The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Austin is the flagship datacenter for supercomputing for the US National Science Foundation, and so what TACC does – and doesn’t do – is a kind of bellwether for academic supercomputing. …
TACC Fires Up “Vista” Bridge To Future “Horizon” Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Ages ago, I described how “traditional” network operating systems used the BGP Routing Information Base (BGP RIB), the system routing table (RIB), and the forwarding table (FIB). Here’s the TL&DR:
Rated horsepower for a compute engine is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it is where the rubber hits the road that really matters. …
The First AI Benchmarks Pitting AMD Against Nvidia was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Béla Várkonyi wrote a succinct comment explaining why so many customers prefer layer-2 VPNs over layer-3 VPNs:
The reason of L2VPN is becoming more popular by service providers and customers is about provisioning complexity.
The Internet can feel like magic. When you load a webpage in your browser, many simultaneous requests for data fly back and forth to remote servers. Then, often in less than one second, a website appears. Many people know that DNS is used to look up a hostname, and resolve it to an IP address, but fewer understand how data flows from your home network to the network that controls the IP address of the web server.
The Internet is an interconnected network of networks, operated by thousands of independent entities. To allow these networks to communicate with each other, in 1989, on the back of two napkins, three network engineers devised the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It allows these independent networks to signal directions for IP prefixes they own, or that are reachable through their network. At that time, Internet security wasn’t a big deal — SSL, initially developed to secure websites, wasn’t developed until 1995, six years later. So BGP wasn’t originally built with security in mind, but over time, security and availability concerns have emerged.
Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director issued the Roadmap to Enhancing Internet Routing Security, and Continue reading
I just realized how much I didn't know about Python Object-Oriented Programming. I thought I knew the basics, but a few days ago, while going through a Python course, I found out I was wrong. Before I forget what I’ve learned, I wanted to write this blog post and share it with you.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the difference between functions and methods, and what exactly ‘self’ means in Python. So, let’s get to it.
class MyClass:
def say_hello():
print('Hello')In this snippet, we’ve defined a Class called MyClass with a function named say_hello. But here’s a question for you - what do you call say_hello? Is it a function or a method?
It’s a common misconception to think that simply defining a function inside a Class automatically makes it a method. However, the distinction lies in how the function is accessed.
This lab delves into configuring a Cisco 1812 router, a legacy device with 100 Mbps […]
The post Cisco 1812 as Home Router first appeared on Brezular's Blog.
Segment Routing allows the network operator to deploy Traffic Engineering even with the most basic routers that support the bare minimum of features.
Traffic engineering is a set of techniques to influence the path a particular …
Nick Buraglio and Brian E. Carpenter published a free, open-source IPv6 textbook.
The book seems to be in an early (ever-evolving) stage, but it’s well worth exploring if you’re new to the IPv6 world, and you might consider contributing if you’re a seasoned old-timer.
It would also be nice to have a few online labs to go with it ;)
Hi all, welcome back to the Packetswitch blog. In today's post, we'll explore how to use NAPALM for managing device configurations. We'll focus on Arista EOS as our example. We'll cover the methods available in NAPALM and how to push, commit and revert configurations on Arista devices.
We'll start by explaining what NAPALM is and why you might want to use it. Then we'll move on to a few examples and take a look at what happens behind the scenes. This approach will give you a clear understanding of NAPALM's role in network configuration management and how it works with Arista EOS devices.
NAPALM stands for Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support. It's a Python library that helps network engineers manage and automate different network devices using a common set of functions. NAPALM solves the problem of dealing with multiple vendor-specific interfaces by providing a unified way to interact with network devices from various manufacturers. This means you can use the same code to manage devices from Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others, saving time and reducing the complexity of network automation tasks.
After having written a user space AX.25 stack in C++, I got bitten by the Rust bug. So this is the third time I’ve written an AX.25 stack, and I’ve become exceedingly efficient at it.
Here it is:
The reason for a user space stack remains from last time, but this time:
I’ve added almost an excessive amount of comments to the code, to cross reference with the specs. The specs that have a few bugs, by the way.
I’m not an expert in Rust, but it allows for so much more confidence in your code than any other language I’ve tried.
I think I know enough Rust to know what I don’t fully know. Sure, I’ve successfully added lifetime annotations, created macros, and built async code, but I’m not fluent in those yet.
Interestingly, Continue reading
In 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals metrics to measure some aspects of real-world user experience on the web. This blog has consistently achieved good scores for two of these metrics: Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint. However, optimizing the third metric, Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures unexpected layout changes, has been more challenging. Let’s face it: optimizing for this metric is not really useful for a site like this one. But getting a better score is always a good distraction. 💯
To prevent the “flash of invisible text” when using web fonts, developers should
set the font-display property to swap in @font-face rules. This method
allows browsers to initially render text using a fallback font, then replace it
with the web font after loading. While this improves the LCP score, it causes
content reflow and layout shifts if the fallback and web fonts are not
metrically compatible. These shifts negatively affect the CLS score. CSS
provides properties to address this issue by overriding font metrics when using
fallback fonts: size-adjust,
ascent-override, descent-override,
and line-gap-override.
Two comprehensive articles explain each property and their computation methods in detail: Creating Perfect Font Fallbacks in CSS and Improved Continue reading
We have been watching the big original equipment manufactures like a hawk to see how they are generating revenues and income from GPU-accelerated system sales. …
Dell’s AI Server Business Now Bigger Than VMware Used To Be was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.