Category: Worth Reading

Another year is almost gone, and it’s time for my traditional “I will disappear until mid-January” retreat (also, don’t expect me to read my email until I’m back).

I hope you’ll also be able to disconnect from the crazy pace of the networking world, forget the “AI will make networking engineers obsolete” shenanigans (hint: SDN did not), and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2025!

Addy Osmani published an excellent overview of the challenges of AI-assisted coding. They apply equally well to the “AI will generate device configurations for me” or “AI will troubleshoot my network” ideas (ignoring for the moment the impact of the orders-of-magnitude smaller training set), so it’s definitely worth reading.

I particularly liked the “‌AI is like having a very eager junior developer on your team” take, as well as the description of the “70% problem” (AI will get you 70% there, but the last 30% will be frustrating) – a phenomenon perfectly illustrated by the following diagram by Forrest Brazeal:

When I discovered GitHub Codespaces (thanks to a pointer by Roman Dodin), I did the absolute minimum of research to get netlab up and running in a container to enable Codespaces-based labs (BGP, IS-IS) and netlab examples.

However, if you want to know the behind-the-scenes details, you MUST read the Codespaces for Network Engineers and Educators deep dive by Julio Perez.

One of the key arguments against stretched clusters (and similar stupidities) I used in my Disaster Recovery Myths presentation was the SSD read latency versus cross-site round-trip time.

Thanks to Networking Notes, I found a great infographic I can use in my next presentation (bonus points: it also works great in a terminal when fetched with curl) and a site that checks the latency of your web site from various vantage points.

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.