Human Infrastructure 337: It's Full Of Links!

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
January 18, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Ryan Harris points out that fragmentation doesn’t function in IPv6 like it did in IPv4, reviews common challenges with v6 path MTU discovery (PMTUD), and shares his best practices for maximum transmission unit (MTU) size on IPv6 networks. Ryan’s observations and research are especially helpful for folks dealing with tunneling or IPv4 + IPv6 on the same network (most people). - Ethan

Jeff McLaughlin reflects on the networking industry we once knew through the lens of his time spent at Juniper and later Cisco. Some great “inside baseball” anecdotes.- Ethan

Anycast is not a protocol, but rather a technique--announcing the same IP address block from more than one router. If you’ll permit a healthy dose of generalization, routers converge on the announcement that’s “closest” to them. In this way, anycast provides a rudimentary, but effective, form of load-balancing. This article reflects on using anycast to distribute queries to the root Internet DNS servers around the globe, including the angst of turning on anycast for that first DNS root server in Finland. Anycast has become a tool in the toolbox of many network architects working with globally distributed services. Lots has been written about the potential concerns of anycast, including (mostly unfounded) fears like, “What happens if routing changes in the middle of a TCP transaction?” - Ethan

This 13 year old thread has a solid write-up explaining the terms terminal, shell, tty, and console including a bit of etymology. - Ethan

TECH NEWS 📣

The puns are strong with this one, with invocations of Large Laundry Models, Laundry Processing Unit, and Downloadable Laundry Cycles. The big question, though--was the LG laundry robot really shipping off 3.7GB of data to the Internet a day? Hard to say. Some suspect a reporting error by the ASUS router Internet gateway box. - Ethan

I’ve felt the sting of an older Ubuntu distro with a production system on it approaching the end of LTS. “Just update Ubuntu, you big dummy!” isn’t always a viable option, as I’ve only ever had one Ubuntu system upgrade go well out of several attempts over the years. Most of those upgrades would fail outright or break server functionality such that it made better sense to rebuild the box from scratch on the new distro. All that kerfuffle to end up functionally back where I started, albeit with security patches available once again. To hear that Canonical will make up to 12 years of support for Ubuntu LTS available? Great news for people who don’t like busy work and don’t mind spending money for Ubuntu Pro (free for 5 personal machines). More info in this YouTube interview with Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Use PAC files in your environment? The PAC File Performance Comparer from the folks at CACI Network Services will help you quantify the performance benefit of one PAC vs. another. Given two PAC files, “The intent is to allow for a quick "before and after" benchmark of a PAC file rewriting exercise, with a resulting CSV output which aims to:

  • Unit Test the expected behaviour of a URL (proxy or direct) against the processed behaviour (proxy... or direct) of a given "before" and "after" set of PAC files

  • Display the PAC-processed behaviour of a URL (proxy or direct) of a given "before" and "after" set of PAC files

  • Display the time taken by the browser engine to process the PAC to calculate the behaviour (proxy or direct) of a given "before" and "after" set of PAC files”

This is free to use and open source. MIT licensed. - Ethan

Pandas is a Python library that allows you to work with data in a spreadsheet-like manner. I recorded Heavy Networking Ep.702 about Pandas with Rick Donato. Pandas is a useful way to work with network automation data. “While pandas is great, it has it’s warts. Wes McKinney wrote about several of these challenges. There are many other criticisms online but most will boil down to two items: performance and awkward/complex API.” Enter Polars. The article walks through several basic operations with Polars, including moving data between Pandas and Polars. - Ethan

On Hacker News, a thread popped up about how the Internet might work in deep space. One responder suggested that the key search terms are delay tolerant networking and the bundle protocol. That led me to RFC 9171 and the IETF’s Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking working group (dtn). The DTN WG and bundle protocol are not specifically addressing the needs of deep space networking, but the concepts they define are applicable there. - Ethan

The IP Journal continues its retro publishing style of excellent technology content for networking professionals. As an offshoot of the IETF it draws on a pool of people doing real work who write articles I care about. Well, mostly anyway. Still, I’ve been reading this publication for nearly thirty years to find out what new stuff just might happen and to learn loads. It’s not on any certification exam but then neither is real life. - Greg

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

It’s been a hot moment since “power workstations” were the hot fashion. Now that AMD and Intel have added some AI silicon to their latest desktop there is a race to get to market and grab some of that sweet sweet AI budget. This post is helpful to me to understand what they can do and why AI doesn’t have to be off-prem. - Greg

In my opinion eBPF is a genuine innovation in Linux and I’m still surprised that it managed to get added to the kernel and become a core feature. This 30 minute video documentary is well done and an easy-to-watch history of eBPF. Isovalent and Intel sponsored this, but it’s very watchable. Delightful. - Greg

Official announcement that Broadcom is completely ending perpetual licensing on VMware  products. Budgeting becomes more confusing since pricing can vary over time, you never own the product so can no more ‘sweating the assets’ when budgets are tight. Vendors get their money regardless of the external or internal conditions. I have no doubt that companies won’t even care and will realize in a few years that it’s a massive problem. They won’t have an exit strategy and will be trapped.  - Greg

Disaggregated network operating system vendor DriveNets announced full integration with Acacia 400G ZR/ZR+ optics. DriveNets says this is the first integration of its kind, and points out it’s not merely support for the plugged in optic. “This integration also goes beyond interoperability validation. DriveNets Network Cloud offers full software support for the Acacia modules, including configuration (channel and power), monitoring, and troubleshooting for Acacia Bright 400ZR+ transceivers with transmit power greater than +1dBm.” The Acacia optics are also coherent, the ultimate impact of which is less gear required to drive data across the huge pipe. Click for more Packet Pushers coverage of DriveNets. - Ethan

At an overly quick glance, the headline sounds like data egress charges are being shut off for customers, but that’s not what’s happening at all. “Starting today, Google Cloud customers who wish to stop using Google Cloud and migrate their data to another cloud provider and/or on premises, can take advantage of free network data transfer to migrate their data out of Google Cloud. This applies to all customers globally. You can learn more here.” When you click to learn more, you find out that first, you have to apply for the data transfer fee elimination--there’s a form. Once Google Cloud approves and instructs you to go for it, you’ve got 60 days to get the migration done. Not a lot of time--you’ve got to be ready to absorb the data and have the pipe to move the data quickly enough. Finally, you’re doing this as a termination of your Google Cloud agreement. How many folks are actually going to be leaving GCP entirely? Hmm. - Ethan

The research referenced describes the living-off-trusted-sites (LOTS) approach the bad guys sometimes use to evade detection. GitHub is one such place, where we might trust GitHub, only to find it’s being used as a platform to deliver malicious code. The PDF of the full report is pleasantly ungated. - Ethan

Cybersecurity in 2023 was no different to 2022. A dumpster fire but at least it got noticed by Checkpoint who finally has realized that firewalls from 2010’s are not what people are buying. This blog post is awful, trite, and pointless which means my opinion of the company remains unchanged - Greg

It’s been a ‘thing’ for a couple of decades to extract the heat generated by data centers to use for heating or regeneration. But only a few projects got built so I’m pleased to see another one in the UK where the facilities are as green as they can make them. You should put your compute there. - Greg

Disclosure : I don’t care about OpenTofu. I don’t see what problem it solves or why it should exist beyond a very narrow interest group that wants to make money off the work done by Hashicorp. - Greg

LAST LAUGH 😆