Daniel Dib is setting up a networking career (from a down-to-earth engineer’s perspective) web site, and started populating it with numerous interviews with fellow networking engineers and architects (all of them well worth reading).

Here are my answers to his questions.

It’s amazing how long it can take to get some sanity into networking technologies. RFC 8212 specifies that a BGP router should not announce prefixes over EBGP until its routing policy has been explicitly configured. It took us only 22 years to get there…

For more technical details, read this email by Job Snijders.

Net neutrality is one of those topics that should never have existed, but of course it inevitably erupts every so often, so here we go…

Not so long ago Robert Graham published his anti-net-neutrality arguments which are (no surprise) not much different from what I wrote when I still cared about this argument (here, here, here and here). While I agree with his overall perspective, I completely disagree with his view of Comcast’s initial response to network congestion.

You wouldn’t believe it – after almost 22 years (yeah, it’s been that long since RFC 1883 was published), IPv6 became an Internet standard (RFC8200/STD86). No wonder some people claim IETF moves at glacial speed ;)

Speaking of IPv6, IETF and glacial speeds – there’s been a hilarious thread before Prague IETF meeting heatedly arguing whether the default WLAN SSID should be IPv6-only (+NAT64). Definitely worth reading (for the entertainment value) over a beer or two.

I’ve added two new case studies to Ansible for Networking Engineers online course:

Create network diagrams from LLDP information playbook focuses on creating a single summary report based on information from numerous devices (and the report just happens to be network diagram in DOT format).

One of the more interesting presentations we had during Tech Field Day Extra @ Cisco Live Berlin was coming from Paessler, a company developing PRTG, a little-known network monitoring software.

More about PRTG in TFD videos and here, here, here and here.

Finally a group of engineers figured out it’s a good idea to make things less complex instead of heaping layers of complexity on top of already-complex kludges.

RFC 8196 specifies default values and extensions to IS-IS that make it a true plug-and-play routing protocol. I wonder when we’ll see it implemented now that everyone is obsessed with intent-based hype.

I got several interesting replies to my automation and orchestration blog post. Some of them were so far in the land of alternate definitions that they were literally off the charts. Here’s one of the best I got in that category:

If you’re not old enough to know otherwise, you’d think (based on recent hype) that we discovered network automation a few years ago. Not true. One of my readers sent me a link to excellent Managing IP Networks with Free Software presentation from NANOG26 (October 2002).

I found the presentation awesome, nothing new, and extremely sad… all at the same time.

One of my readers sent me an email that’s easiest paraphrased into: “Why can’t I have a different IPv6 link-local address (LLA) on every access port connected to a VLAN interface?”

There’s probably nothing stopping someone from implementing such an approach, but it would go against the usual understanding of how bridging and routing interact in L2+L3 switches.