• Human Infrastructure
  • Posts
  • Human Infrastructure 367: vCommunity Sadness, ISE Scripts, Networking Monitoring, and even more

Human Infrastructure 367: vCommunity Sadness, ISE Scripts, Networking Monitoring, and even more

AuthorAuthor

Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
August 29, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Gina Rosenthal attended VMware Explore this week, an event that’s a shell of its former self in the Broadcom era. “The concept of the stages of grief is a framework that helps to understand the emotional responses individuals face when dealing with loss…We’ve experienced a massive collective loss. You probably can see yourself in one or more of those grief stages. Personally, I’m jumping between denial, anger, and depression as I’m here in Las Vegas experiencing this show.” It’s worth reading Gina’s beautiful post as she reflects on the vCommunity that was, ponders the future, and manages grief. - Ethan

If you’ve moved to Proxmox after Broadcom’s changes to ESXi, Markku Leinio has written a plug-in that automatically renews Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) node certificates for Hurricane Electric’s dynamic DNS records. The plug-in is available in his GitHub, which is linked in the blog. - Drew

Ben Cartwright writes “I did some contracting work for LONdon Access Point (LONAP) to design a system that could detect high latency and more critically packet loss on a per flow basis, and figured it was worth sharing the details on what I came up with and how it works.” If this topic is of interest, Ben includes the text of his talk (with diagrams), as well as a link to a video version. Check it out. - Drew

Gian Paolo shares some home-grown scripts for ISE tasks. - Drew

Sometimes the hardest thing to admit is that you have too much to do and you need to share the load with someone else. High-productivity achievers might feel like a failure, or see it as a character defect. Tom Hollingsworth has a much better way to look at delegation: “When you take on too much you do your entire team a disservice. If you’re not available to help because you’ve agreed to do something that someone else could or should be handling, you’re holding everyone back.” Read on for more, and learn from a personal example of Tom’s. - Drew 

Mark Houtz describes a specific CBRS band use case to take orders via iPads for his family’s restaurant. The solution he proposes offers better coverage as well as PCI-DSS compliance than what is typically deployed by most restaurants. Mark gets into useful levels of detail with pictures and diagrams showing his scenario, testing, and results. Private cellular might not replace Wi-Fi in most scenarios, but it definitely solves certain problems. - Ethan

Phil Gervasi offers up this very well done (I am jealous) parody of the 90’s classic tune “Peaches”. Made me smile. - Ethan

Take The Packet Pushers Listener Survey!

Each year we ask for your feedback. It’s that time! Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey. We’re desperately seeking 500+ responses. Okay, we’re not desperate, but we want statistically significant data. We’re not even 20% of the way there yet. We need your input. Thanks in advance!

TECH NEWS 📣

Bloomberg reports that Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are essentially fudging their numbers when it comes to carbon emissions. By using a carbon accounting method that many researchers say is outdated, these companies are buying carbon credits to claim reductions that aren’t actually occurring. According to the article, “If companies didn’t count unbundled RECs, Amazon could be forced to admit that its 2022 emissions are 8.5 million metric tons of CO2 higher than reported—that’s three times what the company disclosed and matches Mozambique’s annual impact. Microsoft’s sum could be 3.3 million tons higher than the reported tally of 288,000 tons. And Meta’s reported footprint could grow by 740,000 tons from near zero.” So what’s the tie-in to AI? One is that model and inference training use huge quantities of energy. If that energy comes from non-renewable sources, that’s more carbon into the atmosphere. The second is that new data centers are being built to house AI infrastructure and deliver AI services to customers, and data center construction also drives carbon pollution. - Drew

After TikTok’a algorithm recommended “Blackout Challenge” videos to a 10 year old girl’s For You Page, she accidentally hung herself. The family sued. After winding through the courts, the judicial system is holding TikTok liable. This is a landmark decision, because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been used by tech companies to claim that they are not liable for whatever is said on their platform by a third party. That notion, combined with the American right to free speech has allowed social media platform to have no liability for what happens to the consumers of their products. That might be changing.

“Because TikTok’s ‘algorithm curates and recommends a tailored compilation of videos for a user’s FYP based on a variety of factors, including the user’s age and other demographics, online interactions, and other metadata,’ it becomes TikTok’s own speech. And now TikTok has to answer for it in court. Basically, the court ruled that when a company is choosing what to show kids and elderly parents, and seeks to keep them addicted to sell more ads, they can’t pretend it’s everyone else’s fault when the inevitable horrible thing happens. And that’s a huge rollback of Section 230.”

