Blog Posts in August 2021
Worth Reading: A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9
As early as 1994 (on April 1st, to be precise) a satire disguised as an Informational RFC was published describing the deployment of IPv9 in a parallel universe.
Any similarity with a protocol that started as a second-system academic idea and is still experiencing hiccups in real world even though it could order its own beer in US is purely coincidental.
Worth Reading: Simplifying Networks
Justin Pietsch wrote another fantastic blog post, this time describing how they simplified Amazon’s internal network, got rid of large-scale VLANs and multi-NIC hosts, moved load balancing functionality into a proxy layer managed by application teams, and finally introduced merchant silicon routers.
MUST Read: Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (RFC 9099)
After almost a decade of bickering and haggling (trust me, I got my scars to prove how the consensus building works), the authors of Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (many of them dear old friends I haven’t seen for way too long) finally managed to turn a brilliant document into an Informational RFC.
Regardless of whether you already implemented IPv6 in your network or believe it will never be production-ready (alongside other crazy stuff like vaccines) I’d consider this RFC a mandatory reading.
netsim-tools Release 0.8.1: Cumulus VX and Nokia SR Linux Containers
Two interesting container images were released in June/July 2021:
- Michael Kashin managed to package Cumulus VX into a container image (more details).
- Roman Dodin managed to persuade Nokia to release SR Linux as a container.
Both images can be downloaded with no strings attached (two major wins for the good guys) and are supported with the latest release of netsim-tools: