Category: worth reading

Here’s some common-sense view on hard-coded rules versus machine learning in network operations by Mark Seery – quite often we can specify our response to an event as a simple set of rules, but if we want to identify deviation from “normal” behavior, machine learning might not be a bad idea.

For more details, watch the Event-Driven Network Automation part of Building Network Automation Solutions online course.

Did you ever wonder why everything in IT becomes slower over time? Our changed expectations and accumulated cruft definitely play a major role.. but it could also be hardware. For more details (and fun reading), explore Fail-Slow at Scale: Evidence of Hardware Performance Faults in Large Production Systems.

Cloudflare has been using ingress anycast (advertising the same set of prefixes from all data centers) for ages. Now they did a giant leap forward and implemented another “this thing can never work” technology: egress anycast. Servers from multiple data centers use source addresses from the prefix that’s advertised by all data centers.

Not only that, in the long-established tradition they described their implementation in enough details that someone determined enough could go and implement it (as opposed to the typical look how awesome our secret sauce is approach from Google).

Bruno Wollmann migrated his blog post to Hugo/GitHub/CloudFlare (the exact toolchain I’m using for one of my personal web sites) and described his choices and improved user- and author experience.

As I keep telling you, always make sure you own your content. There’s absolutely no reason to publish stuff you spent hours researching and creating on legacy platforms like WordPress, third-party walled gardens like LinkedIn, or “free services” obsessed with gathering visitors’ personal data like Medium.

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 ;)