivering customer-facing services that drove the selection of the Pluribus architecture.
This Heavy Networking episode focuses on building a data center fabric. Pluribus Networks is our sponsor. Pluribus brought along a customer to talk about their active/active DC deployment. We’ll get into stretching layer 2 safely, Pluribus's L3 capabilities, operational concerns of active/active when the DCs are many hundreds of miles apart, and the pressure of delivering customer-facing services that drove the selection of the Pluribus architecture.
Despite the term async and its association with asynchronous network I/O, this blog post argues that the Tokio.rs describes it as: “an asynchronous runtime for the Rust programming language. It provides the building blocks needed for writing network applications.”
While this description emphasizes Tokio’s use for network communications, the runtime can be used for other purposes, as we will explore below.
Why Use Tokio for CPU tasks?
It turns out that modern analytics engines invariably need to Continue reading
Recently, we made an optimization to the Cloudflare Workers runtime which reduces the amount of time Workers need to spend in memory. We're passing the savings on to you for all your Unbound Workers.
Background
Workers are often used to implement HTTP proxies, where JavaScript is used to rewrite an HTTP request before sending it on to an origin server, and then to rewrite the response before sending it back to the client. You can implement any kind of rewrite in a Worker, including both rewriting headers and bodies.
Many Workers, though, do not actually modify the response body, but instead simply allow the bytes to pass through from the origin to the client. In this case, the Worker's application code has finished executing as soon as the response headers are sent, before the body bytes have passed through. Historically, the Worker was nevertheless considered to be "in use" until the response body had fully finished streaming.
For billing purposes, under the Workers Unbound pricing model, we charge duration-memory (gigabyte-seconds) for the time in which the Worker is in use.
The change
On December 15-16, we made a change to the way we handle requests that are streaming through the Continue reading
Not every manufacturing node comes out perfectly and not every one comes out on time, but in the past decade and a half, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest and most technologically advanced etcher of chips in the world, has done far better than any of its few remaining peers to push the chip manufacturing envelope while also maintaining consistent and profitable production of older nodes. …
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the fold command. It allows you to limit the length of lines when displaying a text file by "folding" long lines into smaller pieces and, of course, you can save the shortened lines into another file.
Hardware hacking isn’t a topic most network engineers are familiar with—but we always used to say that if I can get access to the console of a router, I can eventually get into the box. The same is largely true of all kinds of computing hardware, including laptops, compute nodes connected to a data center fabric, and, again, routers and switches. In this episode of the Hedge, Federico Lucifredi joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the many options hardware hackers have today.
In the latest episode of IPv6 Buzz, we tackle the first listener questions of the year (well, really left over from the end of 2021 but still good ones!). Those questions cover topics including Unique Local Addressing (ULA) and SD-WAN, NAT66, IPv6 prefix delegation, and more.
In the latest episode of IPv6 Buzz, we tackle the first listener questions of the year (well, really left over from the end of 2021 but still good ones!). Those questions cover topics including Unique Local Addressing (ULA) and SD-WAN, NAT66, IPv6 prefix delegation, and more.
Note: The ASR 9000 series routers also support Cisco Netflow. Rapidly detecting large flows, sFlow vs. NetFlow/IPFIX describes why you should choose sFlow if you are interested in real-time monitoring and control applications.
The following commands configure an ASR 9000 series router to sample packets at 1-in-20,000 and stream telemetry to an sFlow analyzer (192.127.0.1) on UDP port 6343.
flow exporter-map SF-EXP-MAP-1 version sflow v5 ! packet-length 1468 transport udp 6343 source GigabitEthernet0/0/0/1 destination 192.127.0.1 dfbit set !
Configure the sFlow analyzer address in an exporter-map.
Enable sFlow on each interface for complete visibilty into network traffic.
The diagram shows the general architecture of an sFlow monitoring deployment. All the switches stream sFlow telemetry to a central sFlow analyzer for network Continue reading