Human Infrastructure 336: The State Of BGP In 2023

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
January 11, 2024

The State Of BGP In 2023

by Drew Conry-Murray

Geoff Huston has written a two-part report on the state of BGP and Internet routing in 2023. Those stories are linked in the Industry Blogs section below. They are packed with information, so be sure and have a look.

And just a reminder that we’ve launched a new newsletter, Packet Capture. This weekly newsletter collects everything we’ve published over the past seven days. If you want an easy way to keep up with Packet Pushers podcasts, blogs, and videos, you can sign up here.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Daniel Dib continues his VXLAN series with a piece on host or MAC mobility. It’s based on a lab he’s running, and he provides detailed CLI output so you can follow along. - Drew

This classic article will help you learn one of the fundamentals of the *NIX CLI, the grep utility. With grep, you can find specific content inside of files, parse interesting lines from live logs, and more. And yes, regex is accepted as search criteria. I wrote a piece on using grep to find access requests other than 200s in Apache logs that leverages regex. If you’re the sort of person with a lot of data to grep through, you should know about ripgrep, lauded for its speed. - Ethan

You know those odd texts or DMs you get where someone you don’t know says they were glad to run into you at the party last week? You know it’s a scam, but did you know where it was heading? To take you (aka the pig) for all you’re worth (butchering). How? By getting to know the person “accidentally” in your texts, falling for their crypto schtick, and investing all your money into their con. Fascinating read explaining the strategy. - Ethan

Lee Badman aims his jaundiced eye towards Wi-Fi 7 aka 802.11be. He’s intrigued, but as his article explains, there’s a whole lot of “but…” involved. For instance, the new highest speed and channel width are likely to be theoretical as opposed to impactful in real-life. Client roaming is still up to individual vendors to sort out. The gap between consumer grade and enterprise grade wireless devices will remain. But it’s not all bad. Lee holds out hope for additional 6 GHz spectrum consumption. - Ethan

TECH NEWS 📣

By the time you get this, you’ve probably already read all the think pieces and commentary (including mine and Greg’s), but this is a big story so it’s worth including here. While lots of other networking and security vendors are talking about AI Ops, Juniper was actually doing it with the Mist Wi-Fi (which came to Juniper via acquisition). Mist AI was helping Juniper take market share in campus Wi-Fi, and the company was rolling AI ops capabilities into the wired campus as well.

But even while Juniper began having success with Mist, its share price was still languishing. I think shareholders were growing impatient. HPE came along with an offer that would pay a premium of around 30% on those shares, so the deal was done. The big question now is how HPE handles the acquisition. Besides the usual difficulties of integrating two big tech companies (aligning cultures, sales forces, and business models; identifying who can be laid off; and so on), HPE now has to manage two major Wi-Fi products and other portfolio redundancies. Lots of questions remain, but if HPE plays this right, it can remain a major competitor in Wi-Fi and make a serious play for wired campus, telcos and service providers, and the data center. Interesting times ahead! - Drew

As Wi-Fi is a standard equipment manufacturers must be compliant with for interoperability, you wouldn’t think patents would come into the picture. Not so. One of the Huawei patents cited outlines “a method for sending a wireless local area network packet structure”, the specific details of which are described in the patent. Wouldn’t that be covered by the standard? Apparently not, which makes sense in that technical standards often describe what is supposed to happen but not how. In the details of how, patents come into play. Based on these court rulings, how Amazon decided to comply with the standard stepped on some patent holders. Fascinating. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

“Difftastic is a CLI tool that allows you to compare files based on their syntax rather than rely on line-by-line matching.” Rick Donato shows an example comparing two syntactically identical JSON files that were but formatted differently. One file was the JSON all on one line. The other was pretty JSON. Difftastic matched the files as identical. Neat! Interested? Here’s the Difftastic landing page. Free and open source. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Strap in for a double dose of Geoff Huston epics! These two posts comprise an annual report by Geoff on the state of Internet routing. Geoff writes “At the start of each year, I report on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, examining some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.”

Part one digs into IPv4 and IPv6 routing data, including growth measurements for both protocols. Geoff finds that “the drivers for growth in the IPv4 BGP network have largely dissipated across 2023” and explains why.

Part two looks at the stability of BGP based on route updates; that is, whether an increase in route updates that have to be calculated will outstrip the processing power required to perform those updates. “This report will look at the profile of BGP updates across 2023 to assess whether the stability of the routing system, as measured by the level of BGP update activity, is changing.” - Drew 

TL;DR. NetDevOps Days is rolling their events into the upcoming AutoCon events--joining forces to bring folks to one event rather than have two highly similar events. AutoCon1 is happening in Europe in May 2024. AutoCon2 is happening in the US in November 2024. Details TBD. These events should be on your radar to attend both to learn from the experiences of network automation folks and to network with colleagues & vendors trying to figure out network automation. - Ethan

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared On Bluesky by Bobby The Phish