Human Infrastructure 374: Merch Store Launched

Also...getting experience in IT.

Author

Ethan Banks
October 17, 2024

MERCH STORE đŸ‘•đŸ§ąđŸ”

I wasn’t going to tell you yet, because
well. I’m an engineer. I wanted to be sure that everything was just so. But then I realized that what will be, will be. Things won’t be perfect. Maybe there will be little issues, and that’s okay. So I might as well tell you now.

You’re adopted. No, no. That’s not it. Packet Pushers has a merch store now. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

This is version 1.0 of the store. We have the basics right now. Tees, hats, mugs, hoodies, etc. We’ve got stuff with just the Packet Pushers logo, and lots of other stuff with individual podcast logos.

If you are looking for witty or intriguing shirts, we mostly ain’t got ‘em yet. But we’ll get there. (There are some extra cool Day Two DevOps shirts, though.)

Send us your ideas, your memes, and whatever else you’d like to see on Packet Pushers merch. Networking puns, sayings, and witticisms especially appreciated. We’ll turn the ones we like best and don’t violate copyright law into products. - Ethan

In case you care (you don’t, but maybe you do)
after looking at several merch store providers, we ended up using FourthWall. Compared to the many other storefronts we tried out, nothing is close to the FourthWall experience. These folks get it.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS đŸ€“

Daniel Dib digs into how you get that experience you’re looking for. He compares university vs. self study and recommends a variety of ways you can get involved in acts of networking today, even without a job in the industry. - Ethan

Deepak Arora shares wisdom about communicating with those folks who are crucial to a project, but don’t speak deep nerd. “It's essential to recognize that stakeholders may not possess the same level of technical expertise as architects. Their primary concern is often to achieve specific business outcomes, rather than delve into intricate technical details.”

Yes, exactly that. We deep nerds have a tendency to dive into details stakeholders don’t need to know as it doesn’t help them with decision-making. Why do we do it? I suspect most of us are a little insecure. Thus, we feel we must demonstrate our competence. “Let me awe you with my powerful spells, for I am a magician!” - Ethan

Reporting from deep within the bowels of an automation pipeline, Chris Wahl shares his experience with GitHub Reusable Workflows.

“Much like GitLab has the downstream pipelines concept to allow one pipeline to invoke another pipeline, GitHub has the concept of workflows and reusable workflows. Or caller / called workflows. The idea that, much like modules or functions of code, you can “call” another workflow and provide inputs or metadata that is available to the “called” (reusable) workflow.”

Chris goes on to show off some YAML, discuss use cases, and share a few best practices. - Ethan

Researchers Jonas Hofmann and Kien Tuong Truong have discovered exploitable cryptographic vulnerabilities in many cloud storage systems. Their paper (PDF) gets into the hideous details. - Ethan

Alkira recently announced an expansion into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, offering a more efficient acquisition process for GCP customers, enabling them to potentially retire Google committed use dollars while simplifying vendor procurement.

GCP customers can deploy Alkira directly within their GCP environment for faster deployment and reduced time-to-value. This streamlined access is particularly crucial as the growing demands of AI workloads are making speed and efficient resource allocation more critical than ever for enterprises leveraging cloud infrastructure.

Learn more about the announcement below


TECH NEWS 📣

Company Attochron is using frickin’ lasers for high bandwidth last mile connectivity (1.25Gbps - 10Gbps, depending). Weather, moisture, etc. affects laser throughput, but Attochron’s figured out how to make it not suck. 60+ patents granted, and 200 more applied for. - Ethan

Vietnam must use IPv6 to meet its robust, nationwide Internet infrastructure goals they’ve set for 2025 through 2030. Even if the nation wanted to use IPv4, there isn’t enough available v4 address space to get the job done. - Ethan

Ever heard of the “Uptime Council”? Neither have I. Neither had the US Department of Justice or Securities & Exchange Commission, who were not amused by the completely bogus data center certification claims. - Ethan

