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Sturgeon’s Law, VRRPv3 Edition

I just wasted several days trying to figure out how to make the dozen (or so) platforms for which we implemented VRRPv3 in netlab work together. This is the first in a series of blog posts describing the ridiculous stuff we discovered during that journey

The idea was pretty simple:

• Create a lab with the tested device and a well-known probe connected to the same subnet.
• Disable VRRP (or interface) on the probe and check IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity through the tested device (verifying it takes over ownership of VRRP MAC and IP addresses).
• Reenable VRRP on the probe and change its VRRP priority several times to check the state transitions through INIT/BACKUP(lower priority)/MASTER(change in priority)/BACKUP(preempting after a change in priority).

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OpenAI Declares Its Hardware Independence (Sort Of) With Stargate Project

The dependency dance between AI pioneer OpenAI and the Microsoft Azure cloud and the application software divisions of its parent company are fascinating to watch. …

OpenAI Declares Its Hardware Independence (Sort Of) With Stargate Project was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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NAN083: Cox Gets Network Automation Right, and Proves It at DEF CON (Sponsored)

Today’s Network Automation Nerds episode discusses Cox Communications’ journey to getting network automation right. We also talk about how they used network automation to support operating the network at the DEF CON hacker convention. Our guests are David Ezell, Joshua Watkins and Eric Hansen from Cox Communications. We dive into initial steps and challenges in... Read more »

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D2DO263: An Anthropologist’s Advice for Improving IT Cultures

It’s tempting to run IT organizations the same way we run infrastructure: as resource units to be applied to various jobs. But people aren’t infrastructure. They have opinions. They form teams. They operate on different incentives, which sometimes clash within an organization (i.e. sales vs. product managers, or infosec vs. everybody). Today’s guest, Lianne Potter,... Read more »

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The Ethernet/802.1 Protocol Stack

The believers in the There Be Four Layers religion think everything below IP is just a blob of stuff dealing with physical things:

People steeped in a slightly more nuanced view of the world in which IP is not the centerpiece of the universe might tell you that the blob of stuff we need is two things:

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HLRS Takes First Steps To Exascale

The University of Stuttgart’s High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) in Germany tapped Hewlett Packard Enterprise back in December 2023 to build a prototype hybrid CPU-GPU supercomputer nicknamed “Hunter” to pave the way towards an exascale-class machine it is budgeting to have installed in 2027 called “Herder.” …

HLRS Takes First Steps To Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Running EVE-NG in Proxmox

If you follow my blogs, you might know that I recently switched to Proxmox from VMware Workstation Pro for my home lab. I’ve already migrated most of my VMs, including Cisco CML, to Proxmox, and the last piece left was EVE-NG. In this blog post, we’ll go through the steps to install EVE-NG in Proxmox. Let’s get started!

As always, if you find this post helpful, press the ‘clap’ button on the left. It means a lot to me and helps me know you enjoy this type of content.

Running Cisco CML in Proxmox

In this blog post, we’ll go through how to install Cisco CML (specifically CML 2.8 Free Tier) on Proxmox.

PacketswitchSuresh Vina

Overview

EVE-NG doesn’t have official documentation for Proxmox, but it works perfectly fine, and I haven’t faced any issues so far. For this example, I’m using

• Proxmox version 8.3.0
• EVE-NG Community Edition 6.2.0

Most of the VM’s settings can be left at their default values, but there are a couple of changes I had to make. Before diving in, let's have a quick look at Nested Virtualization.

Nested Virtualization

Nested virtualization allows you to run virtual machines Continue reading

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PP046: IPv6 Security, Migration, and Adoption

You asked for more IPv6 and we listened. In today’s episode, we talk with Ed Horley, co-host of the IPv6 Buzz podcast about IPv6 security, migration, and adoption. We talk about how your general security strategy doesn’t change with v4 or v6, but the trouble starts with a lack of v6 knowledge. We talk about... Read more »

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Record-breaking 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack and global DDoS trends for 2024 Q4

Welcome to the 20th edition of the Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report, marking five years since our first report in 2020.

Published quarterly, this report offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network. In this edition, we focus on the fourth quarter of 2024 and look back at the year as a whole.

When we published our first report, Cloudflare’s global network capacity was 35 Terabits per second (Tbps). Since then, our network’s capacity has grown by 817% to 321 Tbps. We also significantly expanded our global presence by 65% from 200 cities in the beginning of 2020 to 330 cities by the end of 2024.

Using this massive network, we now serve and protect nearly 20% of all websites and close to 18,000 unique Cloudflare customer IP networks. This extensive infrastructure and customer base uniquely positions us to provide key insights and trends that benefit the wider Internet community.

• In 2024, Cloudflare’s autonomous DDoS defense systems blocked around 21.3 million DDoS attacks, representing a 53% increase compared to 2023. On average, in 2024, Cloudflare blocked 4,870 Continue reading

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The fall and rise of TikTok (traffic)

The United States ban on TikTok went into effect on January 19, 2025, and although service began to be restored after just 14 hours, it was only close to the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States that associated DNS traffic started to recover to closer to previous levels. In this post, we analyze the events of January 19 and 20, and what they meant for TikTok-related DNS traffic, but also other competitors (including their growth outside the US).

For context, we wrote an initial blog post about the TikTok ban on Sunday, January 19, 2025. The ban was part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," proposed in Congress, which ordered ByteDance to divest due to alleged security concerns. The bill was signed into law by Congress and President Biden in April 2024, and was upheld by the Supreme Court on January 17, 2025.

Aggregated data from our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver shows — as we’ve posted on social media — that the TikTok shutdown in the US began to impact DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains on January 19, just after 03:30 UTC (22:30 ET on January Continue reading

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IBGP Is the Better EBGP

Whenever I was explaining how one could build EBGP-only data center fabrics, someone would inevitably ask, “But could you do that with IBGP?”

