The ants and the pheromones

TLDR; this is the last edition of The Morning Paper for now. Plus: one strand of research you won’t want to miss!

I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast recently (More or Less: Behind the Stats – Ants and Algorithms) in which the host Tim Harford is interviewing David Sumpter about his recent book, ‘The ten equations that rule the world.’ One of those equations, the ‘reward equation’ models how ants communicate using pheromones, and our own brains keep track of rewards using dopamine.

About 4 and a half minutes into the podcast Tim asks a fascinating question: the reward equation includes a decay or ‘forgetting’ parameter, so what happens if you disrupt established solutions for long enough that their hold is broken? For example, the complete disruption to our established routines that Covid has caused over the last year? The answer for ants, if you disrupt all of the pheromone trails around their nest, is that they converge on a new solution in the environment, but it won’t necessarily look the same as the one they had before the disruption. (If you’re interested in the amazing problem-solving skills of ants and how we Continue reading

Automate Leaf and Spine Deployment – Part2

The 2nd post in the ‘Automate Leaf and Spine Deployment’ series describes process used for validating the variable files format and content. The idea behind this offline pre-validation is to catch any errors in the variable files before device configuration is attempted. Fail fast based on logic instead of failing halfway through a build. It wont catch everything but will eliminate a lot of the needless errors that would break a fabric build.

Go Notes: Types

Go has many built in types that are found in other programming languages. It also supports the creation of custom types. Each type has a default zero value that is used when a variable is declared but not yet assigned a value. Boolean Booleans are true or false values. The zero...

Developing NetBox Plugin – Part 4 – Small improvements

Welcome to part 4 of the tutorial on developing NetBox plugin. By now BgpPeering plugin is functional but there are few things here and there that could make it better. In this post, we'll go through many improvements that will make the plugin look better and increase its functionality.

Developing NetBox Plugin tutorial series

Contents

Updating display name of BgpPeering objects

We'll start improvements by changing default display name of BgpPeering Continue reading

Worth Reading: Visualizing BGP-LS Tables

When I’d first seen BGP-LS I immediately thought: “it would be cool to use this to fetch link state topology data from the network and build a graph out of it”. In those days the only open-source way I could find to do it involved Open DayLight controller’s BGP-LS-to-REST-API converter, and that felt like deploying an aircraft carrier to fly a kite.

Things have improved dramatically since then. In Visualizing BGP-LS Tables, HB described how he solved the challenge with GoBGP, gRPC interface to GoBGP, and some Python code to parse the data and draw the topology graph with NetworkX. Enjoy!

Worth Reading: Visualizing BGP-LS Tables

When I’d first seen BGP-LS I immediately thought: “it would be cool to use this to fetch link state topology data from the network and build a graph out of it”. In those days the only open-source way I could find to do it involved Open DayLight controller’s BGP-LS-to-REST-API converter, and that felt like deploying an aircraft carrier to fly a kite.

Things have improved dramatically since then. In Visualizing BGP-LS Tables, HB described how he solved the challenge with GoBGP, gRPC interface to GoBGP, and some Python code to parse the data and draw the topology graph with NetworkX. Enjoy!

An IPv6 Update for 2020

The common theme of many of reviews of the Internet in 2020 has been that the Internet has been used to plug the gap caused by shutting down many of our physical venues where we previously worked and played. No matter what aspect of the Internet you look at, its clear that we all made much more use of the Internet this year. Here I would like to ask the inevitable IPv6 question: What role did IPv6 play in 2020?

Juniper to Mikrotik – MPLS Commands

About the Juniper to MikroTik series

In the world of network engineering, learning a new syntax for a NOS can be daunting if you need a specific config quickly.  Juniper is a popular option for service providers/data centers and is widely deployed across the world. 

This is a continuation of the Rosetta stone for network operating systems series.  In this article we will be covering multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) using label distribution protocol (LDP). We are sticking with LDP as MikroTik does not have wide support for RSVP-TE.

You can find the first two articles of the series here:

Juniper to MikroTik – BGP commands

Juniper to MikroTik – OSPF commands

While many commands have almost the exact same information, others are as close as possible.  Since there isn’t always an exact match, sometimes you may have to run two or three commands to get the information needed. 

