Category: Worth Reading

Would you like to start a tech blog but don’t know how to do it? Ethan Banks put together a phenomenal how-to guide in his Developing Content & Gathering Research For Your Tech Blog article.

Oh, and please use Hugo (or similar) and use walled gardens like LinkedIn solely to post summaries and links to your content. You want to be in control and retain ownership of your work, right?

Dmytro Shypovalov wrote a great series of detailed posts on Egress Peer Engineering:

• Poor Man’s Traffic Engineering
• Egress Peer Engineering: Basics
• Egress Peer Engineering: Building Blocks

Have fun!

Retirement obviously does not sit well with my friend Tiziano Tofoni; the English version of his IPv6 book just came out.

It is a bit sad, though, that we still need “how to use IPv6” books when the protocol is old enough to enjoy a nice glass of whiskey (in the US) trying to drown its sorrow at its slow adoption.

Nick Buraglio and Brian E. Carpenter published a free, open-source IPv6 textbook.

The book seems to be in an early (ever-evolving) stage, but it’s well worth exploring if you’re new to the IPv6 world, and you might consider contributing if you’re a seasoned old-timer.

It would also be nice to have a few online labs to go with it ;)

Urs Baumann loves hands-on teaching and created tons of lab exercises to support his Infrastructure-as-Code automation course.

During the summer, he published some of them in a collection of GitHub repositories and made them work in GitHub Codespaces. An amazing idea well worth exploring!

Vincent Bernat documented a quirk I hope you’ll never see outside of a CCIE lab: combining BGP confederations with AS-override can generate endless AS paths.

I agree entirely with his conclusions (avoid both features). However, I still think that replacing an AS within the confederation part of an AS path (which should belong to a single well-managed AS) is not exactly the most brilliant idea I’ve seen.

I never mastered the fine art of polite diplomatic sarcasm. Brad Casemore is a virtuoso – you’ll love his take on Google’s Quarterly Results: Investors Begin Questioning Efficacy of GenAI Investments.

Dmytro Shypovalov wrote a fantastic article explaining the basics of MPLS-based Segment Routing. It’s pretty much equivalent to everything I ever wrote about SR-MPLS, but in a much nicer package. Definitely a must-read.

Here’s another AI rant to spice your summer: AI Is Still a Delusion, including an excellent example of how the latest LLMs flunk simple logical reasoning. I particularly liked this one-line summary:

The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us but that we think computers are smarter than us and consequently trust them to make decisions they should not be trusted to make.

It might be worth remembering that quote when an AI-powered management appliance messes up your network because of a false positive ;)

In Matt Duggan’s blog post, you’ll find a scathing review of another attempt to throw AI spaghetti at the wall to see if they stick: the GitHub Copilot Workspace.

He also succinctly summarized everything I ever wanted to say about the idea of using AI tools to generate networking configurations:

Having a tool that makes stuff that looks right but ends up broken is worse than not having the tool at all.