Human Infrastructure 356: My First Automation

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
May 30, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

If you’ve heard about NetBox but weren’t sure what it was for, Pat Allen has a good overview of the open-source version’s features and capabilities and why it might be useful for you as a network engineer. - Drew

Daniel Dib continues his in-depth blog series on vPC in EVPN-VXLAN with a detailed post on fabric peering. He discusses pros and cons and provides a couple of useful diagrams to get the concept across. The whole series is worth your time. - Drew

Josh looks back at one of his first successful network automation projects to talk about what went right and–with the benefit of hindsight and more experience–what he would’ve done differently. I really like this idea of looking back at projects to review how you might’ve approached it with more experience under one’s belt. This post discusses a Python script he wrote to automate a firewall task. Josh says he’s planning a series of these, so I’m looking forward to more. And by the way, Josh has a tutorial series on Ansible for Networking on YouTube if you’re curious. - Drew

Tom Hollingsworth has a good take on what makes AI useful, but also why we’ll still need human professionals who are well-trained not just in specific tasks, but also how to extrapolate from incomplete information to find solutions. It’s an encouraging read. - Drew 

Troubleshooting Bad WiFi & Slow Internet for WFH Users Webinar

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TECH NEWS 📣

Reuters reports that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is slow to pay small local contractors and suppliers that are working on facilities the rocket company is building in Texas. Some companies have even gone so far as to file liens against SpaceX for non-payment. Reuters says liens totaling $2.5 million have been filed. Not a good look for a company helmed by a billionaire. - Drew 

Stack Overflow is being paid by Open AI to allow content on the site, created by volunteers, to be used to train AI systems. When some contributors tried to delete or change their posts because they didn’t want their work being hoovered up by ChatGPT, Tom’s Hardware reports that Stack Overflow banned those users, which its Terms of Service allow. As one contributor wrote “it’s just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you." - Drew

Google has been criticized for sharing ludicrous and dangerous AI-generated responses to search queries, including using glue as a pizza topping and eating rocks to add minerals to your diet. Satirical posts from Reddit and The Onion are the original sources for the bad advice, but apparently LLMs haven’t figured out when humans are BSing each other. Now Ars Technica reports on the “one weird trick” you can use in your searches to avoid Goole’s AI Overview responses entirely. Just add &udm=14 to your search query. - Drew

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Opsmill is a startup in the network infrastructure automation space. The company has launched a free, open beta of its Infrahub project, a platform to model and store all the data that comprises your infrastructure. From the GitHub page: “Infrahub from OpsMill is taking a new approach to Infrastructure Management by providing a new generation of datastore to organize and control all the data that defines how an infrastructure should run. Infrahub offers a central hub to manage the data, templates and playbooks that powers your infrastructure by combining the version control and branch management capabilities of Git with the flexible data model and UI of a graph database.” - Drew 

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 💬 

As Nvidia makes ridiculous amounts of bread selling GPUs for AI workloads, every other hardware vendor in the world is hoping to catch a few golden crumbs. For network equipment makers, that means selling data center switches for network fabrics supporting AI workloads. Dell is the latest entrant with its PowerSwitch Z9864F-ON, a top-of-rack switch that offers 64 ports of 800G powered by Broadcom’s Tomahawk 5 ASIC. The switch runs Dell’s distro of the SONiC network OS. Dell is positioning the switch as a part of a larger “AI factory” program in which Dell provides the networking, storage, and compute for all your AI infrastructure needs. - Drew

Allegro Packets, which makes network troubleshooting and diagnostic hardware and software, has announced a new 400G NIC for its traffic analyzers. - Drew

LAST LAUGH 😆