netlab release 1.4 added support for static anycast gateways and VRRP. Today we’ll use that functionality to add anycast gateways to the VLAN trunk lab:

We’ll start with the VLAN trunk lab topology and make the following changes:

Geoff Huston published a lengthy article (as always) describing talks from recent OARC meeting, including resolver-less DNS and DNSSEC deployment risks.

Definitely worth reading if you’re at least vaguely interested in the technology that supposedly causes all network-related outages (unless it’s BGP, of course)

Bruno Wollmann migrated his blog post to Hugo/GitHub/CloudFlare (the exact toolchain I’m using for one of my personal web sites) and described his choices and improved user- and author experience.

As I keep telling you, always make sure you own your content. There’s absolutely no reason to publish stuff you spent hours researching and creating on legacy platforms like WordPress, third-party walled gardens like LinkedIn, or “free services” obsessed with gathering visitors’ personal data like Medium.

After a brief introduction of Kubernetes service and an overview of services types, Stuart Charlton added the last missing bit: how do you expose Kubernetes services to external clients.

Henk made an interesting comment that finally triggered me to organize my thoughts about network-level host multihoming¹:

The problems I see with routing are: [hard stuff], host multihoming, [even more hard stuff]. To solve some of those, we should have true identifier/locator separation. Not an after-thought like LISP, but something built into the layer-3 addressing architecture.

Proponents of various clean-slate (RINA) and pimp-my-Internet (LISP) approaches are quick to point out how their solution solves multihoming. I might be missing something, but it seems like that problem cannot be solved within the network.

The ipSpace.net Design Clinic has been running for a bit over than a year. We covered tons of interesting technologies and design challenges, resulting in over 13 hours of content (so far), including several BGP-related discussions:

• BGP route servers
• Redundant BGP-Based Internet Access
• Secure BGP Configuration on Customer Routers
• Enterprise WAN Routing Design

All the Design Clinic discussions are available with Standard or Expert ipSpace.net Subscription, and anyone can submit new design/discussion challenges.

Every time I mention unnumbered BGP sessions in a webinar, someone inevitably asks “and how exactly does that work?” I always replied “gee, that’s a blog post I should write one of these days,” and although some readers might find it long overdue, here it is ;)

We’ll work with a simple two-router lab with two parallel unnumbered links between them. Both devices will be running Cumulus VX 4.4.0 (FRR 8.4.0 container generates almost identical printouts).

In October 2022 I described how you could build a VLAN router-on-a-stick topology with netlab. With the new features added in netlab release 1.4¹ we can do the same for VXLAN-enabled VLANs – we’ll build a lab where a router-on-a-stick will do VXLAN-to-VXLAN routing.

Geoff Huston published a fantastic history of fiber optics cables, from the first (copper) transatlantic cable to 2.2Tbps coherent optics. Have fun!

After discussing network addressing and switching, routing, and bridging in the How Networks Really Work webinar, it was high time for a deep dive into routing protocols, starting (as always) with an overview.