Blog Posts in February 2025
Worth Reading: The Generative AI Con
I love good steamy rants, and The Generative AI Con from Edward Zitron is as good as they come. Pour yourself a glass of wine (or a cup of tea or whatever else you prefer) and have some fun ;)
Worth Reading: The IPv6 Agnostic Blog
Ole Troan, an excellent networking engineer working on IPv6 for decades, has decided to comment on the color of the IPv6 kettle, starting with:
- Is the transition to IPv6 inevitable? (hint: Betteridge’s law of headlines)
- The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6 - episode 1 (aka Second System Effect1)
I’m pretty sure Ole won’t stop there, so stay tuned.
Stub Networks in Virtual Labs
The previous blog posts described how virtualization products create LAN segments and point-to-point links.
However, sometimes we need stub segments – segments connected to a single router or switch – because we don’t want to waste resources creating hosts attached to a network device, but would still prefer a more realistic mechanism than static routes to inject IP subnets into routing protocols.
Worth Reading: Network Traffic Telemetry Protocols
Pavel Odintsov published a series of introductory blog posts describing protocols we can use to collect network traffic telemetry:
- Part 1 covers the ancient Netflow v5, Netflow v9, and IPFIX. It also mentions sampling and flow aggregation.
- Part 2 describes sFlow, port mirroring and sampled mirroring, and the use of IPFIX/Netflow v9 to transport mirrored traffic.
These blog posts will not make you an expert but will give you an excellent overview of the telemetry landscape1.
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Hint: more than enough to turn you into an instant AI-assisted LinkedIn
garbage generatorThought Leader™ 😜 ↩︎
Run BGP Across a Firewall
When I asked my readers what they would consider a good use case for EBGP multihop (thanks again to everyone who answered!), many suggested running BGP across a layer-3 firewall (Running BGP across a “transparent” (bump-in-the-wire) firewall is trivial). I turned that suggestion into a lab exercise in which you have to establish an EBGP multihop session across a “firewall” simulated by a Linux host.
If you haven’t set up your own lab infrastructure, click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces. After starting your codespace, change the directory to basic/e-ebgp-multihop and execute netlab up.
Worth Reading: Using SDN Controller with RSVP/TE
Dmytro Shypovalov published another article well worth reading: why should you use an SDN controller for RSVP-TE. It covers:
- The reasons people might still prefer RSVP-TE over SR-MPLS and the current state of RSVP-TE
- What an SDN controller might bring to the RSVP-TE world
- SR/RSVP coexistence and interworking
Have fun!
Goodbye, Cumulus Community Vagrant Boxes
Last Monday, I decided to review and merge the “VXLAN on Cumulus Linux 5.x with NVUE” pull request. I usually run integration tests on the modified code to catch any remaining gremlins, but this time, all the integration tests started failing during the VM creation phase. I was completely weirded out, considering everything worked a week ago.
Fortunately, Vagrant debugging is pretty good1 and I was quickly able to pinpoint the issue (full printout):
BalticNOG Meeting (September 2025)
Donatas Abraitis asked me to spread the word about the first ever Baltic NOG meeting in the second half of September 2025 (more details)
If you were looking for a nice excuse to visit that part of Europe (it’s been on my wish list for a very long time), this might be a perfect opportunity to do it 😎.
On a tangential topic of fascinating destinations 😉, there’s also ITNOG in Bologna (May 19th-20th, 2025), Autocon in Prague (May 26th-30th, 2025), and SWINOG in Bern (late June 2025).
Limit the Scope of Git Diff
The results of netlab integration tests are stored in YAML files, making it easy to track changes improvements with Git. However, once I added the time of test and netlab version to the test results, I could no longer use git diff to figure out which test results changed after a test run – everything changed.
For example, these are partial test results from the OSPFv2 tests:
Projects to Work On – the AI Recommendations
Vini Motta decided to use AI on ipSpace.net content to find what it would recommend as the projects to work on in order to become employable in 2025. Here are the results he sent me; my comments are inline on a gray background.
- Network Automation with Python
- Project: Automate basic network tasks like device configuration, backup, or monitoring using Python scripts.
Point-to-Point Links in Virtual Labs
In the previous blog post, I described the usual mechanisms used to connect virtual machines or containers in a virtual lab, and the drawbacks of using Linux bridges to connect virtual network devices.
In this blog post, we’ll see how KVM/QEMU/libvirt/Vagrant use UDP tunnels to connect virtual machines, and how containerlab creates point-to-point vEth links between Linux containers.
Tagged VLAN 1 In a Trunk Is a Really Bad Idea
It all started with a netlab issue describing different interpretations of VLAN 1 in a trunk. While Cumulus NVUE (the way the netlab configuration template configures it) assumes that the VLAN 1 in a trunk is tagged, Arista EOS assumes it’s the native VLAN.
At that point, I should have said, “that’s crazy, we shouldn’t allow that” and enforce the “VLAN 1 has to be used as a native VLAN” rule. Alas, 20/20 hindsight never helped anyone.
TL&DR: Do not use VLAN 1 in VLAN trunks; if you have to, use it as a native VLAN.
Lab: Passive IS-IS Interfaces
The initial IS-IS labs covered the IS-IS basics. It’s time to move on to interesting IS-IS features (and why you might want to use them), starting with passive IS-IS interfaces.
Group Similar Links in netlab Topologies
In the Concise Link Descriptions blog post, I described various data formats that you could use to concisely list nodes attached to a link. Today, we’ll focus on a mechanism that helps you spot errors in your topology: a dictionary of links.
Imagine you have a large topology with dozens of links, and you get an error saying, “there is this problem with links[17]”. It must be great fun counting the links to find which one triggered the error, right?
Please Wait While We're Preparing Your Interfaces
Once a virtual machine running a network operating system boots, you’d expect its data-plane interfaces to be operational, right? Some vendors disagree. It takes over a minute for some network operating systems to figure out they have this thing called interfaces.1
I would love to figure out what takes them so long (a minute is an eternity on modern CPUs), but I guess we’ll never know.
Behind the Scenes
netlab uses two device provisioning mechanisms: it can start virtual machines with Vagrant or containers with containerlab. Some of those containers might use KVM/QEMU to run a hidden virtual machine (see also: RFC 1925 rule 6a).
Arista cEOS Containers Run on Apple Silicon
A few days ago, someone mentioned Arista released a cEOS EFT image running on Arm. Of course, I had to test whether it would run on Apple Silicon.
TL&DR: YES 🎉 🎉
Here’s what you have to do to make the Arista cEOS container work with netlab running on an Ubuntu VM on Apple silicon:
Links in Virtual Labs
There are three major ways to connect network devices in the physical world:
- Point-to-point links between devices (usually using some variant of Ethernet)
- Multi-access layer-1 networks running some IEEE 802.x encapsulation on top of that (GPON, WiFi, Ethernet hubs)
- Multi-access switched layer-2 network (dumb switches, hopefully running some STP variant)
Implementing these connections in virtual labs is a bit harder than one might think, as all virtualization solutions assume you plan to run virtual servers connected to Ethernet segments.