Category: Worth Reading

Sean Goedecke published an interesting compilation of practical advice for engineers. Not surprisingly, they include things like “focus on fundamentals” and “spend your working time doing things that are valuable to the company and your career” (OMG, does that really have to be said?).

Bonus point: a link to an article by Patrick McKenzie (of the Bits About Money fame) explaining why you SHOULD NOT call yourself a programmer (there goes the everyone should be a programmer gospel 😜).

Gabriel sent me a pointer to a blog post by Rudolph Bott describing the details of BGP Unnumbered implementations on Nokia, Juniper, and Bird.

Even more interestingly, Rudolph points out the elephant I completely missed: RFC 8950 refers to RFC 2545, which requires a GUA IPv6 next hop in BGP updates (well, it uses the SHALL wording, which usually means “troubles ahead”). What do you do if you’re running EBGP on an interface with no global IPv6 addresses? As expected, vendors do different things, resulting in another fun interoperability exercise.

Today is a perfect day to point out the fantastic Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks presentation (HT: A blog post by George Michaelson)

It’s a must-read, even if you’re absolutely uninterested in the topic. Just replace “Quantum mumbo-jumbo” with AI or SDN ;) Have fun!

One of the most significant problems engineers face when trying to improve their online presence is the “How do I start writing?” roadblock (hint: publishing bland AI-generated slop won’t get you far unless you aim to become a Thought Leader).

Zvi Mowshowitz collected links to over a dozen different writing styles, starting with JRR Tolkien. I’m pretty sure you’ll find something useful in that vast collection.

I encountered the Escape sequences (named after the first character in the sequence) while programming stuff that would look nicely on the venerable VT100 terminals (not to mention writing one or two VT100 emulators myself).

In the meantime, those sequences got standardized and (par for the course) extended with “proprietary” stuff everyone uses now. Julia Evans did a great job documenting the state of the art. Thanks a million!

You can use SR-MPLS, MPLS-TE, or an SDN controller to build virtual circuits (label-switched paths) across the network core. The controller can push the LSPs into network devices with PCEP, BGP-LU, or some sort of NETCONF/RESTCONF trickery.

Unfortunately, you’re only half done once you have installed the LSPs. You still have to persuade the network devices to use them. Welcome to the confusing world of traffic steering explored in the Loopback as a Service blog post by Dmytro Shypovalov.

I love good steamy rants, and The Generative AI Con from Edward Zitron is as good as they come. Pour yourself a glass of wine (or a cup of tea or whatever else you prefer) and have some fun ;)

Ole Troan, an excellent networking engineer working on IPv6 for decades, has decided to comment on the color of the IPv6 kettle, starting with:

• Is the transition to IPv6 inevitable? (hint: Betteridge’s law of headlines)
• The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6 - episode 1 (aka Second System Effect¹)

I’m pretty sure Ole won’t stop there, so stay tuned.

Pavel Odintsov published a series of introductory blog posts describing protocols we can use to collect network traffic telemetry:

• Part 1 covers the ancient Netflow v5, Netflow v9, and IPFIX. It also mentions sampling and flow aggregation.
• Part 2 describes sFlow, port mirroring and sampled mirroring, and the use of IPFIX/Netflow v9 to transport mirrored traffic.

These blog posts will not make you an expert but will give you an excellent overview of the telemetry landscape¹.

Dmytro Shypovalov published another article well worth reading: why should you use an SDN controller for RSVP-TE. It covers:

• The reasons people might still prefer RSVP-TE over SR-MPLS and the current state of RSVP-TE
• What an SDN controller might bring to the RSVP-TE world
• SR/RSVP coexistence and interworking

Have fun!