Blog Posts in May 2026
Public Videos: OpenFlow Deep Dive
Remember OpenFlow, the One Protocol to Bind Them All1? I haven’t heard anyone even mention it in ages, and I never bothered to ask whether anyone is still using it after the dismal results of the 2022 poll.
Anyway, if you still have to deal with that ancient blunder, six hours of deep dive videos I recorded a decade ago might still be useful. You can watch them without an ipSpace.net account.
Looking for more binge-watching materials? You’ll find them here.
Dual-Stack SR-MPLS
After the introduction to SR-MPLS demo I did during the Segment Routing workshop @ ITNOG10, we moved to dual-stack SR-MPLS – can we assign node segment identifiers (SIDs) to IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes? The demo used the same three-router network as the previous one, with IPv4 SIDs starting at one and IPv6 SIDs starting at 101:
Worth Reading: Agentic AI Setup: Sandboxes and Worktrees
Most of the hyperventilated AI “success stories” are as useful as the “ANSIBLE!!!” movement was a few years ago. It’s thus always a pleasure to find someone with well-established software development chops who took the time to describe what works for them.
One cannot argue with Mike McQuaid’s credentials (at least if you happen to be using homebrew on MacOS, which you REALLY SHOULD), and his Sandboxes and Worktrees: My secure Agentic AI Setup in 2026 article is full of relevant recommendations in case you’re brave enough to let AI agents loose on your GitHub repository.
netlab 26.05: BGP-free SRv6 Core, Junos Features
netlab release 26.05 is out. Here are the highlights:
- Support for global BGP routes with SRv6 next hops (inspired by proof-of-concept by @jvbemmel) on FRR and IOS XR
- Junos OSPF/IS-IS route redistribution, VRF IS-IS instances, and OSPF interface parameters
- Streamline and speed up the FortiOS initial device configuration by @a-v-popov
- Support for Juniper cSRX container by @leec-666
Goodbye, Ubuntu 20.04 (netlab 26.05)
netlab release 26.05 is out. I’ll write about its highlights tomorrow; today, I want to focus on one of its breaking changes: netlab no longer works with Python 3.8 (which reached end-of-life in October 2024), so you can no longer install it on a vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 (which reached end of standard support a year ago).
We wanted to get rid of old Python versions for ages, but never did because Ubuntu 20.04 shipped with Python 3.8, and many netlab early adopters installed it on Ubuntu 20.04 (and the last thing a networking engineer wants is wasting time with upgrades, right?).
Lab: EVPN Asymmetric IRB with Anycast Gateways
I postponed the discussion of ARP issues with EVPN anycast gateways to keep yesterday’s blog post reasonably short. If you’re impatient and want to try that out, I have just the right lab exercise for you; you’ll have to extend VLANs into end-to-end MAC-VRF instances and add IRB and anycast gateways:
You can run the lab on your own netlab-enabled infrastructure (more details), but also within a free GitHub Codespace or even on your Apple-silicon Mac (installation, using Arista cEOS container, using VXLAN/EVPN labs).
ARP with EVPN Asymmetric IRB
TL&DR: With the right nerd knob settings, it all works
In a previous blog post, I described the ARP issues you’ll encounter when using centralized routing (on a spine switch) between two EVPN MAC-VRF instances (a fancy name for a VLAN encapsulated in VXLAN or MPLS).
That blog post established a baseline that will help us unravel the ARP behavior in a more realistic scenario: asymmetric Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB). That’s a mouthful, but it’s really quite a simple concept; the following diagram explains the asymmetric forwarding behavior:
Packet forwarding in an EVPN asymmetric IRB design
Hands-On Introduction to SR-MPLS
The second demo1 I did during the Segment Routing workshop @ ITNOG10 illustrated how easy it is to set up and explore a small SR-MPLS network with netlab. The lab topology described a small three-router network (you need three routers to see “true” labels besides the penultimate-hop popping ones):
MUST READ: The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess
Kyle Kingsbury published a long (10-part) article about his frustrations with AI, aptly named The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess.
Regardless of where you are on the skeptic-to-fanboy spectrum, I would highly recommend you read it, even if you believe you’ll disagree with everything he wrote.
Reorganized ipSpace.net Segment Routing Resources
I created nine sample SR-MPLS topologies for the ITNOG 10 SR-MPLS workshop, and of course, we ran out of time. I plan to cover those topologies and resulting printouts in a series of blog posts; to prepare for those, I cleaned up and reorganized the Segment Routing blog category, which is now split into two:
Hope you’ll find them useful! Also, if you know of other non-vendor Segment Routing resources, please leave a comment, email me, or submit a pull request.
Public Videos: Segment Routing 101
In the spring of 2017, Jeff Tantsura, the IETF Routing Area chair, delivered a short “Introduction to Segment Routing” webinar. In mid-April 2026, we had ~100 people at ITNOG 10 attending the excellent “Segment Routing: From Theory to Practice” workshop by the great Tiziano Tofoni. The future is obviously not evenly distributed.
If you’re in the early stages of your Segment Routing journey, you might appreciate the videos from Jeff’s webinar; you can now watch them without an ipSpace.net account.
On ARP and MAC Aging Timers
Naveen Kumar Devaraj mentioned an interesting fact in his EVPN-related comment:
The EOS default ARP timeout is 4 hours, and MAC aging is 5 minutes.
Arista is not the only platform using these default values; did you ever wonder where they came from?
Hmmm: Cloudflare's Automatic Return Routing
A while ago, I found the How Automatic Return Routing solves IP overlap article on Cloudflare’s blog. They evidently have a technology that addresses a pain point well worth solving (access to shared resources from clients using overlapping address ranges). I just hate how they’re selling it. Go read the article first; I’ll wait.
OK, here’s what bothers me: the “VRFs and NAT are bad” claims, while they use the same technology in disguise.
ARP Issues in EVPN Centralized Routing Design
TL&DR: SIP of Networking Was an Understatement 🤦♂️
Adding IRB to a EVPN MAC-VRFs (the fancy way of saying stretched VLANs) seems like a no-brainer:
- Add IP addresses to VLAN interfaces
- Optionally add a shared anycast gateway
- Declare “Mission Accomplished” (and try to ignore the inevitable phone call at 2 AM on a Sunday night)
Making that work in a multi-vendor environment is even more fun1, as I sadly discovered when creating the EVPN lab exercises or trying to figure out why some EVPN implementations were failing netlab EVPN integration tests.
SwiNOG 41: It Was Nice to Be Back
Last week’s SwiNOG was (as expected) great fun at a phenomenal location, starting with the first slide of the first presentation: “6 Stages of Network De-sh*tification”. I particularly loved the “talk less, chat more” schedule. The longer breaks gave us plenty of time to catch up with old friends and discuss interesting, sometimes completely unexpected, topics. For example, I learned that SIP MESSAGE is used to carry SMS messages these days.
As much as I loved chatting with fellow networking engineers, I also found these presentations highly interesting: