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  • Human Infrastructure 387: Containerlab on a Mac, Avoiding ISP Gear, Deep Thoughts on HPE/Juniper, and More

Human Infrastructure 387: Containerlab on a Mac, Avoiding ISP Gear, Deep Thoughts on HPE/Juniper, and More

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Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
February 06, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Chris Wahl has undertaken a cool project: import 15 years’ worth of blogs into Google’s NotebookLM, a free LLM that lets you organize, summarize, and query text, video, audio, and other data sources. Chris walks through the process of exporting his WordPress files, using Python to parse the XML output to text (including sharing his script), and then shoving those files into NotebookLM. By importing all this content, Chris got summaries such as key topics he’s written about, and he can query the corpus and get answers and citation links. If you’ve got a bunch of files that might be helpful to organize and query, be it blogs, study guides, or product documentation, you might want to give Chris’s method a try. - Drew 

Containerlab is an open-source project that lets you build a networking lab using containerized versions of popular network OSs. It’s meant to be a simple, efficient lab environment that, as a side benefit, can also help you get comfortable with things like YAML. In this post, Suresh provides clear and detailed instructions for getting Containerlab up and running on a MacBook, which makes network labbing portable. Good stuff! - Drew 

Brad Casemore applies his formidable analytical skills to the US Department of Justice’s suit to block the formation of JuniHPEr. The block took most of us by surprise, and the suit—as put to the court—doesn’t quite add up. So what’s really going on here? Brad doesn’t have answers, but he has thoughts. Many thoughts. And maybe bring a dictionary, as Brad is gloriously guilty of lexiphanicism. - Ethan

Michael Horowitz has been maintaining this page since 2015. In it, he excoriates ISP-owned modems and routers for a variety of reasons related to control, capability, privacy and security. A thoughtful reference that’s well-documented. - Ethan

Karim walks through the basics of some improvements within AWS that make it easier to connect services across different VPCs. He walks through the key architectural elements and provides detailed configuration steps.  - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

Discover how Selector Packet Copilot transforms the way network teams interact with their data. Powered by advanced AI and natural language processing, Packet Copilot lets you talk to your packets—analyzing PCAP files, identifying anomalies, and providing instant insights into network performance and security. No more manual digging through packet captures—just ask, and Packet Copilot delivers actionable answers.
Gain deeper visibility into your network, streamline troubleshooting, and accelerate incident response. With Packet Copilot, your organization can improve operational efficiency and strengthen network resilience, taking the first step toward fully autonomous network operations.

https://www.selector.ai/packet-copilot/

TECH NEWS 📣

Anthropic, which makes AI tools including the Claude chatbot, apparently doesn’t want job applicants to use Claude or other LLMs when applying to Anthropic. The article cites an Anthropic job ad that says “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills.”

But why? Is there something wrong with AI mediation? Isn’t the point of LLMs and other AI tools to assist humans with communication tasks? Wouldn’t it be desirable to employ people who use your product to its fullest potential? Unless, of course, Anthropic finds it troubling that its Voight-Kampff screenings are no longer effective? So many questions. - Drew 

The great AI freakout over DeepSeek probably didn’t have to happen. Tom’s Hardware cites a post from the research firm SemiAnalysis that says DeepSeek’s backers, a Chinese investment firm called High-Flyer, has had years of experience building AI systems, access to lots of cash, and thousands of high-end Nvidia GPUs. That includes 10,000 A100 GPUs that High-Flyer purchased in 2021, before US export controls went into place. In other words, the narrative of DeepSeek R1 having been built for about $6 million on lower-performing hardware, while true, wasn’t the full story. This may also explain why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang seemed so unfazed about a market cap drop of nearly $600 billion. - Drew 

Telco Quintillion is planning to lay down a 950 mile run of subsea fiber from Nome to Homer to complete an Alaskan ring. This would provide a fiber backbone to customers in the southwest of Alaska, and improve service for everyone connected to the ring. This redundancy comes at an expected cost of $150M. - Ethan

No big surprise that Elon’s Starlink network of low-earth orbiting satellites is growing. SpaceX is a private company, so numbers aren’t public. But one 2024 revenue estimate is for $7.8B and another for $8.2B. That’s great revenue on a reported 4.6M subscribers.

With everything seeming to be up and to the right for Starlink, what’s the “peril” referenced in the title? Well…Elon himself. He’s upset enough people with his many very public recent shenanigans that there are signs his business ventures might be impacted.

Although not mentioned in the article, another potential peril is competition. Yes, Starlink is first to market with a viable LEO-based broadband service, and I suspect it’ll be sticky. But Amazon’s Project Kuiper is coming, supposedly quite soon. If Amazon follows their usual playbook, they’ll be aggressive on price to undercut competition, even if they have to take a substantial loss to acquire that initial customer base. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Found on Reddit

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

HTTPTAP is a Linux-only utility that allows you to view HTTP calls made by any program. You don’t have to be root. You don’t have to run a daemon. It’s a standalone binary written in Go. - Ethan

From the main website. “Sniffnet is a network monitoring tool to help you easily keep track of your Internet traffic. Whether you want to gather statistics, or you need to inspect more in depth what's going on in your network, this app will get you covered.” Written in Rust. Translated into 20 languages. There’s also a wiki and a FAQ. - Ethan

Operational Technology (OT)---think industrial control systems, sensors, and so on)--is creeping further and further into IT’s domain. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently released recommendations for OT operators and procurers to consider when choosing products. Aside from informing operators, another goal of this report is to apply pressure to OT manufacturers to design OT products with security in mind. If you’re working with OT vendors, this report can provide guidance on good questions to be asking of them. The podcast linked above gets into the publication with a CISA lead. - Drew 

MORE RESOURCES

  1. Podcatcher (podcast player written in Racket + Swift for iOS) - defn.io

  2. OpenHaystack (track BlueTooth devices using Apple’s FindMy network) - seemoo-lab via GitHub

SHARKFEST’25 US, June 14-19
SharkFest’25 US - the annual educational conference focused on sharing knowledge, experience and best practices among the Wireshark® developer and user communities - will take place June 14-19 at the Richmond Marriott Downtown in Richmond, VA. SharkFest attendees hone their skills in the art of packet analysis by attending lecture and lab-based sessions delivered by the most seasoned experts in the industry.

Vint Cerf, recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", will be delivering a keynote titled: “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Internet from 2025 on…” Meet the Wireshark core developers, network with your peers, build your professional network and much more! Don't miss out on what past attendees have called "the best conference in the industry".

Register before March 1 to take advantage of early bird discounts: https://sharkfest.wireshark.org/sfus/registration-options/ 

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Drew and I got to chat with shiny new startup Bowtie Security this week. What do they do? Think SD-WAN/SASE/SSE without them being in the middle of the transaction—no cloud component. This piece is a nerdy article about the Bowtie database design and how they leverage it to create a decentralized SD-WAN/SASE solution. A Bowtie system runs a distributed database architecture that keeps controllers and endpoints synchronized and ready to securely forward without having to tunnel off to a cloud service in the middle.

Wait…does a decentralized, distributed database imply there no Bowtie SaaS option? You are correct. There is no Bowtie SaaS offering, but fear not. Bowtie controller and endpoint software is autoupdated. The Bowtie solution operates like SaaS, just without the cloud element.

Co-founder Justin Francesconi says the Bowtie “no cloud” architecture is cheaper to run than other solutions, because they don’t have a cloud bill. They pass the savings onto you. We’ll be doing a longer write up about Bowtie soon. They are doing something different, and we don’t see that often here at Packet Pushers Intergalactic. - Ethan

Mark Coleman reports, “Imagine an application that relies on multiple interfaces, a cluster of VMs, or specific tenant data. With NetBox Service Mappings, you can declare all those resources as a cohesive unit in one place, making it easier to see dependencies, spot what’s impacted during changes, and keep your “network design” in lockstep with what’s physically (or virtually) in place.”

The NetBox Labs Service Mappings offering is currently experimental. If you’d like to work with this feature, Mark suggests you ping [email protected] and let them know what you’re trying to get done. - Ethan

This is an interesting post about how Cloudflare is supporting an industry standard to help image creators and publishers “...seamlessly preserve the entire provenance chain — from how an image was created and by whom, to every subsequent edit — across the Cloudflare network.” Provenance issues–that is, who gets credit for an image and when and where it was taken–are likely to get increasingly complicated with the rise of AI image creation and modification tools.  - Drew 

As you might guess, the $1 trillion figure for data center infrastructure that Dell’Oro is forecasting is currently being driven by AI. And almost half of that total is estimated to be spent on servers. A trillion dollars is a huge amount of money. I really hope we get something worth it. - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