Wi-Fi 6 Release 2, Or Why Naming Conventions Suck

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

Unintended Dystopia

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.

From the back of the book—

Social media, shopping experiences, and mapping programs might not seem like they have much in common, but they are all built on neurodigital media. What is neurodigital media? It lives at the intersection of the Californian Ideology, the digital computing revolution, network ecosystems, the nudge, and a naturalistic view of the person. The Californian Ideology holds individuals should be reshaped, naturalism says individuals may be reshaped, and digital computing provides the tools, through network ecosystems theory and the nudge, that can reshape individuals. This book explores the history and impact of neurodigital media in the lives of everyday users.

Heavy Networking 613: Deploying An Active-Active Data Center Network For Private Cloud (Sponsored)

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.

Heavy Networking 613: Deploying An Active-Active Data Center Network For Private Cloud (Sponsored)

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.

The post Heavy Networking 613: Deploying An Active-Active Data Center Network For Private Cloud (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Using Rustlang’s Async Tokio Runtime for CPU-Bound Tasks

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

A Workers optimization that reduces your bill

A Workers optimization that reduces your bill
A Workers optimization that reduces your bill

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

Video: Local Area Network Addressing

In the Local Area Network Addressing video (part of How Networks Really Work webinar) I covered numerous obscure LAN addressing details including:

  • There’s no layer-2 address in Fibre Channel frames (because FC is routing not bridging);
  • Why is the multicast bit the lowest bit (0x01) in the first byte on Ethernet but the highest bit (0x80) on Token Ring or FDDI;
  • How some NIC manufacturers never got the memo on what OUI really means.
Watch the video
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video, and the Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to register for upcoming live sessions.

Video: Local Area Network Addressing

In the Local Area Network Addressing video (part of How Networks Really Work webinar) I covered numerous obscure LAN addressing details including:

  • There’s no layer-2 address in Fibre Channel frames (because FC is routing not bridging);
  • Why is the multicast bit lowest bit (0x01) in first byte on Ethernet but highest bit (0x80) on Token Ring or FDDI;
  • How some NIC manufacturers never got the memo on what OUI really means.
Watch the video
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video, and the Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to register for upcoming live sessions.

The Money Printing Press That Is Chip Maker TSMC

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. …

The Money Printing Press That Is Chip Maker TSMC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hedge 114: Hardware Hacking 101 with Federico Lucifredi

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.

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IPv6 Buzz 092: Listener Questions – NAT66, Stable 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.

The post IPv6 Buzz 092: Listener Questions – NAT66, Stable IPv6 Prefix Delegation And More! appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers

Cisco already supports industry standard sFlow telemetry across a range of products and the recent IOS-XR Release 7.5.1 extends support to Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers.

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.

flow monitor-map SF-MON-MAP
 record sflow
 sflow options
  extended-router
  extended-gateway
  if-counters polling-interval 300
  input ifindex physical
  output ifindex physical
 !
 exporter SF-EXP-MAP-1
!

Configure sFlow options in a monitor-map.

sampler-map SF-SAMP-MAP
 random 1 out-of 20000
!

Define the sampling rate in a sampler-map.

interface GigabitEthernet0/0/0/3
 flow datalinkframesection monitor-map SF-MON-MAP sampler SF-SAMP-MAP ingress

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

Explicit Null in Segment Routing

MPLS is such a user-friendly technology it needs a special label that does nothing.

Why explicit null

Normally, the penultimate router in the LSP removes (pops) the top transport label, so that the egress LSR will deal either with the …

Worst Topics To Discuss At A Dinner Party

The holiday season is near. This means you will have to attend dinner parties. And, of course, conversations are the best way to have fun at most events.

When you interact with people at a dinner party, you can talk about various things. For example, you may want to discuss your hobbies, interests, and much more. 

However, there are some topics that you should avoid. Here are the worst topics to discuss at a dinner party.

  1. Controversial Jokes

During dinner parties, you are not banned from making jokes. However, you should avoid controversial topics at all costs. Humor is harmless and good only if it’s not very sarcastic.

Besides that, you may decide to joke about another person that is not at the event. Well, we suggest you do not. That is because the individual you’re talking to may know that person. Additionally, it is not good etiquette to talk behind someone’s back.

  1. Encouraging Someone To Eat Or Drink

Yes, we understand that at a dinner party eating is mainly the point. But of course, you should never tell someone to eat more. This is, of course, unless you’re the host. 

A person may have eaten less as Continue reading

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