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  • Human Infrastructure 357: AutoCon1, Graphing SNAT Collisions, CLUS Announcements, Reclaiming Class E

Human Infrastructure 357: AutoCon1, Graphing SNAT Collisions, CLUS Announcements, Reclaiming Class E

Author

Ethan Banks
June 06, 2024

A Quick Summary Of AutoCon1

Greetings from the east coast of the US, where I’ve re-acclimated to my usual timezone after a trip to Amsterdam. Why did I find myself in Amsterdam last week (neat city, lots of bikes)? I attended the AutoCon1 conference put on by the Network Automation Forum. I was able to attend most of the talks, and summarized them on LinkedIn as close to real-time as I could.

Beyond my own talk summaries, there was a lot of LinkedIn noise around this automation-focused event. If you care to, you could browse the #AutoCon1 hashtag on LinkedIn to see what’s interesting to you. You’ll find a wide mix of posts.

You might also subscribe to the Network Automation Forum’s YouTube channel. I’ve been told that all of the talks will go up once they’ve been edited, and yeah…you really want to sub. The talks were practical and actionable.

The talks were mostly by practitioners with hands-on experience giving their best network automation advice for engineers. Also the vendors when they got up to speak were much in that spirit—mostly in the form of community project announcements. In fact, the most popular talk summary I posted was a Nokia announcement by Wim Henderickx about their new open source Kubenet project, which uses K8s as a platform to deliver network automation artifacts (instead of what most of us usually think of—using K8s for container lifecycle management).

In addition to the Kubenet announcement from Nokia, Itential launched community project Torero which automatically instantiates environments to run automation artifacts (playbooks, scripts, etc.) either locally or on a centralized server or server cluster.

NetBox Labs announced their Cloud Free Plan which lets you stand up a SaaS instance of NetBox for $0. There are scale limitations placed on this free version, but reasonable limits that make NetBox Cloud Free lab-friendly.

Finally, OpsMill announced the open beta of their InfraHub source of truth that integrates version control, a CI pipeline, a data transformation layer, and more. InfraHub is not just a network source of truth, but is meant to be a source of truth for all of the infrastructure you’re automating. InfraHub is not just another NetBox.

All in all, AutoCon1 was a great event that felt…different. Different from so many tech events I’ve attended over the years. Too often, tech events are driven by a big vendor and feel a bit “been there, done that.” AutoCon0 and AutoCon1 both had an excited vibe, where folks were sharing hard fought knowledge, and the questions & discussion after the talks were robust. “I did this and that was a terrible idea. Do this instead. Learn from my mistakes,” was a theme I noticed in several talks.

There were even profitable disagreements. For example, after the closing keynote by Peter Boers, Dinesh Dutt stood up and said, “I could not disagree with you more,” with a massive grin on his face. Shots fired! But…shots fired in a positive way that lead to a public exploration of what Peter said vs. Dinesh’s perspective, and then progressed to a useful place with dialog among several in the room. You don’t get that sort of thing happening at most tech events. What NAF’s AutoCon is doing is special.

I know travel is hard. But…if you can make it to AutoCon2 in Denver in November 2024, I think you’ll be happy you made the trip.

/Ethan

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Sean shares his Starlink performance experience, updating the post a couple of times after his initial publication. He’s a happy customer, sharing his use of Wi-Fi calling and streaming video, and making other observations. A useful article in that I’ve heard rumors that Starlink performance degrades as more people get on it in an area. I have yet to meet anyone in real life who has experienced that, however. I only know a few Starlink users personally, but they’ve all been happy with the service for several months. Anyone experienced performance degradation over time? Let me know. - Ethan

Geoff Huston, backed as always by a finely tuned historical perspective as well as good old fashioned data, suggests that perhaps DNSSEC is over. He makes a good case for why maybe we should just walk away and leave DNSSEC behind. - Ethan

Back in the late 90’s, there was a demo where Gigabit Ethernet was shown running over rusty barbed wire. Seems impressive, right? Indeed, the maker of the display wanted you to be impressed so that you’d buy their Ethernet hardware. According to Dr. Howard Johnson, this wasn’t actually a compelling demonstration. He explains why by discussing what affects a digital signal as it moves through a wire. “Only four properties really affect the performance of most digital transmission structures. The ‘big four’ transmission-line properties are impedance, delay, high-frequency loss, and crosstalk.” He explains in more detail, but keeps his prose accessible for those of us without degrees in electrical engineering. - Ethan

Alex wanted to observe NAT exhaustion on a Fortinet FortiGate firewall. To make it happen, he configured the FortiGate to export a specific data set to an Azure function. The Azure function results in a graph of the data, leveraging several Azure services. There’s quite a lot to this solution, but Alex makes it accessible. He shares everything, including a GitHub repo in case you’d like to adopt his mad strategies for your own dark observability experiments. - Ethan

Ben ponders the usefulness of a routable Class E address space, because hey, IPv4 isn’t going away anytime soon, and we aren’t using Class E for whatever it was reserved for to begin with. That’s a lot of addresses going to waste in a time of poignant IPv4 scarcity.