TL&DR: Of course, but that does not mean you should.

Anyway, leaving behind the land of sane designs, let’s trot down the rabbit trail of IBGP-only networks.

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NB510: CISA Says US Tech Inherently Insecure; AI Now Included in Google Workspace

Take a Network Break! Guest co-host John Burke joins Drew Conry-Murray for this week’s analysis of tech news. They discuss a string of serious vulnerabilities in Wavlink Wi-Fi routers, Fortinet taking a one-two security punch, and CISA director Jen Easterly calling out US hardware and software companies for being “inherently insecure.” Microsoft and Google put... Read more »

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Tech Bytes: Can SD-WAN Solve Latency Issues for Modern Applications? (Sponsored)

Traditional SD-WAN ensures that business-critical apps get the best-performing network path to deliver a good user experience and meet service levels. But as SaaS and cloud adoption increase, the best path across a WAN may not be enough. Techniques like WAN ops and legacy caching techniques may have worked for enterprise or private apps, but... Read more »

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Concise Link Descriptions in netlab Topologies (Part 1)

One of the goals we’re always trying to achieve when developing netlab features is to make the lab topologies as concise as possible¹. Among other things, netlab supports numerous ways of describing links between lab devices, allowing you to be as succinct as possible.

A bit of a background first:

• In the end, netlab collects all links in the links list before starting the data transformation process.
• Every entry in the links list is a dictionary. That dictionary can contain link attributes and must contain a list of interfaces connected to the link.
• Every interface must have a node (specifying the lab device it belongs to) and could contain additional interface attributes.

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IRP v4.2.7 has arrived: Enhanced Inbound Performance Optimization & Prefix-List-Based Statistical Models

The post IRP v4.2.7 has arrived: Enhanced Inbound Performance Optimization & Prefix-List-Based Statistical Models appeared first on Noction.

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TikTok ban takes hold: data reveals sharp traffic decline and rapid shift to alternatives

The United States ban on TikTok went into effect on January 19, 2025, and our data showed a clear impact starting after 03:30 UTC (10:30 PM ET on January 18, 2025). The ban was part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," proposed in Congress, which ordered ByteDance to divest due to alleged security concerns. The bill was signed into law by Congress and President Biden in April 2024, and was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Aggregated data from our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver shows — as we’ve posted on X — that the TikTok shutdown in the US began to impact DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains on January 19, just after 03:30 UTC (22:30 ET on January 18). This includes DNS traffic not only for TikTok, but also for other ByteDance-owned platforms, such as the CapCut video editor. Traffic dropped by as much as 85% compared to the previous week and showed signs of further decline in the following hours.

Around that time, a message indicating the TikTok ban began appearing for US users.

Analyzing data from autonomous systems or networks, traffic from TikTok owner ByteDance’s network (AS396986) in the US Continue reading

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From Python to Go 011. Parsing XML, JSON, And YAML Files.

Hello my friend,

This blog post is probably the first one, where we start doing more practical rather than foundational things in Python and Go (Golang). Up till now we were going through all possible data types as well as small steps how to deal with files. Today we’ll bring that all together and boost it with practical scenario of parsing data following the most popular data serialization techniques these days

Which Jobs Do Require Network Automation Skills?

For quite a while I’m trying to hire a good network automation engineer, who shall be capable to write applications in Python, which shall manage networking. The pay is good, so my understanding would be that the candidates’ level shall be good as well. My understanding is sadly far from reality as general skills in software development is poor. I was thinking multiple times, if people who passed my trainings would apply, they could have smashed it (provided they practice). Which means there are a lot of jobs out there, requiring good level of automation and software development skills. But they stay unfulfilled because there are no good candidates. It could be yours.

Boost yourself up!

We offer the following training programs Continue reading

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phpIPAM in Docker with Nginx reverse-proxy

I have a bit of a problem with this setup serving phpIPAM via Nginx reverse proxy, so I said to share the solution which works for me here maybe will help somebody out there. I installed phpIPAM as Docker container following the instructions here: https://github.com/phpipam-docker/phpipam-docker. Using it via plain http was working OK, but I […]

<p>The post phpIPAM in Docker with Nginx reverse-proxy first appeared on IPNET.</p>

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InfraHub Schema Library

In my previous InfraHub introductory post, we covered installation and the basics of InfraHub. In this second post, let’s explore the ‘Schema Library’ provided by OpsMill, the team behind InfraHub. As mentioned in the previous post, InfraHub doesn’t include any user-defined schemas out of the box, so we need to create our own. However, the Schema Library repository offers a collection of schemas that we can easily import into InfraHub. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Schema Library and how to use it.

If you are new to Infrahub and want to learn the basics of what it is and how to install it, feel free to check out my introductory post below.

Getting Started with Infrahub

If you’re in the network automation space or attended one of the last two Autocon events, you might have come across a new tool called ‘Infrahub’ from OpsMill

PacketswitchSuresh Vina

Recap on Schema

The way I think about schema is that it is a blueprint that defines the structure of your data. It specifies the nodes (like devices and interfaces), their attributes, and the relationships between them. This allows you to customize how you Continue reading

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Hedge 255: Open Multi-perspective Issuance

One of the various attack surfaces in encryption is insuring the certificates used to share the initial set of private keys are not somehow replaced by an attacker. In systems where a single server or source is used to get the initial certificates, however, it is fairly easy for an attacker to hijack the certificate distribution process.

Henry Birge-Lee joins us on this episode of the Hedge to talk about extensions to existing certificate systems where a certificate is pulled from more than one source. You can find his article here.

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