Do You Need To Answer That Question?

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We’ve all been in a situation where we’re listening to a presentation or in a class where someone is sharing knowledge. The presenter or expert finishes a point and stops to take a breath or move on to the next point when you hear a voice.

“What they meant to say was…”

You can already picture the person doing it. I don’t need to describe the kind of person that does this. We all know who it is and, if you’re like me, it drives you crazy. I know it because I’ve found myself being that person several times and it’s something I’m working hard to fix.

Info to Share

People that want to chime in feel like they have important things to share. Maybe they know something deeper about the subject. Perhaps they’ve worked on a technology and have additional information to add to the discussion. They mean well. They’re eager to add to the discussion. They mean well. Most of the time.

What about the other times? Maybe it’s someone that thinks they’re smarter than the presenter. I know I’ve had to deal with that plenty of times. It could be an Continue reading

Goodbye, Cumulus Community Vagrant Boxes

Last Monday, I decided to review and merge the “VXLAN on Cumulus Linux 5.x with NVUE” pull request. I usually run integration tests on the modified code to catch any remaining gremlins, but this time, all the integration tests started failing during the VM creation phase. I was completely weirded out, considering everything worked a week ago.

Fortunately, Vagrant debugging is pretty good1 and I was quickly able to pinpoint the issue (full printout):

Read more …

Network Automation and AI at NANOG 93

The dominant theme of the presentations this time around at NANOG 93 was the combination of automation of network command and control and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools to this control function. The interest in AI appears to have heightened of late, and while the hype levels are impressive even for an industry that can get totally fixated on hype, the deliverables so far still appear to fall somewhat short.

PP050: Understanding–and Protecting Yourself From–the Malware Economy

There’s a robust malware economy with an active market for exploits, brokered access to compromised systems, ransomware, bots-as-a-service, and more. And this malware economy is targeted at you. On today’s Packet Protector we talk with Jake Williams, a security researcher, consultant, and instructor, about the malware economy, how it operates, and the most effective strategies... Read more »

Tech Bytes: Nokia Event-Driven Automation: Simple, Reliable Data Center Automation (Sponsored)

Nokia’s Event-Driven Automation, or EDA, is a network automation platform that aims to help network engineers achieve predictable, error-free operations so you can keep up with all the change tickets coming your way while ensuring the data center is reliable and performant. On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Nokia, we’ll talk about how EDA... Read more »

NB514: Cisco, Juniper Announce New Switches; SolarWinds Goes Private in $4.4 Billion Buyout

Take a Network Break! We start with some Red Alert vulnerabilities to get your blood pumping, and then dive into networking news. Cisco announces new data center switches with AMD Pensando DPUs that let you deploy security and other services directly on to the switch. Cisco ThousandEyes is previewing Traffic Insights, which correlates flow records... Read more »

HS095: The Journey to a Self-Healing Network: Intelligence, Agents, and Complexity (Sponsored)

Can AI and automation create a truly autonomous network, one that’s self-diagnosing and self-healing? Join Vitria CTO and Founder Dale Skeen and industry analyst Charlotte Patrick in this sponsored episode of Heavy Strategy to discuss the challenges–and limitations–of using AI to create autonomous networking. This discussion covers the “intelligence architecture” required to implement automation, and ... Read more »

Loopback as a Service

Methods of steering traffic into MPLS and Segment Routing LSP is one of the least standardized and most confusing parts of traffic engineering.

The mess of nexthop resolution

Despite some existing interoperability issues, in general, the MPLS and SR control …

BalticNOG Meeting (September 2025)

Donatas Abraitis asked me to spread the word about the first ever Baltic NOG meeting in the second half of September 2025 (more details)

If you were looking for a nice excuse to visit that part of Europe (it’s been on my wish list for a very long time), this might be a perfect opportunity to do it 😎.

On a tangential topic of fascinating destinations 😉, there’s also ITNOG in Bologna (May 19th-20th, 2025), Autocon in Prague (May 26th-30th, 2025), and SWINOG in Bern (late June 2025).

Read more …

Helping civil society monitor attacks with the CyberPeaceTracer and Cloudflare Email Security

Civil society organizations have always been at the forefront of humanitarian relief efforts, as well as safeguarding civil and human rights. These organizations play a large role in delivering services during crises, whether it is fighting climate change, support during natural disasters, providing health services to marginalized communities and more. 