Ben did a lot of testing around Class E use and documents his findings. Can it be done? Yes and no…not without some changes to NOS code in some cases, but it sort of works in other cases. What’s more, Ben discovered Class E in use more than I would have expected. For instance, Ben tested with several BGP ASNs to see which would accept an advertisement of a netblock from Class E. Several did.

So can you use Class E? It depends. Should you? Probably not. Ben concludes with the only common sense direction we can head in. “If we are going to start using address space that might not work for all users, it would be wise to pick the address space that we already have a considerable head start on getting accepted: IPv6.” - Ethan

TECH NEWS 📣

This acquisition makes strategic sense for T-Mobile, as they are buying their way into the rural US market and gaining lots of additional coverage via the US Cellular footprint. The deal is expected to close in mid-2025. Whether or not the acquisition will pass regulatory approval is an open question, but I haven’t read any compelling arguments suggesting it won’t. - Ethan

The tug-of-war between growing data center footprints and power availability is highlighted in this story about US state Virginia’s “data center alley.” As data center growth continues, the power demand forecasts are getting beyond what energy suppliers can supply, at least if they want to supply energy in a carbon neutral way.

Renewables have limits, and don’t supply power consistently. Solar doesn’t supply at night, and wind energy relies on, well, the wind blowing. But data centers consume at a relatively steady rate. Natural gas is a viable way to feed hungry data centers, but burning fuel is what we’re trying to get away from in a world of climate change. Nuclear? It gets a mention in the piece as a significant supplier in Virginia, but nuclear power plants take years to bring online and are unpopular with many and don’t ramp quickly to meet demand spikes.

There are no easy answers for our society’s thirst for consuming the world via screens. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared by Paul Beyer in the Packet Pushers community Slack group.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Trey Hunner asks, “Did you know that some Python modules can double-up as handy command-line tools?” He leads off showing how the webbrowser module can be used to open a URL in your default browser. (Can confirm.) The magic is found in the -m command line argument. Trey explains -m, then itemizes several Python modules that can be invoked from the CLI. TIL! - Ethan

Here’s an admittedly odd little project, but I found it interesting. File Tunnel is used to “Tunnel TCP connections through a file.” A couple of use cases cited in the README.md.

  1. You'd like to connect from Host A to Host B, but a firewall is in the way. But both hosts have access to a shared folder.

  2. You'd like to connect to a remote service (eg. 192.168.1.50:8888), but only have access to Host B using RDP.

How does it work? “The program starts a TCP listener, and when a connection is received it writes the TCP data into a file. This same file is read by the counterpart program, which establishes a TCP connection and onforwards the TCP data. To avoid the shared file growing indefinitely, it is purged whenever it gets larger than 10 MB.” - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Alas, VBScript is soon to be no more. In this post, Microsoft describes the deprecation timeline to take place over the next few years. - Ethan

The Lumen team reports, “Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs identified a destructive event, as over 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers were taken offline belonging to a single internet service provider (ISP). The incident took place over a 72-hour period between October 25-27, rendered the infected devices permanently inoperable, and required a hardware-based replacement. Public scan data confirmed the sudden and precipitous removal of 49% of all modems from the impacted ISP’s autonomous system number (ASN) during this time period.” 😢 The article details the event. - Ethan

This week in Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Cisco Live US is happening. CLUS is usually Cisco’s noisiest event of the year and where we expect to hear visionary proclamations from the C-suite. Here are the headlines I spotted that, at a glance, appear to impact those using Cisco products hands-on.

Perhaps more to come, as the 2024 edition of Cisco’s party in the desert is not yet over. - Ethan

Storage provider Qumulo has joined the Ultra Ethernet Consortium. The UEC is a consortium of vendors working to make Ethernet better able to support lossless, timely delivery of frames in a high-throughput data center. The UEC is notable in part for NVIDIA’s absence. A useful understanding of the UEC is an attempt to make a network transport stack that can compete on price and performance against NVIDIA’s Infiniband and other tightly coupled transports they sell in their monster GPU products.

Qumulo is not in the AI infrastructure business (at least not directly), so what’s their interest in the UEC? As a networked storage provider, they have the same concerns converged Ethernet has had for decades now. Performance of networked storage can be improved with tight integrations up and down the stack. In addition to their UEC membership, “Qumulo announced a collaboration with Intel Corporation and Arista Networks to advance the state-of-the-art in IT infrastructure at the intersection of networking, storage, and data management. These technologies enhance the performance and operations of Qumulo’s Scale AnywhereTM Data Management platform from the edge to the data center to the public cloud delivering valuable operational benefits to data center, network, and storage operators.” - Ethan

Back in February, cloud networking provider Netris hosted a roundtable discussion led by Kelsey Hightower, and summarizes the key points in this piece. Some of Kelsey’s observations are, as always, provocative. Especially standing out to me was his point that hybrid cloud, practically speaking, isn’t a thing. Computing is happening whether it’s on-premises or in a public cloud, and tooling is making management of those environments…kind of the same. To draw a sharp line of distinction doesn’t make sense to Kelsey. - Ethan

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared by Kaj Niemi in the Packet Pushers community Slack group.