Using EVE-NG for testing

We conducted utilized EVE-NG for all of the testing with the topology seen below.

Juniper CommandMikroTik Command
show ldp neighbormpls ldp neighbor print
show ldp interfacempls ldp interface print
show route forwarding-table family mplsmpls forwarding-table print
show ldp databasempls Continue reading

Worth Reading: Finding Bugs in C and C++ Compilers

Something to keep in mind before you start complaining about the crappy state of network operating systems: people are still finding hundreds of bugs in C and C++ compilers.

One might argue that compilers are even more mission-critical than network devices, they’ve been around for quite a while, and there might be more people using compilers than configuring network devices, so one would expect compilers to be relatively bug-free. Still, optimizing compilers became ridiculously complex in the past decades trying to squeeze the most out of the ever-more-complex CPU hardware, and we’re paying the price.

Keep that in mind the next time a vendor dances by with a glitzy slide deck promising software-defined nirvana.

Worth Reading: Finding Bugs in C and C++ Compilers

Something to keep in mind before you start complaining about the crappy state of network operating systems: people are still finding hundreds of bugs in C and C++ compilers.

One might argue that compilers are even more mission-critical than network devices, they’ve been around for quite a while, and there might be more people using compilers than configuring network devices, so one would expect compilers to be relatively bug-free. Still, optimizing compilers became ridiculously complex in the past decades trying to squeeze the most out of the ever-more-complex CPU hardware, and we’re paying the price.

Keep that in mind the next time a vendor dances by with a glitzy slide deck promising software-defined nirvana.

Friction Finders

Do you have a door that sticks in your house? If it’s made out of wood the odds are good that you do. The kind that doesn’t shut properly or sticks out just a touch too far and doesn’t glide open like it used to. I’ve dealt with these kinds of things for years and Youtube is full of useful tricks to fix them. But all those videos start with the same tip: you have to find the place where the door is rubbing before you can fix it.

Enterprise IT is no different. We have to find the source of friction before we can hope to repair it. Whether it’s friction between people and hardware, users and software, or teams going at each other we have to know what’s causing the commotion before we can repair it. Just like with the sticking door, adding more force without understand the friction points isn’t a long-term solution.

Sticky Wickets

Friction comes from a variety of sources. People don’t understand how to use a device or a program. Perhaps it’s a struggle to understand who is supposed to be in charge of a change control or a provisioning process. It could even Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020521


Despite WHOIS’s relevance, however, the dawn of new data regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seemingly disconnected the ties that bind domains to their owners


Microsoft on Wednesday shared more specifics about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the attackers behind the SolarWinds hack to stay under the radar and avoid detection, as cybersecurity companies work towards getting a “clearer picture” of one of the most sophisticated attacks in recent history.


In this post, I’ll look at hash-based signatures, a family of post-quantum algorithms that could be a good match for DNSSEC from the perspective of infrastructure stability.


Although spoofing has been around for a long time, there has been no longitudinal study of how it is changing over time. Prior studies of DNS spoofing explored how it works, particularly the use of spoofing for censorship.


The number of data breaches declined by half last year — to less than 4,000 events — yet the number of leaked records more than doubled, as did the number of breaches that included a ransomware component, according to an annual analysis of breach events by Risk Based Security.


Starlink is satellite internet access from SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s Continue reading

Heavy Networking 560: Moving Big Data Sets From Far-Off Locations

Construction sites generate tons of data but often lack network connectivity. Today's Heavy Networking explores how one CTO has found ways to move huge data sets to HQ and the cloud using everything from Free Space Optics to LTE to consumer broadband. There are also stories about flying drones and robot dogs, and the operational impacts of SD-WAN. Our guest is Michael Shepherd, CTO of Rogers-O’Brien Construction.

Heavy Networking 560: Moving Big Data Sets From Far-Off Locations

Construction sites generate tons of data but often lack network connectivity. Today's Heavy Networking explores how one CTO has found ways to move huge data sets to HQ and the cloud using everything from Free Space Optics to LTE to consumer broadband. There are also stories about flying drones and robot dogs, and the operational impacts of SD-WAN. Our guest is Michael Shepherd, CTO of Rogers-O’Brien Construction.

The post Heavy Networking 560: Moving Big Data Sets From Far-Off Locations appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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