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  • Human Infrastructure 383: Home Lab Tips, IPv6, the Art of Persuasion, and More

Human Infrastructure 383: Home Lab Tips, IPv6, the Art of Persuasion, and More

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
January 09, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Do you need IPv4 and v6 connectivity on a PAN firewall connected to an xDSL modem and residential ISP? If so, this post has you covered. - Drew 

James Henderson has a terrific article that breaks out essential network automation concepts. This post dives into how to reconcile individual elements of a network (a router or switch, for example) with the network as a whole. This reconciliation is important because individual elements have to work together for the entire network to function. A network automation framework thus needs to account for individual elements as well as larger network services. He walks through a VLAN configuration change as an example. - Drew 

Change causes discomfort, and most people don’t like discomfort. Eyvonne Sharp outlines ideas for how to get people on board with new technologies or business ideas that challenge the comfortable status quo. Unfortunately there’s no Jedi Mind Trick; instead, Eyvonne recommends sparking curiosity by introducing ideas in non-threatening environments and asking “What if…?”, as well as using storytelling to connect at an emotional level while painting a vision of what’s possible. Last, but most important, you need patient persistence. If you’re trying to get traction with a new idea in your org (network automation, for example), Eyvonne’s got helpful advice. - Drew

The Digital Empress has a great list of tools for pen testing and IT auditing that would do any lab proud. She also shares online resources if you want to sharpen your security skills, including paid and free options. She also shares tips and platforms for setting up a virtual lab on prem or in the cloud, and suggests practice scenarios that map to real-world needs. If you’re looking to build or expand your security lab, start here. - Drew 

Nick Buraglio, IETF working group co-chair for v6ops, shares a new IPv6 block that’s useful for documentation: 3fff::/20. Why does this matter? A couple of reasons.

  1. Because you don’t want to use global unicast addresses v6 in documentation. That’s just a problem waiting to happen.

  2. Because the documentation prefix 2001:db8:/32 defined in RFC3849 isn’t a large enough block to accommodate how large IPv6 networks are planned and address blocks allocated in the modern day.

Read RFC9637 to learn more. - Ethan


Christian Scholz slayed the dragon, finally earning the JNCIE-ENT that had eluded him. Persistence paid off. Well done, Christian! - Ethan

Hazel drives a profanity-laced bulldozer through the heart of observability’s present state. After the directive we get to instrument all the things and record all the things, she poignantly asks, “AND THEN WHAT?” And then what, indeed.

Hazel shares her definitions of Observability 1.0 and 2.0, with comments on how a lot of companies get it wrong. This can be summarized as gathering data but not doing anything useful with it. She concludes with predictions of what Observability 3.0 will look like. emphasizing that getting business value from the data will be the whole point.

“Observability 3.0 will, more than anything else, be measured by the value that non-engineering functions in the business are able to get from it.” - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

  1. The IPv6 situation on Docker is good now! - ./techtipsy

  2. Filter-Based Forwarding (FBF) in Junos – Because Why Not Make Routing More “Fun”? - Christian’s Juniper Blog

  3. SQLite Commands - Majornetwork

  4. Wi-Fi 7 Overview - mrn-cciew

  5. Subnets: Key to Network Organization - NodeConnect

  6. The Woeful State of the Wholesale Telecommunications Industry - Part 1 - Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

  7. On the Rationale Behind the Cable Cuttings in the Baltic Sea - Stefan Lundqvist, Ph.D. via LinkedIn

  8. The Cisco #MFD12 Slide That Overloaded My Brain - wirednot

Deloitte Ranks Alkira 25th Fastest-Growing Tech Company in North America

Over the past 30 years, the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 program has recognized innovative companies across the technology, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech sectors. Past Fast 500 winners include technology pioneers like Google, eBay, and Tesla, who have transformed how each of us live, work, and play. This year, the list recognized Alkira for achieving a growth rate of 7,194% during this period.
https://www.alkira.com/alkira-ranked-25th-fastest-growing-company/

TECH NEWS 📣

The expansion of AI compute is driving power needs ever higher. The data center situation in Ireland has caused a grim power problem. “Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland’s grid operator to halt new data centers near Dublin until 2028. These huge buildings and their powerful computers last year consumed 21% of the nation’s electricity, according to official records.” Prices are going up for everyone, folks are getting upset, and this problem is going to be a problem everywhere, at least in the near term.

