Human Infrastructure 335: New Year, New Links

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
January 04, 2024

Editor’s Note: Announcing The Packet Capture Newsletter

by Drew Conry-Murray

It feels a little recursive to tell you about a newsletter in this newsletter, but here we go. Starting next week, we’re launching the new Packet Capture newsletter. Why? Because we put out a lot of podcasts (8 and counting), plus blogs, videos, and other stuff, and it can be hard to keep up. Packet Capture is a weekly digest that gathers everything we’ve published on packetpushers.net and on our YouTube channel over the last seven days. Packet Capture is designed to be an easy way to see what we’re up to and get the newest content every week.

The launch of Packet Capture won’t affect this newsletter. This newsletter is meant to be a broad sample of the good stuff other people are doing online. That’s not changing.

If you’re interested in Packet Capture, you can sign up here. As always, we don’t sell, share, or trade your email with anyone.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

AI was inescapable in 2023 and will continue to drive interest from media, investors, consumers, governments, and big business in 2024. That interest generates hype, which tends to inflate into a bubble that eventually bursts. We’ve been here before. Cory Doctrow’s essay uses the aftermath of the dotcom bubble as a model to think about what happens with AI after the hype eventually collapses. He’s got an interesting take on why the aftermath of the dotcom bubble left a few good things beyond: “...the most important residue after the bubble popped was the mil­lions of young people who’d been lured into dropping out of university in order to take dotcom jobs where they got all-expenses paid crash courses in HTML, Perl, and Python. This army of technologists was unique in that they were drawn from all sorts of backgrounds – art-school dropouts, hu­manities dropouts, dropouts from earth science and bioscience programs and other disciplines that had historically been consumers of technology, not producers of it.” These people brought in new ideas and energy, and helped drive a new round of creativity.

Might the same thing happen for AI? Cory has some interesting thoughts. This longish essay is worth your time. - Drew

What happens if you’re stuck as a Wi-Fi guest that only allows HTTP/HTTPS, but you really need SSH access to a remote box? You configure SSH to work over HTTPS, of course. There are other options for remote SSH access, but this article details SSH over HTTPS specifically. - Ethan

I assumed this was impastable, but Peter Heinrich noodled his way to passing IP over uncooked spaghetti. Peter says, “Actually this is rather RS232 over spaghetti. But using the SLIP protocol, some USB-to-RS232 adapters and two Linux machines, one can easily tunnel IP over RS232, thus effectively tunneling IP over the spaghetties.” On the click, there is a picture of his saucy contraption. - Ethan

Louis is a developer with expertise in Linux networking including eBPF. He works at Isovalent on the Cilium product. In this article, Louis explains with code packet redirection. He explains, “Packet redirection is taking a packet from one network interface and injecting it into another.” Louis says this is the first in a series on eBPF networking. No word on whether Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent will impact Louis’ fine work. - Ethan

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a discussion on the ‘hourglass model’ of the IP protocol stack. The basic premise is that you can change anything except the IP protocol. Ethernet / infiniband/FDDI are interchangeable for example. You can change TCP or UDP or some other protocol. Right now the unchangeable part has grown to be “IP/HTTP/HTML” as there is little value in using anything else. This article uses protobufs as an example of convergence. - Greg

TECH NEWS 📣

This article is interesting less because of the clickbaity 6G, and more because it chronicles where the telco industry is at in rolling out 5G. Not far, not consistently, and with evolving branding and products. Give it a read if you’d like to get up to speed on 5G Standalone vs. 5G Advanced vs. 5.5G. Is 6G coming? Sure, eventually. Nothing to worry about right now, though. - Ethan

Today I learned that Li-Fi is a thing. As I read through this piece, it sounds at least vaguely related to what happens with light using fiber optics for communications, only done without cables. The article gets into specific research done to improve the error rate of this transmission medium using a white light that blends three different light waves. Despite the title, don’t think of Li-Fi as a future Wi-Fi replacement. Wi-Fi penetrates walls. Li-Fi doesn’t. Whatever the future of Li-Fi might be, use-cases will be limited, just like millimeter wave 5G has limited use cases. - Ethan

If you’re coming back to help desk shenanigans clogging up your ticket queue, maybe this helps. “Based on customer reports, this issue impacts enterprise wireless networks with fast-transition/fast-roaming enabled to facilitate seamless device movement between wireless access points. Home users who have installed KB5033375 or KB50532288 are yet to report experiencing Wi-Fi connectivity problems. The impact seems confined to Windows 11 operating systems, specifically those operating on version 22H2 or 23H2 feature releases. Windows 10 systems don't seem to be affected by this particular issue.” Good luck! - Ethan

On the surface, this is odd. The announcement that LinkedIn was moving to Azure was made back in 2019. Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Isn’t a move to Azure for LinkedIn, which runs mostly on its own infrastructure, obvious? “Issues with the planned migration arose from LinkedIn attempting to use its own software tools instead of those readily available on Azure, one of the people said. LinkedIn is in the process of constructing an additional data center to handle its computing needs, the person said.” That is, LinkedIn is running into the same problem many of us have had over the years. I was once confused at the use of a mainframe for a government app. Wouldn’t there be a cost savings migrating it to a scalable client-server architecture? No, it was explained to me. The costs to retool & redesign the application were so high that the fiscally responsible thing to do was to keep buying bigger mainframes until the app completed its lifecycle. Details & dependencies make technology implementation hard in unexpected ways. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Meshtastic self-descibes as “an open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” The data rates are slow--37.5kbps on the high end, with 10.94kbps and down more likely. The use case for Meshtastic is transmitting text messages where there is no other available communications medium. Meshtastic uses the LoRa radio spectrum, but the tech is not LoRaWAN. About 80 nodes are supported in a Meshtastic mesh, and the current long-distance record is 254km. Have fun! - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Paris Traceroute is not an app for finding the fastest way to the Eiffel Tower. It’s a variation of classic traceroute designed to account for the use of flow-based load balancing and other routing techniques employed on the Internet to spread traffic more evenly across devices. These techniques can make it harder for network engineers using standard traceroute to get an accurate view of the path between a source and destination. Phil Gervasi provides a handy overview of how traceroute and its Parisian variation work, as well as limitations of the variant and tips for understanding its output. - Drew

Two live events aimed at the network automation crowd will now be merged into one. NetDevOps Days, which was started by NetBox, is teaming up with the Network Automation Forum (NAF) to fold NetDevOps days into NAF’s AutoCon event. Why? Kris Beevers at NetBox Labs writes “Both events have incredible momentum. The combined communities and sponsor ecosystems will amplify the energy. The focus of a singular event in the rapidly accelerating network automation ecosystem will compound that amplification.” Ethan Banks and I attended the inaugural AutoCon0 event in 2023 and were impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of attendees, conference planners, and sponsors. I can see why NetBox Labs, which is a tech company and not an events organizer, would want to join forces. - Drew

If you’re a Fly.io customer and missed this one, check it out. Your bill might be changing. Note this change affects dedicated IPv4s and not shared IPv4s. - Ethan

Route 53 now supports DoH. You can configure this for inbound and outbound Route 53 resolvers. You can also be selective about which domains are forwarded elsewhere. AWS states that there is no additional charge to use DoH. - Ethan

GREG’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

List of sausages - Wikipedia

Sausages are key to my edible life. I’ve consumed hundreds of varieties and made my own multiple times. I don’t think I ever quite grasped just how universal the concept of stuffing meat mix into animal intestines was until I saw this list. - Greg

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared by Jason Perlow on Bluesky