AI Assistants

I have written elsewhere about the danger of AI assistants leading to mediocrity. Humans tend to rely on authority figures rather strongly (see Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram as one example), and we often treat “the computer” as an authority figure.

The problem is, of course, Large Language Models—and AI of all kinds—are mostly pattern-matching machines or Chinese Rooms. A pattern-matching machine can be pretty effective at many interesting things, but it will always be, in essence, a summary of “what a lot of people think.” If you choose the right people to summarize, you might get close to the truth. Finding the right people to summarize, however, is beyond the powers of a pattern-matching machine.

Just because many “experts” say the same thing does not mean the thing is true, valid, or useful.

AI assistants can make people more productive, at least in terms of sheer output. Someone using an AI assistant will write more words per minute than someone who is not. Someone using an AI assistant will write more code daily than someone who is not.

But is it just more, or is it better?

Measuring the mediocratic effect of using AI systems, even as Continue reading

Running netlab and BGP Labs on Apple Silicon

I usually say that you cannot run netlab on Apple silicon because the vendors don’t provide ARM images. However, when I saw an ARM version of the FRRouting container, I started wondering whether I could run the BGP labs (admittedly only on FRR containers) on my M2 MacBook Pro.

TL&DR: Yes, you can do that.

Now for the recipe:

Read more …

Containerlab – Creating Network Labs Can’t Be Any Easier

Containerlab - Creating Network Labs Can't Be Any Easier

What if I tell you that all you need is just a YAML file with just a bunch of lines to create a Network Lab that can run easily on your laptop? You'd call me crazy, right?

Well, in this blog post, I'll walk you through what Containerlab is and how it can simplify creating and managing your labs with ease. Let's dive in.

What we will cover?

  • What is containerlab?
  • Comparing EVE-NG/GNS3 to Containerlab
  • Installation and initial setup
  • Lab images (Arista cEOS)
  • Containerlab terminology
  • Lab example
  • Cleaning up
  • Closing thoughts
Cisco Restconf - Get Operational Data
In this blog post, we’ll use Restconf to pull operational data from a Cisco switch. So far in our previous posts, we’ve looked at getting and changing configuration data.
Containerlab - Creating Network Labs Can't Be Any EasierPacketswitchSuresh Vina
Containerlab - Creating Network Labs Can't Be Any Easier

What is Containerlab?

The official definition is "Containerlab provides a CLI for orchestrating and managing container-based networking labs. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create lab topologies of users choice and manages labs lifecycle."

Simply put, containerlab is a Lab-as-a-code tool that helps you set up and manage your network labs easily. Instead of dealing with complex setups and configurations, containerlab simplifies everything for you. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 031524


Of all the problems with electric cars, perhaps the least expected was the revelation that some home charging points provide a potential point of weakness for malign foreign powers to interfere with our National Grid.


More than 8,000 domains and 13,000 subdomains belonging to legitimate brands and institutions have been hijacked as part of a sophisticated distribution architecture for spam proliferation and click monetization.


MWC Qualcomm is going big on AI at MWC, where it’s showing off a 7 billion parameter large language model running on an Android phone, along with an online hub to help mobile devs blend models into their apps, and AI infused into its latest 5G modem and Wi-Fi 7 silicon.


In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017.


Law enforcement agencies shut down xDedic, a cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) marketplace specifically providing web servers to cybercriminals, back in 2019.


Use of the Rust programming language has been on the rise but is only expected to continue to gather steam as more security-focused organizations call for Rust developers Continue reading

How Observability Is Different for Web3 Apps

Web3 represents the next evolutionary step in building web applications. Web3 combines blockchain technology, decentralized protocols and peer-to-peer interactions to give birth to a new standard for transparency and security through decentralized applications (dApps). The dApps rely on decentralized servers instead of traditional (Web2) applications based on a centralized server. However, this new paradigm presents challenges for logging, tracing — in a Django-based Web3 application using Scout APM. How Is Observability Different in Decentralized Apps? Observability in Web3 dApps poses several unique challenges that need to be resolved. Immutable Transactions Web3 dApps rely heavily on blockchain technology. Generally speaking, once a blockchain transaction has been confirmed, it cannot be changed, even if there has been a mistake. This makes it extremely important to have close monitoring and observability to detect and prevent issues before data is written to the blockchain. Distributed Data Traditional web applications rely on centralized servers while Web3 dApps rely on a globally distributed and decentralized network of nodes. A robust observability solution is therefore required to aggregate and analyze data across this complex network. Variable Continue reading

Technology Short Take 176

Welcome to Technology Short Take #176! This Tech Short Take is a bit heavy on security-related links, but there’s still some additional content in a number of other areas, so you should be able to find something useful—or at least interesting—in here. Thanks for reading!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Security

  • In early February a vulnerability was uncovered in a key component of the Linux boot process. The vulnerability affects virtually all Linux distributions and allows attackers to bypass the secure boot protections and insert a low-level bootkit. While the requirements for exploiting the vulnerability Continue reading

Video: Intro to Real Life Network Automation

Urs Baumann invited me to have a guest lecture in his network automation course, and so I had the privilege of being in lovely Rapperswil last week, talking about the basics of real-life network automation.

Urs published the video recording of the presentation on YouTube; hope you’ll like it, and if you don’t get too annoyed by the overly pushy ads, watch the other videos from his infrastructure-as-code course.

Video: Intro to Real Life Network Automation

Urs Baumann invited me to have a guest lecture in his network automation course, and so I had the privilege of being in lovely Rapperswil last week, talking about the basics of real-life network automation.

Urs published the video recording of the presentation on YouTube; hope you’ll like it, and if you don’t get too annoyed by the overly pushy ads, watch the other videos from his infrastructure-as-code course.

History of SDN in Google’s datacentre

I recently read a very interesting post on LinkedIn in which Urs Hölzle, one of the original Google network engineers, celebrated twenty years of Google network innovation. He provided links to the recent paper from Google describing how Google developed its datacentre network and how it has evolved since then. The paper describes how Google applied the Clos network topology in its datacentres and the early implementations of software-defined-networking that controlled data flows across the network.

One point that was really interesting, which came up in the comments to the article, is that Google implemented the original network routing code in Python.

Mr. Hölzle also linked to an independant research report that came out at the time. It provided the initial view of what Google was developing and is interesting to read almost 20 years after it was written.

The post History of SDN in Google’s datacentre appeared first on Open-Source Routing and Network Simulation.

Data Center Fabric Designs: Size Matters

The “should we use the same vendor for fabric spines and leaves?” discussion triggered the expected counterexamples. Here’s one:

I actually have worked with a few orgs that mix vendors at both spine and leaf layer. Can’t take names but they run fairly large streaming services. To me it seems like a play to avoid vendor lock-in, drive price points down and be in front of supply chain issues.

As always, one has to keep two things in mind:

Read more …

Data Center Fabric Designs: Size Matters

The “should we use the same vendor for fabric spines and leaves?” discussion triggered the expected counterexamples. Here’s one:

I actually have worked with a few orgs that mix vendors at both spine and leaf layer. Can’t take names but they run fairly large streaming services. To me it seems like a play to avoid vendor lock-in, drive price points down and be in front of supply chain issues.

As always, one has to keep two things in mind:

Read more …
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