The long term solution? Although not cited in this article, expect more and more nuclear power plants to come online. - Ethan

Governments are ordering ISPs to block sites that might serve at a platform to distribute or contribute to the distribution of copyrighted materials. I remember working for a state government not all that many years ago where we weren’t allowed to block anything on public computers located at the State Library (not even hardcore porn!) because that was tantamount to state-sponsored censorship. How times have changed. - Ethan

Wi-Fi 8 aka IEEE 802.11bn aka Ultra High Reliability WLAN is coming. This time, the wireless industry isn’t pushing for more speed. They’re pushing for dependability. “Wi-Fi 8 will maintain the same maximum physical layer rate of 23 Gbps as Wi-Fi 7, utilizing the familiar 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz frequency bands. The real innovation lies in how Wi-Fi 8 optimizes these existing resources to provide a superior user experience.”

New features proposed include Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR), Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF), and Dynamic Sub-Channel Operation (DSO). How soon? 2027 for the standard, and 2028 for products. - Ethan

New research from Anthropic reveals new ways for humans to trick LLMs into coughing up information they aren’t supposed to cough up (for example, instructions for making a bomb). The researchers call the algorithm “Best-of-N Jailbreaking,” but in principle it’s the same approach any four-year-old uses when they want something: just keep asking, over and over in different ways, until the LLM succumbs. - Drew

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Choose the very best fixed-width font for your coding & terminal needs in this bracket-style game. Turns out I’m a “Cousine” guy. - Ethan

From the README. “Tracing (filtered) packets in the Linux networking stack, using eBPF probes and interfacing with control and data paths such as OvS or Netfilter. Visit the online documentation for more details, or run retis --help and retis <command> --help.” - Ethan

This doc shows where various nation states are at in allowing frequencies needed for 6GHz Wi-Fi to be used. At a glance, nearly all nations have enabled 5945-6425 MHz, many nations have enabled the entire 5945-7125 MHz range, and several others are considering adding 6425-7125 MHz to the 6GHz Wi-Fi mix. - Ethan

From the video description. “The simple and ubiquitous RJ-45. Unshielded twisted-pair wire. How did we end up using these for Ethernet? We wanted to find out, and it took us on a decade-long journey.” - Ethan

From the about page. “Manx is a catalog of manuals for old computers. Manx is an open source project hosted on GitHub.

Many of these manuals can't be found by search engines because the manuals have been scanned but haven't been converted to text. Google can index deep into these scanned documents because they will OCR scanned images in PDFs and index the resulting text. However, manx contains additional metadata on the online documents as well as information about documents known to exist but not available online. Manx's search engine is currently limited to searching part numbers, titles and keywords of these manuals.

This catalog mostly covers manufacturers of minicomputers and mainframes, or associated devices such as terminals and printers.” - Ethan

If network latency is an interesting topic to you, check out these talks from some of the top experts in the world. Click on “Get the recordings” at the top right of the home page to find them. The “watch session” links take you to YouTube. No fuss. No drama. No logins. No gates. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

The clock is officially ticking for US federal civilian agencies that use the public cloud to bring those cloud deployments in line with secure baselines developed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. The announcement states that these agencies must “...identify specific cloud tenants, implement assessment tools, and align cloud environments to CISA’s Secure Cloud Business Applications (SCuBA) secure configuration baselines.” The first deadline is February 21st of 2025, by which time agencies must “provide the tenant name and the system owning agency/component for each tenant.” The full directive is available here. - Drew

Network automation vendor Gluware has been acquired by a private equity firm for an undisclosed amount. Depending on your perception of the private equity industry, this could be good or bad. The Packet Pushers spoke with Gluware CEO and co-founder Jeff Gray. He says Caudrilla is focused on long-term growth, not short-term cost-cutting. Gray says Caudrilla will provide the financial investment to help fuel Gluware’s growth, and doesn’t anticipate an impact on Gluware staffing or product development. Gray also said Gluware is an anchor company in the network automation sector of Caudrilla’s portfolio, and that other acquisitions in the automation space may be on the roadmap. The long-term goal is an exit, though whether that means an IPO or an outright sale to another party is to be determined. - Drew

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. Indiana bakery still using Commodore 64s originally released in 1982 as cash registers - Tom’s Hardware

  2. Flat Earthers Went to Antarctica to Look at The Sun. Here's What Happened. - Science Alert

  3. A cozy tour through networking architecture - Cozy Quest Devlog

  4. $2,100 mechanical keyboard has 800 holes, NYC skyscraper looks - Ars Technica

  5. This Keyboard Lets People Type So Fast It’s Banned From Typing Competitions - Vice

  6. I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone - Simon Willison’s Weblog

  7. Atari Joystick Decanter Set - Atari

  8. Jolt Cola aims to make a comeback - this time with even more caffeine - ABC11

  9. An abandoned ship held a treasure for 30 years: 50 arcade machines of immense value to gamers - Jason Deegan

  10. ‘Yes, I am a human’: bot detection is no longer working – and just wait until AI agents come along - The Conversation

LAST LAUGH 😆

Here’s to an exciting new year! Shared on Bluesky by @carnage4life.bsky.social‬