Rodney Brooks republished an article on great AI expectations that he wrote 37 years ago. Not surprisingly, apart from a few technical details triggered by four decades of exponential growth in silicon capabilities, the article could have been written yesterday.

Side note: I’m a bit younger than Rodney, but I also went through at least three waves of AI hype cycles, starting with Prolog and 4GL, then expert systems, and finally neural networks. Around that time, I stopped caring and focused on networking, but I have enough battle scars to remain skeptical.

Just when I thought no vendor stupidity peculiarity could surprise me, Cisco IOS/XE proved me wrong.

I was improving a completely unrelated BGP functionality. I ran BGP integration tests on Cisco IOL (because it’s the fastest one to boot), and the BGP community propagation test failed. After verifying that I did not change the template and that the data structures had not changed, I checked the IOL release I was using.

Surprise 🎉🎉: the neighbor send-community configurations that worked since (at least) the IOS Classic release 15.x stopped working in Cisco IOS/XE release 17.16.01a.

PlanetScale published a great article describing the high-level principles of how storage devices work and covering everything from tape drives to SSDs and network-attached storage — a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in how their data is stored.

Is an LLM a stubborn donkey, a genie, or a slot machine (and why)? Find out in the Who is LLM? article by Martin Fowler.

Changing an existing BGP routing policy is always tricky on platforms that apply line-by-line changes to device configurations (Cisco IOS and most other platforms claiming to have industry-standard CLI, with the notable exception of Arista EOS). The safest approach seems to be:

• Do not panic when the user makes changes to route maps and underlying filters (prefix lists, AS-path access lists, or community lists).
• Let the user decide when they’re done and process the BGP table with the new routing policy at that time.

One should never trust the technical details published by the industry press, but assuming the Tomahawk Ultra puff piece isn’t too far off the mark, the new Broadcom ASIC (supposedly loosely based on emerging Ultra Ethernet specs):

1. Uses Optimized Ethernet Header, replacing IP/UDP header with a 10-byte something (let’s call it session identifier)
2. Makes Ethernet lossless with hop-by-hop retransmission/error recovery
3. Uses credit-based flow control (the receiver continuously updates the sender about the amount of available space)

If you’re ancient enough, you might recognize #3 as part of Fibre Channel, #2 and #3 as part of IEEE 802.1 LLC2 (used by IBM to implement SNA over Token Ring and Ethernet), and all three as the fundamental ideas of X.25 that Broadcom obviously reinvented at 800 Gbps speeds, proving (yet again) RFC 1925 Rule 11.

A while ago, I published a blog post proudly describing the netlab integration test that should check for incorrect OSPF network types in netlab-generated device configurations. Almost immediately, Erik Auerswald pointed out that my test wouldn’t detect that error (it might detect other errors, though) as the OSPF network adjacency is always established even when the adjacent routers have mismatching OSPF network types.

I made one of the oldest testing mistakes: I checked whether my test would work under the correct conditions but not whether it would detect an incorrect condition.

Writing tests that check the correctness of network device configurations is hard (overview, more details). It’s also an interesting exercise in getting the timing just right:

• Routing protocols are an eventually-consistent distributed system, and things eventually appear in the right place (if you got the configurations right), but you never know when exactly that will happen.
• You can therefore set some reasonable upper bounds on when things should happen, and declare failure if the timeouts are exceeded. Even then, you’ll get false positives (as in: the test is telling you the configurations are incorrect, when it’s just a device having a bad hair day).

And just when you think you nailed it, you encounter a device that blows your assumptions out of the water.

netlab release 25.07 was published yesterday. The major new features include:

• The ospf.areas plugin supports OSPFv2 and OSPFv3 stub areas, NSSA areas, and area ranges.
• The BGP routing policies plugin supports aggregate BGP routes
• The BGP configuration module supports BGP confederations

But wait, there’s much more:

As I was running the netlab pre-release integration tests, I noticed that ArubaCX failed the IPv6 Common Services test (it worked before). Here’s the gist of what that test does:

• It creates three VRFs (red, blue, and common)
• It imports routes from red and blue VRF into the common VRF and routes from the common VRF into the red and blue VRF (the schoolbook example of common services VRF)
• Just to be on the safe side, it imports red routes into the red VRF and so on.

Here’s the relevant part of the netlab lab topology:

Did you ever wonder why pressing an up-arrow in a (Linux) terminal window sometimes recalls the previous command but other times creates ^[[A?

Julia Evans did, and spent months exploring the quirks of the Linux terminal (and writing blog posts describing what she found), finally resulting in The Secret Rules of the Terminal (including the various shells, terminal emulators, escape codes, and TTY driver). A must-read if you’re a newbie who wants to understand why things happen the way they do.

One of the happy netlab users sent me an interesting challenge:

• He’s built a large lab and added tons of extra configuration to the lab devices.
• Afterwards, he realized he’d like to add a few more devices to the lab and was worried about losing all the changes he had made.

Unfortunately, you cannot add new devices to an already-running lab. You must shut down the lab, change the topology description, and start a new lab. However, there are things you can do to preserve the extra work you already did:

Martin Fowler published an interesting article about Expert Generalists. Straight from the abstract:

As computer systems get more sophisticated we’ve seen a growing trend to value deep specialists. But we’ve found that our most effective colleagues have a skill in spanning many specialties.

Also:

There are two sides to real expertise. The first is the familiar depth: a detailed command of one domain’s inner workings. The second, crucial in our fast-moving field is the ability to learn quickly, spot the fundamentals that run beneath shifting tools and trends, and apply them wherever we land.

Remember how I told you to focus on the fundamentals? 😎

Have you ever managed to type reload in the wrong terminal window and brought down a core switch (I probably did)? I managed to do the Ubuntu equivalent of that stupidity: I told my main Ubuntu server to sudo poweroff instead of doing that to a Vagrant VM.

Fortunately, the open-source world doesn’t have to rely on the roadmaps created by networking vendors’ product managers; if there’s a big enough pain, someone will solve it.

Yesterday, I mentioned that a Cisco router running pre-standard IS-IS 3-way handshake (this is why you need it) interoperates with multiple implementations of RFC 5303. How’s that possible, and does it matter whether you configure the ancient Cisco routers (release 15.x) to use IETF 3-way handshake instead of the “proprietary” one?

I took a trip to the Wireshark land to figure out the details (you can download the capture file):