I decided to add “Further Reading” sections to BGP lab exercises, containing links to vendor documentation and useful related blog posts. I naively expected to offload the job to Claude, commit the results, and move on. The “related blog posts” were a piece of cake; precise links to relevant vendor documentation turned out to be more of a challenge.

TL&DR: I would love to get your suggestions for further reading as PRs in the BGP Labs repo.

Apart from FRRouting, the vendor documentation is mostly generated from whatever internal system and uses auto-generated anchors that can change at any moment – somewhat “suboptimal” for what I wanted to do.

Donnie Savage decided to use netlab to test OpenEIGRP-Cisco IOS interoperability (TL&DR: it works and the source code is in Donnie’s EIGRP repository).

He asked me for a few hints before setting up his test server. This is what I sent him; you might find it useful if you ever decide to use netlab to test a new network device/protocol implementation.

The Packet Pushers newsletter dropped into my Inbox this morning, and it included a lovely Network Labs on a Budget article by Suresh Vinasiththamby, explaining how you can build a virtual lab on a mini-PC (exactly what I’m using for my netlab server) using EVE-NG, CML, or the containerlab/netlab combo.

On a tangential note: I’m busy getting various netlab features to work with netmiko, so something had to give (= blog posts).

Here’s another you can’t make this up SNAFU observation I made when running integration tests for netlab Syslog functionality: Cisco Nexus OS cannot send Syslog messages to a directly connected silent host.

The setup is as trivial as it can get: a Cisco Nexus OS VM (running version 10.6(2)) connected to a dnsmasq container running rsyslogd.

All the videos in the Data Center Fabric Architectures webinar are now available without a valid ipSpace.net account.

The webinar hasn’t been updated in years, so the vendor-specific information is mostly obsolete. However, I’m sure you’ll still find the requirements, architectures, designs, and technology overviews sections relevant.

To watch more free ipSpace.net videos, browse them here, or click the Access Free Content button in any webinar roadmap.

After Kazuya Takahashi released his wonderful network-xray tool and added it as an external tool to the open-source BGP configuration labs, I wrote a short document explaining how to start external tools in your BGP labs without changing the lab topology, and how it works in GitHub Codespaces (hint: wonderfully).

I also modified all lab instructions to include a pointer to the optional tool-setup step.

Happy labbing ;)

TL&DR: Programmers writing Cisco Nexus OS code should have known better. They didn’t (care?).

One can understand that an operating system written in the late 1980s generates crappy suboptimal error messages, even though it was known even in those days how to do things right.

Is it too much to hope that the programmers writing newer operating systems (like Cisco Nexus OS) would be better? Obviously, it is 🤦‍♂️

When Donnie Savage announced the open beta of OpenEIGRP, I quickly asked him whether it would be possible to get an easy-to-use container with OpenEIGRP integrated with other FRR daemons (and its CLI).

Donnie delivered ;) – you can download a ready-to-use container and try its EIGRP features. Let’s see how you can make that process even simpler with netlab:

After his excellent Git for Networking Engineers series, Tony Mattke decided to take netlab for a spin (thank you!), starting with Install netlab, Build a Lab in Five Minutes

The DNS Museum documents tons of crazy uses of DNS, the world’s most distributed database (OK, a key-value store), including a “DNS for configuration management” podcast episode with Corey Quinn.

Have fun!