Category: worth reading

AWS started charging for public IPv4 addresses a few months ago, supposedly to encourage users to move to IPv6. As it turns out, you need public IPv4 addresses (or a private link) to access many AWS services, clearly demonstrating that it’s just another way of fleecing the sheep Hotel California tax. I’m so glad I moved my videos to Cloudflare ;)

For more details, read AWS: Egress Traffic and Using AWS Services via IPv6 (rendered in beautiful, easy-to-read teletype font).

Erik Auerswald pointed me to an interesting open-source project. LibreQoS implements decent QoS using software switching on many-core x86 platforms. It’s implemented as a bump-in-the-wire software solution, so you should be able to plug it into your network just before a major congestion point and let it handle the packet dropping and prioritization.

Obviously, the concept is nothing new. I wrote about a similar problem in xDSL networks in 2009.

Daniel Dib started writing a series of blog posts describing Cisco vPC in VXLAN/EVPN Networks. The first one covers the anycast VTEP, the second one the vPC configuration.

Let’s hope he will keep them coming and link them together so it will be easy to find the whole series after stumbling on one of the posts ;)

You probably know I hate posting links to walled gardens or sites that try really hard to make you sign up. Sometimes, I have to make an exception: Roman Pomazanov wrote a great (and humorous) article comparing how easy it is to set up simple labs with GNS3, containerlab, and netlab.

Another lovely must-read rant from the cranky security professional.

TL&DR: Data protection requirements like PCI-DSS aren’t there to make companies more secure but to make it too expensive for them to hoard excessive customer data (see also: GDPR).

Lasse Haugen had enough of the never-ending “we can’t possibly deploy IPv6” excuses and decided to start the IPv6 Shame-as-a-Service website, documenting top websites that still don’t offer IPv6 connectivity.

His list includes well-known entries like twitter.com, azure.com, and github.com plus a few unexpected ones. I find cloudflare.net not having an AAAA DNS record truly hilarious. Someone within the company that flawlessly provided my website with IPv6 connectivity for years obviously still has some reservations about their own dogfood ;)

Another cybersecurity rant worth reading: cybersecurity is broken due to lack of consequences.

Bonus point: pointer to RFC 602 written in December 1973.

Every time someone tries to persuade you to buy (expensive) big-buffer data center switches, take an antidote: the Things we (finally) know about network queues article by Avery Pennarun.

The March 2024 Internet Protocol Journal has a lengthy article on the history and “future” of Ethernet that might be worth reading (although it’s short on details) if you weren’t around when it all started.

If you need a good rant about Thought Leaders, Talent Gap, and Certification-Based-Hiring, look no further than I see a different gap from here!. Here’s a choice tidbit:

Every single job description that requires some sort of certification must be treated with suspicion. Demanding a certification usually means that you don’t know what you want, and you’re just outsourcing your thinking to someone else.

Have fun!

John Capobianco published the source code of his Packet Buddy application on GitHub. It’s a Python UI that takes a PCAP file, converts it to JSON, and includes that JSON as part of the ChatGPT chat, allowing you to discuss the captured packets with ChatGPT.

His idea is one of the best uses of generative AI in networking I’ve seen so far, as long as you remember that you’re dealing with an overconfident intern who has no problem making up an answer just to sound smart. Have fun!

Finally, if you don’t want to use ChatGPT (I wouldn’t blame you) or send captured data into The Cloud, someone already adapted his idea to use local LLMs.

In case you’ve heard about bufferbloat but don’t know what it is: Dan Groshev wrote a nice bufferbloat for dummies blog post on the APNIC blog.

Another must-explore gem by Julia Evans: Popular git config options.

Side note: I keep collecting links to insightful Git articles in the Git and GitHub section of the Network Automation Tools webinar.

I ran the first webinar as an independent author almost exactly fourteen years ago¹, with the first ticket sold just before New Year’s Eve. I kept focusing on individual webinars until someone asked me, “Would it be possible to buy access to everything you did?” His question effectively created the ipSpace.net subscription, with the first one sold in late 2010 (I still have the email that triggered the whole process).

After procrastinating for months, I finally spent a few days cleaning up and organizing OSPF blog posts (it turns out I wrote almost 100 blog posts on the topic in the 18 years of blogging).