Human Infrastructure 353: TCP/IP Turns 50

AuthorAuthor

Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
May 09, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Laura Chappell looks back at “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” a paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 1974. In it, authors Vint Cerf and Robert Khan outlined what would eventually become TCP/IP, sharing ideas on ports, sequence numbers, the SYN flag, and more. - Ethan

Brad Casemore analyzes the spending on AI, believing that both the capex and opex required for serious AI computing puts it out of reach for any but the very largest of operators. Brad thinks hard about AI’s astronomical power requirements, inferring that we might see acquisitions of clean, renewable energy providers by the big cloud operators to keep AI compute going. As Brad so aptly states, “The juxtaposition of information-age AI services relying on industrial-era coal would be grotesquely incongruous, not to mention significantly harmful to the environment. No company burning coal to power its datacenters could credibly claim an environmental cloak or boast about sustainability.” - Ethan

Mark Houtz creates a lexicon explained by metaphors to help enterprise wireless folks get their head around private cellular networks. Why does this matter? Because the opening up of the Citizen Broadband Radio Service to private cellular makes this type of wireless network accessible to many more businesses—maybe the one you work for. This post will help you understand how private cellular is similar to (and different from) your beloved collection of access points and SSIDs. - Ethan

Geoff Huston in a short (for him) post analyzes Internet routing data that infers what the average IPv6 network sizes are over time. How many /48s? How many /56s? Etc. From there, he ponders what the role of subnetting even is in the IPv6 era. While Geoff’s not advocating for a subnetless Internet, the design principles from olden days around network sizing don’t often apply these days. Geoff leaves us with a conundrum. “As an abstraction to assist in scaling the networks, subnets still have a role to play, but as the pendulum of the technology of packet networking swings back from routing to switching, its increasingly challenging to understand exactly what this role is!” - Ethan

Tony takes the contrarian viewpoint that sudo isn’t always the right answer for operators who need to run a command requiring root level privileges. In this post, he covers the history of why sudo became the standard way to escalate to root, explains the prevailing wisdom justifying this situation, then skewers them all. Along the way, he mentions alternative tools really and userv as different approaches to the “I need to do root stuff, but don’t want to be logged in as root all the time” problem. He also suggests that being able to log into a shell as root isn’t the purest evil it’s made out to be, depending on the situation. - Ethan

I’m fascinated by public DNS services. They’re something that seems simple, but when you dig into the details, it's a bag of hidden problems. RIPE is a Regional Internet Registry, but plans to retire its public DNS secondary. Deep diving on the reasons why, operating the server has become a burden and impractical. Educational, and also a reminder that DNS is not well-configured by end users generally. - Greg

NetBeez is a real-time network performance monitoring solution that runs end-to-end tests across any network infrastructure, including WiFi and remote. 

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TECH NEWS 📣

Bob Dennard was known from creating a way to store a single bit of data in a single transistor—the foundation of DRAM. This was much more efficient than the magnetic-core random access memory in use at the time.

Bob also contributed Dennard scaling aka Dennard’s law to the world of computing. “The theory was based on Moore’s law, which posits that the number of transistors that can be fit into a given space will double approximately every two years. Dennard scaling predicted that the performance of each watt would increase at roughly the same rate. In other words, power consumption would drop as transistors were made smaller, enabling chipmakers to increase processor clock speed without increasing power draw.” While ultimately Dennard scaling gave way to physics, it held true until 2005.

Robert Dennard passed on April 23, 2024. He was 91 years old. - Ethan

The growing swath of AI tools both for recruiters and job seekers aren’t making anything easier for anyone. Well…it’s easier to generate content. Applications. Response letters. Follow up messages. That sort of thing. But AI doesn’t seem to be making it easier for people looking for work to find opportunities or vice-versa. From what I’m reading, it’s getting harder for everyone to find the signal in the noise—AI is generating a lot of noise.

