Network terminology was easy in the 1980s: bridges forwarded frames between Ethernet segments based on MAC addresses, and routers forwarded network layer packets between network segments. That nirvana couldn’t last long; eventually, a big enough customer told Cisco: “I don’t want to buy another box if I already have your too-expensive router. I want your router to be a bridge.”

Turning a router into a bridge is easier than going the other way round¹: add MAC table and dynamic MAC learning, and spend an evening implementing STP.

A few weeks ago, Daniel Dib tweeted a slide from Radia Perlman’s presentation in which she claimed IPv6 was the worst decision ever as we could have adopted CLNP in 1992. I had similar thoughts on the topic a few years ago, and over tons of discussions, blog posts, and creating the How Networks Really Work webinar slowly realized it wouldn’t have mattered.

netlab release 1.3 contains two major additions:

• VXLAN transport using static ingress replication or EVPN control plane – implemented on Arista EOS, Cisco Nexus OS, Dell OS10, Nokia SR Linux and VyOS.
• EVPN control plane supporting VXLAN transport, VLAN bridging, VLAN-aware bundles, and symmetric IRB – implemented on Arista EOS, Dell OS10, Nokia SR Linux, Nokia SR OS (control plane), VyOS, and FRR (control plane).

Here are some of the other goodies included in this release:

Etienne-Victor Depasquale, a researcher at University of Malta, is trying to figure out what technologies service providers use to build real-life metro-area networks, and what services they offer on top of that infrastructure.

If you happen to be involved with a metro area network, he’d love to hear from you – please fill in this survey – and he promised that he’ll share the results of the survey with the participants.

It’s so refreshing to find someone who understands the impact of latency on application performance, and develops a methodology that considers latency when migrating a workload into a public cloud: Adding latency: one step, two step, oops by Lawrence Jones.

After completing the discussion of basic Kubernetes networking with a typical inter-pod traffic scenario, Stuart Charlton tackled another confusing topic: an overview of what Kubernetes services are.

When I started implementing the netlab VLAN module, I encountered (at least) three different ways of configuring physical interfaces and bridging domains even though the underlying packet forwarding operations (and sometimes even the forwarding hardware) are the same. That confusopoly is guaranteed to make your head spin for years, and the only way to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes is to go back to the fundamentals.

TL&DR: we renamed netsim-tools to netlab as the project evolved from a bag of tools into a full-blown intent-based lab-as-code system (how’s that for a Bullshit Bingo winner?).

There is no change to the functionality, user interface (CLI commands), or documentation. Upgrading the existing Python package should install the new one, but please make sure you install or upgrade networklab Python package instead of netsim-tools; we won’t keep the backward compatibility forever.

Now for more details:

Ages ago when we were building networks using super-expensive 64kbps WAN links, a customer sent us a weird bug report:

Everything works fine, but we cannot transfer one particular file between two locations – the file transfer stalls and eventually times out. At the same time, we’re seeing increased number of CRC errors on the WAN link.

My chat with the engineer handling the ticket went along these lines:

The results you can get when you know how to apply proper glue to a bunch of open-source tools never cease to amaze me. The latest entrant in that category: Akvorado, a Netflow/IPFIX collector and analyzer by Vincent Bernat.

Some of the sample graphs (shown in the GitHub repo) are not far off from those that knocked our socks off during the first Kentik Networking Field Day presentation. Definitely a tool worth exploring ;)

Long long time ago, we built a multi-protocol WAN network for a large organization. Everything worked great, until we got the weirdest bug report I’ve seen thus far:

When trying to transfer a particular file with DECnet to the central location, the WAN link drops. That does not happen with any other file, or when transferring the same file with TCP/IP. The only way to recover is to power cycle the modem.

Try to figure out what was going on before reading any further ;)

Bruce Schneier wrote an article on the dangers of cryptocurrencies and the uselessness of blockchain, including this gem:

From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use.

Please feel free to tell me how he’s just another individual full of misguided opinions… after all, what does he know about crypto?

Béla Várkonyi left a great comment on a blog post discussing (among other things) whether we need large buffers on spine switches. I don’t know how many people read the comments; this one is too valuable to be lost somewhere below the fold

You might want to add another consideration. If you have a lot of traffic aggregation even when the ingress and egress port are roughly at the same speed or when the egress port has more capacity, you could still have congestion. Then you have two strategies, buffer and suffer jitter and delay, or drop and hope that the upper layers will detect it and reduce the sending by shaping.

I stumbled upon an interesting article in one of my RSS feeds: should we build smart highways or smart cars?

The article eloquently explains how ridiculous and expensive it would be to put the smarts in the infrastructure, and why most everyone is focused on building smart cars. The same concepts should be applied to networking, but of course the networking vendors furiously disagree – the network should be as complex, irreplaceable, and expensive as possible. I collected a few examples seven years ago, and nothing changed in the meantime.

One of the last things I did before starting the 2022 summer break was to push out the next netlab release.

It includes support for routed VLAN subinterfaces (needed to implement router-on-a-stick) and routed VLANs (needed to implement multi-hop VRF lite), completing the lengthy (and painful) development of the VLAN configuration module. Stefano Sasso added VLAN support for Mikrotik RouterOS and VyOS, and Jeroen van Bemmel completed VLAN implementation for Nokia SR Linux. Want to see VLANs on other platforms? Read the contributor guidelines and VLAN developer docs, and submit a PR.

I’ll be back in September with more blog posts, webinars, and cool netlab features. In the meantime, automate everything, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!