Category: Worth Reading

Ali Bahadır Coşkun continued his EVPN/VXLAN journey. Using the free netlab-powered EVPN/VXLAN labs, he finished the basic EVPN/VXLAN lab (adding EVPN control plane to VXLAN underlay), and then completed the whole VXLAN/IRB/anycast saga.

Want to do something similar? The free EVPN/VXLAN lab exercises include six VXLAN labs, almost a dozen EVPN labs, and a few EVPN designs. I might add a lab or two during the summer break.

Daniel Blažek couldn’t resist testing Arista EOS centralized anycast gateway functionality (on top of IPv6 underlay to make it even more fun) and published working device configurations in a GitHub repo.

His repository includes a containerlab topology definition, so you can start the lab directly from the repository.

The Appearing Productive in The Workplace article I stumbled upon is yet another masterful description of how AI slop, used by Expert Beginners, wastes everyone’s time and energy. Try to have fun reading it, even though it may be way too close to the mark.

Claudia de Luna published a step-by-step description of how you can use SuzieQ data with an AI agent.

That’s definitely interesting, but I found the list of MCP resources at the end of her blog post even more valuable; that’s a keeper even if you never looked at SuzieQ (in which case you REALLY SHOULD).

Charity Majors wrote an excellent article describing AI enthusiasts in a race against time and AI skeptics in a race against entropy. Fair warning: its very first sentence triggered an acute case of PTSD:

I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding.

I’ve seen way too many presentations making “astonishing claims” about the unlimited unicorn-driven powers of OpenFlow, SDN, OpenDaylight, or Ansible.

Ali Bahadır Coşkun wrote a nice article describing how he mastered extending a VLAN with static VXLAN with the help of free netlab-powered VXLAN labs.

The same set of lab exercises includes six VXLAN labs, almost a dozen EVPN labs, and a few EVPN designs. I might add a lab or two during the summer break.

Chris Grundemann wrote an interesting article arguing that you should structure your network operations around teams, not heroes.

Even if you feel you’re perfectly OK with your network being held together by exhausted heroes (and duct tape), it could be a bit harder to deploy network automation in an always-busy hero culture. However, the choice, as they say, is yours.

Following a link in Martin Fowler’s Fragments, I stumbled upon Genie Tarpit by Kent Beck – a perfect summary of my experiences with AI coding (code reviews are OK, new code less so). He also provided a good reason for that behavior:

The “plausible deniability” task orientation of the genie leaves it claiming success even though the code doesn’t work at all.

And the proposed solution?

You probably saw this one coming—nobody knows.

Tony Mattke built several networking-focused CLI tools and released them on GitHub. You might find them useful.

Doug Madory wrote an interesting article (published on APNIC blog) arguing that we shouldn’t worry about ephemeral BGP leaks that can be observed only during the BGP path hunting process that follows a route withdrawal.

I have to disagree with that. It’s never a good idea to ignore a dead canary in the coal mine.

While the ephemeral leaks do not impact the end result (after all, the route is gone), they are an important indicator of the lack of BGP route policy enforcement in the autonomous systems that propagate them. If an autonomous system is propagating a bogus route when no better routes are available, it’s equally likely to propagate a bogus route when an intruder manages to inject it.