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Human Infrastructure 400: Quick Reader Survey, Proper Prefix Documentation, Co-Packaged Optics, and More

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
May 08, 2025

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THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

If you’re announcing routes to the public Internet, you should be also telling the Internet what to expect from those announcements. You can do this via the Routing Policy Specification Language and your friendly neighborhood Internet Routing Registry. This post shows you how.

Lest you think such public documentation is optional—it really isn’t, not in 2025. The expectation of global Internet routing participants is that there’s publicly available descriptions of the policy around your prefixes. If you don’t have one, it’s possible others won’t carry that traffic.

Look for a future Heavy Networking podcast (end of May 2025) when we cover IRRs and RPSL with Jason Gintert and Jake Khoun. - Ethan

This post picked up steam on Hacker News, and I assume got hugged to death. Thus the archive link.

The author is a dev who makes the point that being able to fix everything doesn’t create an obligation to do so. But the kinds of people that make good devs (and engineers) just WANT to fix everything. It’s who we are…we almost HAVE TO fix all the things. But that sense of obligation is a trap. - Ethan

This is a Bluesky thread, not a blog post, but it’s got some helpful things to think about if you’re interviewing engineers and you want to figure out who’s actually going to be good in the role, not just someone who interviews well. - Drew 

Broadcom and Nvidia are two of the major players in co-packaged optics (CPOs) for switches. CPOs will help ramp up total throughput while also tamping down on power demand, a critical development as data center power consumption skyrockets, particularly for AI infrastructure. This post looks at how Broadcom and Nvidia’s approaches differ, and also compares CPOs to Linear Pluggable Optics (LPOs), an alternative that’s less complex but may not be able to overcome Broadcom and Nvidia putting their market muscle behind CPOs. - Drew  

Daniel asks and answers several questions about how the IS-IS protocol works on multi-access networks, including “What is a Designated Intermediate System (DIS)? Why do we need a pseudonode? How do we flood Link State PDUs (LSPs)?” He also gets into other material here. As he says in the post, you might want to bookmark this for when you have some time to really dig in. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

Get Ahead of the Tech Curve Before It Leaves You Behind
Your industry is being rebuilt from the ground up. Generative AI, robotics, and edge computing aren’t future concepts anymore. They’re here, and they’re reshaping how leading companies operate across healthcare, finance, retail, and beyond.

The question is: Will you lead the change or play catch-up?

Join Ethan Banks, host of the Built to be Bold webinar, as he moderates an exclusive session with Dr. Ayesha Khanna, global AI expert and co-founder of Addo AI.

Where Tech is Headed: Unlock Your Edge with Smarter Infrastructure, May 22, 2025 | 10:00 a.m. MT

This webinar, hosted by global telecommunications leader Zayo, will feature insights on:

  • Technologies redefining business models 

  • How innovative companies are adapting 

  • Why scalable, AI-ready infrastructure is essential 

  • And more!

This goes beyond just another trend overview. It’s a strategic conversation to help you rethink how your organization is positioned for the future. 

TECH NEWS 📣

The Removing Our Unsecure Technologies to Ensure Reliability and Security (ROUTERS) Act is a bipartisan piece of legislation that doesn’t outlaw use of any equipment from what I can tell. It simply kicks off an investigation “into networking equipment that originates from or is under the control of nations deemed a threat.” China has a well-documented track record here.

Patch your gear, folks. - Ethan

TL;DR. The bad guys use a man-in-the-middle attack via a proxy server. They get people to use the proxy via a phishing attack. The proxy acts as an authentication relay between the user and the site they were phished into thinking they were connecting to. Now that the proxy is part of the communications chain, it gets the MFA exchange, too. Poof, your account’s been compromised.

Of course, the phishing attack is the weak link here, literally—the proxy is going to seem like a legit URL to the casual observer, but someone paying closer attention will know it’s bogus. But that’s not most people. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared by Jaap in the Packet Pushers Community Slack.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

From the README. “pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) traveling from you to remote servers and back again.”

