Category: worth reading

Geoff Huston published a fantastic history of fiber optics cables, from the first (copper) transatlantic cable to 2.2Tbps coherent optics. Have fun!

Mark Seery wrote a fantastic must-read article explaining why routing will never be a solved problem.

You might want to enjoy it as a relaxing antidote after a painful exposure to SD-WAN (or SD-something-else) brainwashing.

Bruce Davie makes an excellent point in his QUIC Is Not a TCP Replacement article – QUIC not a next-generation TCP, it’s a reliable RPC transport protocol.

What Bruce forgot to mention is that we had a production-grade RPC transport protocol for years – SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) – but it had two shortcomings:

• It wasn’t invented by the right people;
• It used a different IP protocol number and thus upset every ossified middlebox in the Internet. QUIC hides on top of UDP (because adding extra headers makes at least as much sense as junk DNA).

Jeroen Van Bemmel created another interesting netlab topology: EVPN/VXLAN between SR Linux fabric and FRR on Linux hosts based on his work implementing VRFs, VXLAN, and EVPN on FRR in netlab release 1.3.1.

Bonus point: he also described how to do multi-vendor interoperability testing with netlab.

If only he wouldn’t be publishing his articles on a platform that’s almost as user-data-craving as Google.

Charity Majors published another masterpiece: The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business).

I doubt that anyone who would need this particular bit of advice would read or follow it, but (as they say) hope springs eternal.

Bruce Schneier wrote an article on the dangers of cryptocurrencies and the uselessness of blockchain, including this gem:

From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use.

Please feel free to tell me how he’s just another individual full of misguided opinions… after all, what does he know about crypto?

I stumbled upon an interesting article in one of my RSS feeds: should we build smart highways or smart cars?

The article eloquently explains how ridiculous and expensive it would be to put the smarts in the infrastructure, and why most everyone is focused on building smart cars. The same concepts should be applied to networking, but of course the networking vendors furiously disagree – the network should be as complex, irreplaceable, and expensive as possible. I collected a few examples seven years ago, and nothing changed in the meantime.

Another interesting column by Geoff Huston: performance of TCP congestion control protocols when using Low-Earth Orbit or Geosynchronous Orbit satellites for Internet access.

Erik Auerswald sent me a pointer to a blog post by Dave Taht: The state of fq_codel and sch_cake worldwide. It’s so nice to see what a huge impact Dave made since he started the Bufferbloat project.

Hint: if you have no idea what Bufferbloat or fq_codel are, you REALLY SHOULD explore Dave’s web site.

Julia Evans published a long list of new(ish) Linux command line tools. For example, did you ever want to have directory listing in nicely formatted JSON? How about ls -l | jc --ls | jq .?

Quite a few of these tools also work on Mac and can be installed with HomeBrew. Some are written in a scripting language, so you could (in theory) also use them on Windows (without WSL).

I stumbled upon a sad tweet a few days ago…

… and not surprisingly, a lot of people chimed in saying “don’t give up, we still prefer reading”. Unfortunately, it does seem like the amount of worthy content is constantly decreasing, and way too many quality blogs disappeared over the years, so I’ll try to lift the veil of depression a bit ;)

Lívio Zanol Puppim published a series of blog posts describing a full-stack network automation, including GitOps with GitLab, handling secrets with Hashicorp Vault, using Ansible and AWX to run automation scripts, continuous integration with Gitlab CI Runner, and topped it off with a REST API and React-based user interface.

You might not want to use the exact same components, but it’s probably worthwhile going through his solution and explore the source code. He’s also looking for any comments or feedback you might have on how to improve what he did.

Russ White’s Weekend Reads are full of gems, including a recent pointer to the AI Illusion – State-of-the-Art Chatbots Aren’t What They Seem article. It starts with “Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. Despite all the incredible things computers can do, they are still not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word.” and it only gets better.

While the article focuses on natural language processing (GPT-3 model), I see no reason why we should expect better performance from AI in networking (see also: AI/ML in Networking – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

You MUST read the next masterpiece coming from Ethan Banks: Career Advice I’d Give To 20, 30 and 40-Something Year Old Me. I found this bit particularly relevant:

Your life is at least half over. Stop wasting time doing things other people think are important.

If only Ethan would have told me that wisdom ten years ago.

Iwan Rahabok’s open-source VMware Operations Guide is now also available in Markdown-on-GitHub format. Networking engineers support vSphere/NSX infrastructure might be particularly interested in the Network Metrics chapter.