In early September, I started yet another project that’s been on the back burner for over a year: ipSpace.net Design Clinic (aka Ask Me Anything Reasonable in a more structured format). Instead of collecting questions and answering them in a podcast (example: Deep Questions podcast), I decided to make it more interactive with a live audience and real-time discussions. I also wanted to keep it valuable to anyone interested in watching the recordings, so we won’t discuss obscure failures of broken designs or dirty tricks that should have remained in CCIE lab exams.

The initial response from ipSpace.net subscribers has been overwhelming: I got over a dozen great topics, chose three of them for the September 2021 session, and we spent almost two hours discussing them. We also had time for the “anything else you’d like to discuss” section, where we covered interestingly diverse topics like eBPF, SR-IOV, routing in public clouds, SONiC, and IPv6-only deployments.

I tried to make submitting additional ideas as easy as possible:

• A dedicated website (yet again powered by Hugo) lists the past- and upcoming topics. You might want to check that list first.
• Send me an email if you can’t find anything relevant on that list. I’ll either point you to an existing webinar (example: someone had questions about EVPN, and they were all covered in existing EVPN materials) or add your idea to the list of topics.
• Every month I select 2-3 topics covered in the monthly Zoom call and send out the usual invitations approximately a week before the call.

We’ll have the next live session in early October. If there’s an interesting technical challenge you’d love to chat about, send me an email (if you have an account on ipSpace.net, you probably have it somewhere).