The legal wrangling isn’t over yet, though. Lots more to come, with a lot of money at stake. “Of course, the Supreme Court could try to avoid the issue, or rule badly. Congress could override the courts. But at the very least, this decision forces the issue. And that means the gravy train, where big tech has been able to pollute our society without any responsibility, is likely ending.” - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Russ White has launched a series of online networking and architecture courses called Rule 11 Academy. It’s early days in building out material, but he recently announced new installments around BGP, network addresses, and more. Right now you can sign up and get free access for the next two months. - Drew

Cisco has released a new monster reference validated design document, this one for an EVPN/VXLAN fabric. If you want to skip the announcement and go straight to the CVD, it’s here.

Want to know the components Cisco built the CVD around? “The Cloud Campus Fabric solution is provided through a combination of Meraki Dashboard, the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), and Catalyst wired platforms which have fabric functionality. As described later in this document, the Catalyst 9500 and 9300 platforms are utilized to create the elements of the Campus Fabric whilst the Catalyst 9300 and 9100 are utilized to create the elements of the Access Layer.” - Ethan

“A guide to setting up a production-like Kubernetes cluster on a local machine. It is written in the spirit, and with inspirations from Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the Hard Way, and may be considered its lengthier, extended version, optimized for a local deployment.” - Ethan

Yes, it’s what it sounds like. And no, no one is suggesting this is a new use case for OSPF. But it’s interesting. Why? “Even though this database is designed to contain link-state data, it turns out that the OSPFv3 specification makes it possible for a client to store arbitrary data in it, and synchronize this database with all the other OSPF hosts on the network.”

“This is, of course, a complete misuse of the protocol: OSPF gives us perfectly valid routing tables, meaning that the vanilla OSPF servers on the network are ready to forward IP packets from any machine to its destination ... but we completely ignore this capability instead, turn our client devices into (somewhat rogue) OSPF servers, and abuse the OSPF protocol so that they may exchange arbitrary Ethernet packets instead of OSPF link information.”

What’s actually going on here? The project encapsulates Ethernet frames into the OSPF link state database, using OSPF as a transport to carry the frames between two endpoints that use tap devices as interfaces. Don’t ask me for more details. I didn’t actually try it. 😂 - Ethan

AutoCon2 is coming up fast on November 18-22 in Denver, Colorado and we want to let you know some key dates:

Conference Registration is open NOW!

  • Early bird pricing of only $399 started August 29.

  • Hotel registration is open now - grab a room SOON!

Workshop Registration opened on August 8

  • We're going to have a great slate of workshop options covering a range of topics in network automation and orchestration

  • Note that it's a separate event conveniently preceding AC2

The Full AC2 Conference Agenda will be published by September 9

NAF is a watering hole - a place where we can have harmonious collaboration in network automation: the practice of network automation, orchestration, observability, AI tooling, education, process and standards, and more. Come hear what your peers are doing in their networks (on the stage and in the hallways), what solution providers are bringing to the table, what's happening with open source, and all things network automation.

AutoCon is THE Forum for Network Automation. See you in Denver!

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2025 - NVIDIA  
Nvidia rides the GPU money train all the way to record quarterly earnings of $30 billion—a growth rate of 122% over last year. Other tech execs would sacrifice a limb to get results like that. And yet, Nvidia’s stock still dipped because financial analysts were expecting even better returns. What’s a CEO gotta do to get a little respect from Wall Street? Sheesh. - Drew

Fortinet has made two notable upgrades to its SASE offering. First is Sovereign SASE, which lets customers control the geographical regions where sensitive data such as logs are stored and where traffic is routed to ensure compliance with regulations that require certain data to remain with a particular geographical or national boundary. Second is the addition of generative AI capabilities to the SD-WAN portion of the SASE offering. From the press release: “FortiAI, Fortinet’s GenAI assistant, is now available for Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to manage and orchestrate the entire SD-WAN infrastructure.” - Drew

LibreQoS is an open-source tool for measuring quality of service and performing traffic analysis. This APNIC blog provides a good overview of the tool and its primary use cases, and links to a Webinar on LibreQoS if you want even more details. - Drew

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj Niemi