I threw this one in because it’s gloriously weird and utterly impractical. It exists because it can, and I love it for that. PingFS also serves as a reminder that ICMP echo packets have a payload you can put stuff in. - Ethan

gRIBI provides an interface directly to the routing table on a device. From the README. “gRIBI defines an interface via which entries can be injected from an external client to a network element. The gRIBI interface is defined in the proto/service/gribi.proto - which defines a simple API for adding and removing routing entries. The RIB entries are described using a protobuf translated version of the OpenConfig AFT model.”

There are many reasons you might want to manipulate the RIB directly, and OpenFlow and P4 are examples of tools that allow such a thing. But they weren’t what the gRIBI authors were looking for. They explain in the motivation.md doc as follows.

“We propose an interface to the routing table on the device, that:

  • Acts as a client of the routing table manager on the device, such that the injected entries can be interdependent on the entries of other protocols, with resolution handled by the device itself.

  • Has transactional semantics, particularly a request/response design, such that the success or failure of an operation can be learned by the programming entity.

  • Is separate from any existing protocol, such that its entries are alongside any other protocol, rather than aiming to inject entries as though they are coming from such a protocol.

  • Has a normalised interface across vendors, such that similarly to OpenConfig, gNMI and gNOI, translation to vendor-specific data models is performed on the device occurs on the device, where it can be done most effectively.

  • Is considered fundamentally as part of the control-plane of the device, not the management plane; such that entries are created as as though they are learnt via a dynamic routing protocol, not treated as ephemeral configuration of the device.”

-Ethan

This episode focuses mostly on the impact of LLMs, and how to be aware of their benefits and limits. It also notes there are different kinds of AI to consider. There’s also a good discussion about how to approach a text, especially one generated by an LLM (because it may be trained to tell you only what you want to hear). As for the episode’s main question, my guess is that AI will eliminate some jobs, alter others, and otherwise inevitably creep into every facet of work until, like persistent network connectivity, we don’t notice it until it stops working. - Drew  

MORE RESOURCES

SharkFest ‘25 US

SharkFest’25 US, taking place June 14-19 at the Richmond Marriott Downtown in Richmond, is fast approaching. Featuring a keynote by Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google and recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", and many insightful sessions delivered by industry experts, SharkFest is the must-attend event for network professionals and Wireshark enthusiasts.

Don't miss this ultimate Wireshark developer and user conference, and what past attendees have called "the best conference in the industry!” Meet the Wireshark core developers, network with your peers, build your professional network and much more! Learn more and register now!

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Juniper has announced three new capabilities in its Mist AI platform: First, Marvis Minis can simulate a user to measure the WAN performance between the site where the Mini is located and a cloud application. The Mini can test reachability and gather loss, latency, and jitter data. Second, Juniper has updated the Mist UI to show the status of issues raised by Marvis, and whether those issues have been resolved automatically by Marvis or by a human admin. Third, Juniper is introducing a Marvis client for Windows, MacOS, and Android that can measure performance from the client to an AP to help streamline Wi-Fi troubleshooting. - Drew  

Gluware has announced the 5.5 version of its network automation software. New capabilities include native integration with NetBox, allowing for easier synchronization between device data residing in Gluware and NetBox’s data model of the network. The release also adds support for two versions of the SONiC network OS (the community version and Dell’s Enterprise version), and enhanced support for Cisco Meraki, Versa Director, and other products. - Drew   

SonicWall looks to entice Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with a new offering that lets MSPs sell 24/7 managed firewall services, with backing by SonicWall’s own NOC team. The company has also introduced two new hardware firewalls that offer L4/L7 statefull firewalling, application control, IDS/IPS, content filtering, and other features. The NSa2800 firewall has 16 1G ports and 3 10G SFP+ ports; the NSa3800 has 24 1G ports and 10 10G SFP+ ports.  - Drew 

Netpicker is a network management software tool that provides capabilities such as config backup, network compliance and security testing, and CVE-based vulnerability assessment. The software’s 2.2 release has added a beta feature that lets you automate network jobs, along with other features. - Drew   

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. Square Root Day - Wikipedia

  2. This is how it feels at the beginning of the end of the world (European power outage) - Fast Company

LAST LAUGH 😆

Found on Reddit at r/ProgrammerHumor