Human Infrastructure 325: This Week's Good Stuff

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
October 05, 2023

This Week’s Good Stuff

by Drew Conry-Murray

Enjoy this week’s selection of curated links and resources, including a story on the first-ever financial penalty for space junk, Ansible tips, and playing around with the in-flight Wi-Fi on an airplane.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

James amused himself by poking around Internet-less in-flight WiFi. He didn’t hack the plane’s black box, but did make a few intriguing discoveries while troubleshooting why the payment portal was broken. Lots to see about the flight in a repeating JSON payload coming from the portal. - Ethan

This post gets down to layer 1, examining signaling of a 10GBASE-R PHY with an oscilloscope. Even if the engineering specifics of the test equipment being illustrated isn’t interesting to you, the screen caps showing data represented as a wave might be. Very cool. - Ethan

Phil Gervasi describes the growing US Networking User Association, a collection of regional network user groups scattered around the US. If you’ve been looking for a local networking community to meet up with, the (US)NUA might have a networking user group (NUG) in your area. (For example, I’m the organizer for the (NH)NUG, and we’re planning 3 events for 2024.) Phil explains the (US)NUA in more detail, announcing his own Upstate (NY)NUG. Worth a read if the (US)NUA is new to you. Also give

This one is so absolutely on the mark, I felt it in my guts. Great thoughts in this short piece from deeply experienced IT systems architect Chris Wahl. You should read the whole thing, but if you need the TL;DR, it’s this. “Find people who can tell you that something is NOT PERFECT.” - Ethan

This short post assembles a few best practices that will help the neophyte Ansible user avoid some common issues. The author touches on organization, secrets management, linting, dry runs, and ansible-mitogen. That last one was new to me, but mitogen is about performance improvements when managing large numbers of devices. - Ethan

Markku Leiniö describes what really goes on in a Windows DHCP database when a lease expires. What doesn’t happen is an immediate release back to the pool of the address. Nope. Instead, the lease is held in an expired state, waiting for a cleanup process to happen sometime later. And even then, the address might not be freed up. “So, while the leases have been expired due to the short lease duration, the leases are still kept reserved for those clients, if they happen to come back to network to request them again.” Markku explains in detail, linking to various docs, showing CLI output, and suggesting registry entries to get closer to the DHCP behavior you’re looking for. - Ethan

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TECH NEWS 📣

This technology extends data access for mobile devices to higher rate data flows. Existing phone-to-satellite is limited to short text messages and mostly pitched as an emergency feature. AST Spacemobile has a very large satellite antenna of 693 sq feet, meaning fewer but larger satellites. Does the market want lesser quality and lower speed to the handset or the faster and reliability of microsatellites to a base station a la Starlink? Or is there a reason for both? - Greg

Spam is a significant cost on IT, so I welcome Google’s move to enforce SPF/DKIM and DMARC for MTA sources that send more than 5,000 emails per day. Plus there must be an unsubscribe link in the email. These are good steps to control the sources of spam. For companies this means that your DNS email records must be fully and correctly implemented before this applies, because 5,000 emails to Google accounts isn’t much. People love sending email instead of making phone calls. - Greg

The $150,000 fine was a gentle slap on the wrist to the multi-billion dollar company, but sets a precedent. Levying fines is a tool that could be increasingly important as orbiting space debris litter the skies above our planet. - Ethan

Issues with 1.1.1.1 public resolver and WARP - Incident Report for Cloudflare

Did you feel a disturbance in the force on October 4, 2023? Well, if you use CloudFlare’s 1.1.1.1 for DNS resolution, you might have. It was borked for a few hours. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Read the description.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

In this research paper Microsoft engineers describe the ‘Catapault’ DC fabric built using FPGAs in every server. In over-simple terms, FPGAs are programmable ASICs providing the benefits of hardware speed but with some flexibility through programming. By configuring the FPGAs for different workloads you can provide a wide range of application acceleration. - Greg

Learn about curl, the classic CLI tool for retrieving URLs. This guide reads like a blog post, and functions like a live tutorial with embedded commands you can click to run right in your browser. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Cisco completes Accedian acquisition - Cisco
Accedian provides network visibility and user experience monitoring for service providers and webscalers in the name of ‘service assurance’. There is real pressure on telcos to prove that their networks perform as promised. When customers deploy SDWAN they have deep visibility into application performance and telcos are often looking stupid and incompetent when the hard data drops into their laps. In an attempt to combat the widespread perception of poor service and low-quality MPLS networks, the telcos are deploying tools that should have been in place two decades ago. Cisco is following this trend using its playbook of acquiring solutions that fit with their culture and that its customers are already buying. The acquisition was announced in June 2023 so it’s a rapid transition. - Greg

Expanding access to safer AI with Amazon - Anthropic Blog
Do your AI modeling with Anthropic, now on AWS. Amazon is hurling as much as $4B at Anthropic. The bet is that there’s enough AI training organizations will want to do to create a plausible ROI. From a conversation I had today citing an announcement VMware made at Explore earlier this year, VMware is making a similar bet. Businesses are going big on AI for competitive advantage and improved efficiency. The infrastructure companies are making it easy to lease an AI compute stack, a stack that’s somewhat more complex than racking lots of compute, storage, and networking. - Ethan

“We’re proud to introduce Grafana Beyla, an open source eBPF auto-instrumentation tool that is now in public preview. Beyla reports span information for basic transactions as well as RED metrics (Rate-Errors-Duration) for both Linux HTTP/S and gRPC services — all without requiring any code modification to manually insert probes.” In short, you can instrument an application without having to update code with instrumentation statements. Beyla does the heavy lifting using eBPF and sends the data off to Grafana for you. - Ethan

Pulumi landed $41M of funding in a C round. They’ll use it to continue developing the increasingly popular infrastructure-as-code tool aimed at developers. Co-founder & CEO Joe Duffy cited improvements to the core product, better cloud abstractions, prioritized security, and AI inclusion as goals going forward. “In short, the new Series C funds will allow us to double down on innovation that is already working, while breaking new ground in pursuit of our mission. Most importantly, we look forward to working with you, our end users and community, to build the best product experiences that solve your hardest and most pressing problems.” If you’d like an introduction to Pulumi (unsponsored), check out Day Two Cloud episode 146. - Ethan

LAST LAUGH 😆