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  • Human Infrastructure 379: Inside the LAN Party House, SACK Block Analysis, Robot Revolution, and More

Human Infrastructure 379: Inside the LAN Party House, SACK Block Analysis, Robot Revolution, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
November 21, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Adriano is a developer that uses ChatGPT for part of his customer-facing project. After extensive testing and getting consistent results back from ChatGPT, he released the feature. Then ChatGPT lost its mind with embarrassing results for his project, only to recover its mind a few days later. Maddening. What’s a developer to do? What are any of us to do that want to leverage the ChatGPT 4o model? - Ethan

There are man caves…and then there’s this. I suppose this home is the ultimate expression of why most of us really got into networking. - Ethan

Lee Badman uses his long history of work in the wireless trenches to ponder the many changes to old guard Cisco’s model and new kid on the block Nile’s network-as-a-service offering. Lee’s got the sort of perspective that only time provides. - Ethan

Yes. - Drew

John provides step-by-step instructions for setting up Vault, which provides secure storage for secrets including passwords, tokens, and encryption keys. He also offers a couple of helpful suggestions on settings to minimize shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. - Drew

Instructor Laura Chappell is writing a series on how to analyze Selective ACKs using Wirekshark. The latest installment walks through how to track down missing sequence numbers. - Drew

Unlock 96% Faster Cloud Deployments: Discover the Real Value of Alkira’s Network-as-a-Service

The Nemertes Real Economic Value research study, based on interviews with thirteen enterprise customers of Alkira, uncovered some significant and consistent ways in which Alkira delivered measurable value to the organizations. Customers were able to realize value by simplifying their environments and the management of them by building on Alkira’s core functionality: provisioning, managing, and securing connectivity among cloud and on-premises environments via a network infrastructure-as-a-service model. Get your copy of the report and learn how customers are seeing results of 96% faster cloud deployments, and 80% reduction in time to deploy new security services.

TECH NEWS 📣

Metal was Equinix’s bare metal offering, based around their $100M acquisition of Packet in 2020. Metal is just not making enough money for Equinix to keep going with it, so Metal is going away. - Ethan

Two cables under the Baltic Sea have been severed. One connected Finland and Germany, and the other Sweden and Lithuania. Although the identity of the guilty party is unknown, no one seems to think what happened was an accident. - Ethan

Give this one a read for an understanding of the “maker-taker” problem as highlighted by the recent drama in the world of WordPress. - Ethan

The US FTC is the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is concerned about previously reported anti-competitive practices Azure is accused of engaging in. Such as? “Imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to other competitive platforms.” I predict that if anything happens as a result of the investigation (what with the political winds of change happening in America right now), it will be a fine that amounts to a trivial scolding. - Ethan

Along with John Kemeny, Thomas Kurtz was the inventor of BASIC among other accomplishments. Like many other Gen X geeks, BASIC was my first programming language. I cut my teeth on BASIC using a Commodore 64, writing code for a computer science class in high school, competing in a sort of hackathon, designing sprites for computer games using graph paper, and learning about bitwise operators.

Thanks for making something that helped set the course of my career in tech, Dr. Kurtz. Your work affected me and millions more. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Here’s the abstract from this academic position paper.

“In spite of its long and successful history, TCP is a poor transport protocol for modern datacenters. Every significant element of TCP, from its stream orientation to its expectation of in-order packet delivery, is wrong for the datacenter. It is time to recognize that TCP’s problems are too fundamental and interrelated to be fixed; the only way to harness the full performance potential of modern networks is to introduce a new transport protocol into the datacenter. Homa demonstrates that it is possible to create a transport protocol that avoids all of TCP’s problems. Although Homa is not API-compatible with TCP, it should be possible to bring it into widespread usage by integrating it with RPC frameworks.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this paper before, as Homa is a uniquely named protocol and it rings a bell, although I’ve not heard of anyone who’s implemented Homa in anger.

The recent work I’ve seen that is tied to improving data center network performance falls under the following headings.

  1. Faster speeds. To wit, 800Gbps Ethernet paired with silicon photonics, such as what Juniper is offering, with 1.6Tbps coming in perhaps 2026-27.

  2. Scheduled Ethernet fabrics. Drivenets has such an offering based on the Open Compute Project’s Distributed Disaggregated Chassis model.

  3. Optical transport. Drut Technologies offers a photonic fabric networking option for their larger AI & HPC focused compute offering. This one is truly novel. Think “layer 1 switching” programmed by a controller.