This reminds me that much of the work I’ve gotten over the years hasn’t been via a recruiter or an online posting. It’s because I knew someone, or knew someone that knew someone. If you’re looking for work or looking for someone with a particular set of skills to fill a position, don’t just look at postings and apply blindly. Leverage your human network. Who do you know that knows someone? While not the same as knowing someone, we at Packet Pushers try to help close the gap between employers and job seekers via our jobs board. - Ethan

This piece goes back to late March, but I’d missed it. Sorry if it’s old news to you, but I think it’s interesting to witness Starlink’s capabilities grow month by month and year by year. They are launching more satellites into orbit to increase the density of coverage, and iterating on satellite design to improve latency characteristics and increase bandwidth. Starlink feels like science fiction come to life.

In this report, Michael Kan states that the US Federal Communications Commission “is letting the company test the technology “state-wide” in California, Washington, Texas, and Hawaii. In addition, SpaceX can conduct testing in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Whitmore Lake, Michigan; and Rock Creek, Colorado, among other locations. The company is indicating the tests will see how the cellular Starlink system fares across various kinds of terrains.”

Early Starlink cellular testing has demonstrated download speeds of up to 17Mbps to regular old (not enhanced for satellite comms) smartphones. As an outdoor enthusiast who spends a considerable amount of time in the wilderness outside of cell tower range, I look forward to the day when I don’t need to carry an emergency satellite tracker. One device to rule them all. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Thijs van den Hout shares six years of experience with collaborative DDoS mitigation. How can service providers share information about DDoS attacks they are seeing to help combat DDoS attacks on a wider scale? Technical cooperation is required, of course. But more than that, there is governance, scheduled testing, and research to coordinate. This summary provides a model service providers could use to build more robust DDoS defense by pooling their resources for the betterment of the Internet at large. Bravo. - Ethan

Cisco’s John Capobianco applies LLMs to a routing table, fine-tuning the model to be able to answer specific natural language questions about the routing table. At the top of the doc, he defines the key technologies he’s relying on, including LLM, RAG, RAFT, LangChain, and more to get us started.

Then John walks through the code (not all that many lines required), training data, fine-tuning process, and costs. In the end, he can ask a chat engine questions like, “If I was a packet with a destination of 10.255.255.9, what interface would I use?” And, of course, the correct answer comes back. This work of John’s is in its early days, but demonstrates the possibilities. Imagine the sorts of questions you might be able to ask of the system once it was trained on the entirety of network state!

There are a number of networking AI startups doing work related to what John is experimenting with, including SliceUp, Augtera Networks, and Selector. Other networking vendors are beginning to add AI capabilities to their platforms as well. Nokia comes to mind, where they demo integrating ChatGPT with their SR-Linux CLI. - Ethan

REMINDER: The Fat Pipe Is Going On A Diet!

We created the Fat Pipe podcast feed for listeners who wanted ALL THE PODCASTS. It was useful when we had just three or four shows. Now that we’re up to nine podcasts on the network (and counting), we’ve realized the Fat Pipe has become a little overwhelming.

Starting this June, we’ll slim down the Fat Pipe. By September, this feed will carry Heavy Networking, Network Break, and Day Two Cloud. We encourage you to subscribe individually to all the other shows you want to hear so you don’t miss an episode. You can subscribe at Packetpushers.net or via your favorite podcatcher.

Here’s the schedule for the Fat Pipe diet:

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Network automation & orchestration provider Itential continues their ServiceNow integration with this announcement. Aimed at Communications Service Providers, the Itential for ServiceNow OMT (Order Management For Telecom) means you can use ServiceNow OMT as the front-end and Itential’s Automation Platform as the back-end to fulfill orders.

“The solution enables teams to dynamically publish Itential workflows and services into the ServiceNow OMT product catalog, enabling product owners to quickly incorporate orchestrated network services into their new and existing products.” Click through for more details, including a webinar where you can dig into the capabilities for your use case. - Ethan

Jeffrey Mew at Microsoft reports, “Data Wrangler is a free extension that offers data viewing and cleaning that is directly integrated into VS Code and the Jupyter extension. It provides a rich user interface to view and analyze your data, show insightful column statistics and visualizations, and automatically generate Pandas code as you clean and transform the data.”

I haven’t had time to do anything more than install the extension, but I’m keen to play around with this one. As it can filter, sort and transform data as well as generate transformation code, it feels to me like there are network automation use cases for Data Wrangler. - Ethan

LAST LAUGH 😆