Category: Humor

When someone starts complaining about networking device CLI, remind him that other parts of IT aren’t doing much better. For example, it’s oh-so-easy to install a package on Linux or OSX.

Andrew Lerner, my favorite Gartner analyst, recently published a hilarious blog post describing what vendors mean when they say “our product is software-defined” or “we’ll make it work”. Enjoy!

Need more vendorspeak? Try eight levels of vendor acceptance (carefully documented during a particularly stressful on-site test in Poland).

A link on Bruce Schneier’s blog pointed me to the latest article by the truly awesome James Mickens, this time making great fun of security researchers. Exactly what you need with your coffee on a Saturday morning. Enjoy!

The OSCON keynote by Simon Wardley explains a number of things, including (lack of) enterprise IPv6 adoption. Enjoy!

I was talking about “application-layer gateways” on firewalls and NAT boxes with a fellow engineer, and we came to an interesting conclusion: in most cases they are not gateways; they don’t add any significant functionality apart for payload fixups for those broken applications that think carrying network endpoint information in application packets is a good idea (I’m looking at you, SIP and FTP). These things should thus be called Application Layer Fixups or ALFs ;)

An interesting message appeared on v6ops mailing list a few days ago: the first interconnect between independent IPv6 implementations was established 20 years ago. No wonder some youngsters who don't know any better treat this venerable protocol like a modem and ignore it in favor of IPv4 ;)

Stumbled upon a hilarious description of challenges encountered when trying to scale distributed systems (cluster of controllers running centralized control plane comes to mind).

It starts with “If someone tells you that scaling out a distributed system is easy they are either lying or drunk, and possibly both,” and gets better and better. Enjoy!

This post SHOULD have been published on April 1st, but I need to define the terminology for another upcoming post, so here it is ;)

RFC 2119 defines polite words to use when something really shouldn’t be done. Some network designs I see deserve more colorful terminology.

2014-11-02: Updated with reference to RFC 6919 (/HT to @LapTop006)

True old-timers might appreciate the analogies I got while writing the Network Infrastructure as Code article. Let’s start with “do you remember this thingy?”

If you recognized the state-of-the-art (in those days) box in the picture, you might be able to relate to this screenshot:

This is pretty close to some SDN architectures I was privileged to see in the last three years.