Let’s not forget what the Ultra Ethernet Consortium is working on that is likely to have an impact on data center networking performance, too…eventually. But new protocols (such as Homa) are a tough sell. Inertia is difficult to overcome. - Ethan

One of the most well-known FOSS projects out there, Prometheus is a monitoring tool that collects metrics, evaluates results against rules, and triggers alerts. This major release is a big deal you should take note of if you’re in the Prometheus world.

From the 3.0.0 release notes, “This release includes new features such as a brand new UI and UTF-8 support enabled by default. As this marks the first new major version in seven years, several breaking changes are introduced. The breaking changes are mainly around the removal of deprecated feature flags and CLI arguments, and the full list can be found below. For users that want to upgrade we recommend to read through our migration guide.” - Ethan

From the README. “Quincy is a VPN client and server implementation using the QUIC protocol. Quincy uses the QUIC protocol implemented by quinn to create an encrypted tunnel between clients and the server.” Written in Rust. - Ethan

Some eBPF goodness for you. From the README. “Kyanos is an eBPF-based network issue analysis tool that enables you to capture network requests, such as HTTP, Redis, and MySQL requests. It also helps you analyze abnormal network issues and quickly troubleshooting without the complex steps of packet capturing, downloading, and analysis.”

Kyanos is more than a sort of packet sniffer, though. Because Kyanos is using eBPF, it can see what’s happening at the kernel level. “Kyanos provides kernel trace points from the arrival of requests/responses at the network card to the kernel socket buffer, displaying these details in a visual format. This allows you to identify exactly which stage is causing delays.” Very cool. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Job Snijders compares an inadvertent route hijack in 2008 that affected YouTube vs. a more recent route hijack attempt that purposefully targeted Fastly. While the 2008 route hijack resulted in significant outages, the 2024 attack failed thanks to RPKI, which cryptographically verifies the routes an AS is allowed to advertise. If you’re looking for reasons to adopt RPKI, this post might help. (And if you want more info on how RPKI works, check out a recent Packet Protector podcast on the issue with guest Russ White). - Drew

Vendor Bluell shares this listicle that caught my eye because some of the libraries are ones I’ve used, including the top 3: Requests, BeautifulSoup, and Pandas. Perhaps you’d like to explore some of the suggested alternatives. - Ethan

“As of November 2024 for snapshots from the main development branch and future stable release builds (possibly also including the upcoming 24.10 series), the package manager in OpenWrt has changed from opkg to apk.” - Ethan

NetBrain, best known to network engineers as a network mapping tool, has been moving into the network automation and network intent markets. The company’s latest software release, R12, adds an LLM Co-Pilot feature and, more interestingly, a Golden Engineering Studio (GES).

NetBrain says GES can “reverse-engineer” your production network’s configuration to understand the network’s design, intent, and features. The press release states “Reverse engineering is ideal for long-running network environments that lack consistent documentation because of many years of leadership and structural changes. It allows current network engineers to understand the design rules previously put in place and helps them generate thousands of no-code automations for efficient, compliant network operations at scale.” - Drew

Network automation startup OpsMill has announced Infrahub Enterprise, an enterprise version of its open-source Infrahub software. Infrahub is a source of truth for network devices and is intended to integrate with network automation pipelines and tools. Infrahub competes with the likes of Netbox and Nautobot. The Enterprise version includes advanced RBAC features, SLAs and support, and “production-ready” releases. 

If you aren’t ready for the enterprise version, OpsMill has also announced version 1.0 of the open-source Infrahub, which is freely available to download and play with. - Drew

NetBox Labs has announced two new products to complement its popular NetBox source of truth software: Discovery and Assurance. 

Discovery is a separate software product that can discover devices on your network. Built on NetBox Labs’ Diode software that ingests and formats data into the NetBox data model, Discovery now incorporates an agent-based discovery function. NetBox Labs says it will still partner with third-party discovery tools, but this new product release is a signal that NetBox is willing to push into adjacent markets at the risk of alienating vendor partners.

Assurance is also a separate software offering that integrates with NetBox. Assurance is designed to help companies deal with operational drift; that is, the difference between intended state as documented in NetBox’s data model, and the actual state of network devices. The NetBox blog says Assurance has two design goals “...first, to characterize operational drift so teams can analyze, build plans, and get drift under control; and second, to keep it that way with power tools for identifying and remediating deviations quickly.”

Discovery will be available in Q4 of 2024. Assurance debuts in 2025. - Drew

The PRC is engaging in both governmental and corporate digital espionage. I’m pretty sure we all knew this, although the extent of it might be surprising. I don’t think the descriptor “pervasive” is too far off based on how this short statement reads. - Ethan

EVEN MORE INDUSTRY NOISES 📰

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

LAST LAUGH 😆