Apple’s proposing that security certificate lifespan be dropped from 398 to 45 days by 2027. That means if you can’t automate cert lifecycle management on certain devices, it sucks to be a sysadmin. Unless you really, really like replacing certs all the time. And if you’re that person, seek help. We’re worried about you. - Ethan

All of us that started our digital connectivity journey via dial-up bulletin board systems are a little sad now. Ward invented XMODEM, shared his code with everyone, and was generally an excellent human. Thank you, Ward. - Ethan

Hey, good news. Part of our boring dystopia has been rolled back. While there’s a good bit more to it, the guts of the rule “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up.” Hurrah! - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ đŸ€Ł

Shared by Kaj Niemi in the Packet Pushers community Slack.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

I suspect this is mostly a historical artifact at this point, but I still found it interesting. - Ethan

If you’ve dumped VMware in your homelab for trending hotness Proxmox, this project might interest you.

The site boldly proclaims this about itself. “Make managing your Homelab a breeze. 150+ scripts to help you manage your Proxmox VE environment. Whether you're a seasoned user or a newcomer, Proxmox VE Helper Scripts has got you covered.” - Ethan

Ivan Pepelnjak continues to iterate on his “labbing as code” netlab project. In the 1.9.1 release, packet capture functionality was added along with several router features and support for the Cisco IOSv L2 image. ICYMI, Ivan was a guest on the Network Automation Nerds podcast recently. Thank you for being awesome all these years, Ivan. - Ethan

The NetOps open source tool by Netos allows you to manage your NetBox installation using Ansible Semaphore.

Never heard of Netos? Netos is a financial modeling engine for networks that rides on open source NetBox. I wrote about Netos here, because I think what they’re doing is incredibly useful for communicating with the financial folks why the network spend is what it is. - Ethan

The Packet Pushers annual audience survey is still live, awaiting the caress of your keyboard. đŸ€—

To encourage you, I used AI to generate this image of a “network engineer taking a survey”.

✅ Extra finger.

✅ Cables seem unconnected.

So
cool. I hope that helped. đŸ« 

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Anastasiya Pak shares a nicely done 16 page PDF generated by RIPE in conjunction with NEXOP explaining all the options you’ve got for obtaining IPv4 and IPv6 address space for your network. Quite helpful if you’ve never been through the process before, or haven’t been through it recently. Notably absent was the mention of the full moon blood sacrifice required to get IPv4 these days, but otherwise seemed complete. - Ethan

First to market with two new white box switches using Broadcom Jericho-3-AI and Ramon-3 ASICs. DriveNets is the software. Accton is the hardware. Scales “up to 32K GPUs connected with 800Gbps interfaces.” Architecture is DriveNet’s implementation of the Open Compute Project’s Distributed Disaggregated Chassis. We Packet Pushers nerds discussed DDC with DriveNets on Heavy Networking Ep.728 featuring Run Almog & Yuval Moshe. - Ethan

BNew Arelion POP at MRS4 in Marseille. “Directly connects to 14 major subsea cables landing in Marseille, enabling the global Internet carrier to support international traffic flows from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.” Also many meshing opportunities for several regional markets you might want to connect to. - Ethan

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. OpenAI will fall the hardest when the AI bubble bursts, analyst says (probably right) - Quartz

  2. Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks (epic screw up) - Ars Technica

  3. MacProxy Plus (open source tool) - HunterIrving via GitHub

  4. Heretical thoughts on AI (January 2023) - Eli Dourado

  5. Wasm is the new CGI (May 2022) - Roborooter

  6. BackBox Cyber Resilience Platform Earns Highest User Satisfaction and Easiest to Use Score in Fall 2024 G2 GridÂź Report - BackBox Press Releases

  7. Prioritising Network Performance and Security among Driving Factors for UK SASE Adoption (ungated PDF) - Xalient

  8. Aryaka Fall ’24 Update Adds Cloud Access Security Broker and Remote Browser Isolation Integration to Unified SASE as a Service, Accelerating Customer Value Delivery (longest headline award 🏆) - Aryaka Press Releases

LAST LAUGH 😆