What do many of these organizations have in common? Many times, it’s cyber attacks from adversaries looking to steal sensitive information or disrupt their operations. Cloudflare has  seen this firsthand when providing free cybersecurity services to vulnerable groups through programs like Project Galileo, and found that in aggregate, organizations protected under the project experience an average of 95 million attacks per day. While cyber attacks are a problem across all industries in the digital age, civil society organizations are disproportionately targeted, many times due to their advocacy, and because attackers know that they typically operate with limited resources. In most cases, these organizations don’t even know they have been attacked until it is too late. 

Over the last 10 years of Project Galileo, we’ve had the opportunity to work more closely with leading civil society organizations. This has led to a number of exciting new partnerships, Continue reading

Large Language Model (LLM) – Part 2/2: Transformer Architecture

 Introduction

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) language translation and Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models are subcategories of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that utilize the Transformer architecture. Seq2seq models are typically using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks or encoder-decored based Transformers. In contrast, GPT is an autoregressive language model that uses decoder-only Transformer mechanism. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the decoder-only Transformer architecture.

The Transformer consists of stacks of decoder modules. A word embedding vector, a result of the word tokenization and embbeding, is fed as input to the first decoder module. After processing, the resulting context vector is passed to the next decodeer, and so on. After the final decoder, a softmax layer evaluates the output against the complete vocabulary to predict the next word. As an autoregressive model, the predicted word vector from the softmax layer is converted into a token before being fed back into the subsequent decoder layer. This process involves a token-to-word vector transformation prior to re-entering the decoder.

Each decoder module consists of an attention layer, Add & Normalization layer and a feedforward neural network (FFNN). Rather than feeding the embedded word vector (i.e., token embedding plus positional encoding) directly Continue reading

TNO016: One Integrated Experience for NetOps, SecOps, and Business Teams (Sponsored)

Collaboration among tech and business teams is crucial to advancing your business. Extreme Networks is introducing Extreme Platform ONE to support this collaboration. In this sponsored episode, we talk about how this product is designed to streamline workflows and enhance user experience through automation and AI integration. Extreme Networks Platform ONE is a centralized platform... Read more »

Hedge 259: Architecture and Process

We often try to “institutionalize” things that work into repeatable processes—and most of the time, it doesn’t work. The process ends up becoming unwieldy, eventually failing to prevent failures and stifling innovation. How can we get out of this rut? Differentiating between architecture and process. Far too many IT shops try to replace architecture with process. Our second topic for this episode is the destructive lies of the tool trope. Tools are not “neutral,” they impact the way we think and work. A primary example of a tool that can often reshape our thinking and doing in very negative ways is … the process.

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Searching for the cause of hung tasks in the Linux kernel

Depending on your configuration, the Linux kernel can produce a hung task warning message in its log. Searching the Internet and the kernel documentation, you can find a brief explanation that the kernel process is stuck in the uninterruptable state and hasn’t been scheduled on the CPU for an unexpectedly long period of time. That explains the warning’s meaning, but doesn’t provide the reason it occurred. In this blog post we’re going to explore how the hung task warning works, why it happens, whether it is a bug in the Linux kernel or application itself, and whether it is worth monitoring at all.

INFO: task XXX:1495882 blocked for more than YYY seconds.

The hung task message in the kernel log looks like this:

INFO: task XXX:1495882 blocked for more than YYY seconds.
     Tainted: G          O       6.6.39-cloudflare-2024.7.3 #1
"echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
task:XXX         state:D stack:0     pid:1495882 ppid:1      flags:0x00004002
. . .

Processes in Linux can be in different states. Some of them are running or ready to run on the CPU — they are in the TASK_RUNNING state. Others are waiting for some signal or event to happen, e.g. network packets to arrive or terminal input Continue reading

Pike is wrong on bloat

This is my response to Rob Pike’s words On Bloat.

I’m not surprised to see this from Pike. He’s a NIH extremist. And yes, in this aspect he’s my spirit animal when coding for fun. I’ll avoid using a framework or a dependency because it’s not the way that I would have done it, and it doesn’t do it quite right… for me.

And he correctly recognizes the technical debt that an added dependency involves.

But I would say that he has two big blind spots.

  1. He doesn’t recognize that not using the available dependency is also adding huge technical debt. Every line of code you write is code that you have to maintain, forever.

  2. The option for most software isn’t “use the dependency” vs “implement it yourself”. It’s “use the dependency” vs “don’t do it at all”. If the latter means adding 10 human years to the product, then most of the time the trade-off makes it not worth doing at all.

He shows a dependency graph of Kubernetes. Great. So are you going to write your own Kubernetes now?

Pike is a good enough coder that he can write his own editor (wikipedia: “Pike has written many text Continue reading

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