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  • Human Infrastructure 401: Survey Results, Enough with the AI Doom, IPv4 Thinking, and More

Human Infrastructure 401: Survey Results, Enough with the AI Doom, IPv4 Thinking, and More

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Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
May 15, 2025

Survey Results

Last week we asked whether the length of this newsletter needed to change. The poll results are in, and the winner is STATUS QUO!

For the folks hoping for less stuff, we may experiment with some tweaks to try and make the newsletter a little more consumable. And for the maniacs who want more, there’s always the Internet if you need to supplement your supply. : )

Thanks to everyone who responded, and apologies to folks who encountered weirdness trying to respond. This newsletter platform has its quirks and we’re still figuring them out. - Drew

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

The author takes a look at employment data and can’t find any evidence that AI is taking anyone’s jobs. And it’s been about 3 years that the unemployment scare has been going on. You’d think we’d see more evidence if AI was going to impact society so severely.

That’s not to say companies aren’t trying, and perhaps even succeeding in some cases, to replace humans with AI. But we’re a very long way from AI fundamentally transforming the makeup of the workforce. - Ethan

Sean points out that any engineering project has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning and end are usually good experiences. The excitement of the start. The satisfaction of the end. But the middle. Hmm. That can be a time of despair. Unexpected issues. Scope creep. Challenging, perhaps even insurmountable, problems. The deadline looming more quickly than you’d like.

It’s going to be okay, though. Sean says, “The trick is to recognize that the feeling is temporary - you can always work through it - and to make sure you don’t do anything stupid in the meantime.” - Ethan

Chris Wahl looks at the history and evolution of DevOps. While partly a cultural change (getting different teams to talk to one another in a productive manner), Chris argues DevOps has evolved into a full-blown technical discipline. You still need the communication, but you also need “domain expertise that is both wide and deep across areas like application and platform architecture, networking, branching strategies, building test environments, CI/CD pipelines, container architecture, tool building, and even cost controls.” - Drew 

A medium-sized company reached out to Johannes Weber to get some feedback on a project that would allow the company to use IPv4 internally while using IPv6 to reach the Internet via two different ISPs. Johannes walks through some examples of what he calls “IPv4 thinking” and why it leads to bad ideas. He also lays some blame at the feet of a firewall vendor for defaulting to NAT. There’s good lessons in here. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to this episode of the IPv6 Buzz podcast if you want more on how IPv4 thinking may be holding organizations back: The Problem with IPv4 Thinking. - Drew

Christian Scholz plans to take a Juniper Networks EX8208 and turn it into a mini-fridge. But it won’t just be a fridge with a novelty exterior. He writes “My Plan is to use a custom designed PCB to control all (and I literally mean ALL) LED’s AND Fans that all the Linecards and Chassis and PSUs have to offer while simultaneously program blink-patterns depending on the fill-level of the fridge. The Cards themselves will be “cut” and act as a front-plate for the fridge inside. The LCD that you see on the top will be hacked and display the amount of cans left in the fridge and if it falls below a warning and a critical threshold it will light up the warning or ALARM LED.” He’s got even more ambitions for this project. Click the link to find out, and hopefully we’ll get to see the finished product. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

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!

TECH NEWS 📣

TL;DR. If you bought a VMware perpetual license, you could still use the software, but couldn’t renew support in the Broadcom era. Now there’s a cease and desist letter going out to make sure that you aren’t running any updates or patches that came out since your support contract ran out. Broadcom might even insist on an audit.

“The letter [PDF], reviewed by Ars Technica and signed by Broadcom managing director Michael Brown, tells users that they are to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches, save for zero-day security patches, issued since their support contract ended.” - Ethan

This article is one of a number of stories I’ve heard where AI agents aren’t ready to replace humans just yet. Help? Yes. Augment? Absolutely. Replace? No. Will agentic AI tech get better? No doubt, but I think we’ve got a ways to go before we understand the ultimate impact to IT shops. - Ethan

I wasn’t sure if this should go in the IT News section or the Dystopia section (which may be a distinction without difference these days). In any case, if you need to avail yourself of an AI chatbot for therapy, or to use it as a sounding board to help you work through issues or questions that you’re uncomfortable talking about with a person, remember that you have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality. Law enforcement can request AI chat logs from tech providers, or demand them via a warrant. And the chat bot makers are likely feeding your interactions right back into their bots. The article linked above makes a strong case for caution. It’s something to think about when using these tools for things more personal than Studio Ghibli memes or vibe coding. - Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

“Make it so! Wait, I mean, so is that how we make it?”

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

The netlab labbing platform (what I run currently) is at release 2.0.0 with lots of updates. I’ve just upgraded. If you’re new to netlab, it’s essentially a YAML-defined network labbing platform with a ton of supported features and scenarios. Imagine having a fully-defined network ready for you to start working with including IP addresses, routing protocols, VLANs, and much more. Open source. Free. - Ethan

From the README. Qtap is “an eBPF agent that captures traffic flowing through the Linux kernel. By attaching to TLS/SSL functions, data is intercepted before and after encryption and then passed to flexible plugins with full visibility along with all of the available context - process/container/host/user/protocol/etc. Qtap makes it possible to understand what's happening with your egress traffic, without modifying apps, installing proxies, or managing certs.” - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

BalticNOG 2025 - September 24-25, 2025
https://balticnog.org

The next Baltic Network Operators Group meeting is happening in a few months at the Marriott Vilnius, Lithuania. As I write this, the registration page indicates that early bird tickets are gone, and 246 regular tickets remain at a price of €250.00. Call for abstracts is open until June 13, 2025.

What is this NOG all about? “BalticNOG is a non-profit initiative dedicated to fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and technical discussions among network professionals in the Baltic region and beyond. It serves as a hub for operators, engineers, and researchers to exchange insights on internet infrastructure, security, and best practices. By bringing together industry experts and stakeholders, BalticNOG aims to strengthen regional connectivity and contribute to the global internet community.” - Ethan

Broadcom has announced the launch of 200G/lane co-packaged optics (CPO). From the release: “Broadcom’s 200G/lane CPO technology is designed for next-generation, high-radix scale-up and scale-out networks, which will demand parity with copper interconnect reliability and power efficiency. This capability is crucial for enabling scale-up domains exceeding 512 nodes, while also addressing the bandwidth, power, and latency challenges associated with the increasing size of next-generation foundation model parameters.” - Drew 

DriveNets, which offers disaggregated networking products, has inked a deal with Japanese service provider KDDI. From the press release: “This agreement aims to expand the deployment of disaggregated routers, improve the management efficiency of these routers, and optimize the capital investment and operating costs of high-scale network deployments.  Based on the agreement, KDDI will start the deployment of DriveNets Network Cloud solution in backbone core routers at four key locations with the goal of reaching commercial operations by the end of 2025.” - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