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  • Human Infrastructure 402: Sorting IPv6 Addresses, Intel Selling Networking+Edge BU Rumor, Cisco Quantum Chip

Human Infrastructure 402: Sorting IPv6 Addresses, Intel Selling Networking+Edge BU Rumor, Cisco Quantum Chip

Author

Ethan Banks
May 22, 2025

Hey, all. Drew’s out of the office this week, so this issue is a solo act instead of our usual duet. My schedule’s been packed this week, so I’m sharing more links and less commentary as I am tight on time. (I know, I know. 🎻) But I gathered plenty to share—the usual eclectic mix of infrastructure blogs, news, memes, industry announcements, and general interest nerdery.

I hope 2025 is treating you very well indeed. Drew and I will both see you in Prague for AutoCon3 next week if you’re going.

And here we go!

/Ethan

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Hey, got an active networking blog? My newsreader blew up, and I didn’t have a backup OPML file (shame…shame…shame). I lost ~150 feeds. Send me your RSS so I can keep up with your packet prose? TIA. - Ethan🫡

Bruce Davie, who’s been a Packet Pushers podcast guest 2x, makes the case for effectively expressing yourself.

“The longer I worked in technology, the more I came to believe that communications, both oral and written, can be a key differentiator in a technical career. Probably the first time I realized this was when writing my PhD thesis. Engineers as a group are notoriously averse to writing, but I came to see the satisfaction to be had in clearly communicating your ideas on paper.”

He cites several other times from his lengthy, diverse career in networking infrastructure that communication was crucially important.

I agree strongly with Bruce. Being able to write, present, or simply talk with a colleague about complex technical topic sets you apart from others. You come across as an authority that can be trusted, and that matters to your employer. Of course, that cuts both ways—you better actually know what you’re talking about. Bluffing in tech only gets you so far. At the end of the day, the packets don’t lie. - Ethan

A detailed blog post with configuration code, diagrams, and more. Interfaces and VLANs and WireGuard, oh my. - Ethan

Chris observes, “If IPv6 addresses were written out in full, with leading 0s on fields and all their 0000 fields, you could handle them as a simple conventional sort (you wouldn't even need to tell sort that the field separator was ':'). Unfortunately they almost never are, so you need to either transform them to that form, print them out, sort the output, and perhaps transform them back, or read them into a program as 128-bit numbers, sort the numbers, and print them back out as IPv6 addresses. Ideally your language of choice for this has a way to sort a collection of IPv6 addresses.”

Got some code for this you can pipe a list of v6 addresses to? This seems like a solvable problem (at least in my head). - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

TECH NEWS 📣

“Intel has considered divesting its network and edge businesses as the chipmaker looks to shave off parts of the company its new chief executive does not see as crucial, three sources familiar with the matter said.”

In other words, it’s about focus as Intel tries to survive. The question is what networking and edge tech is left, and who might be interested in it? Intel’s been cutting from this part of the business for a while now. - Ethan

“The carrier sued Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike three months after the July 19, 2024 outage disrupted travel for 1.4 million Delta passengers.

Delta has said the outage cost US$550 million ($852 million) in lost revenue and added expenses, offset by US$50 million of fuel savings.

On May 6, a US federal judge in Atlanta said Delta must face a proposed class action by passengers whose said it unlawfully refused full refunds after the outage upended their travel.”

Sigh. At least the lawyers will win. I guess? - Ethan

“In the new alert, federal agents said criminals are targeting “end of life” routers—older models no longer supported by manufacturers with security updates—and infecting them with a variant of TheMoon malware. The infected devices are then used as proxy servers, allowing criminals to mask their real locations while committing online crimes ranging from financial theft to illegal transactions on the dark web, the FBI said.”

Sadly, this alert is an action item for almost no one. Non-techie folks (you know, most all humans) operating routers so old that they no longer being patched couldn’t care less as long as their phones do the thing. That’s not an indictment of anyone. For most people, the Internet is something you use, not something you secure. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

  1. Cisco shows quantum networking chip, opens new lab (When will the CCIE-Q track launch?!?) - Reuters

  2. Linux 6.16 To Support The Realtek RTL8127A 10GbE Ethernet Controller - Phoronix

  3. Education giant Pearson hit by cyberattack exposing customer data (exposed GitLab token in a public file) - BleepingComputer

  4. China begins assembling its supercomputer in space (12 of 2,800 satellites launched) - The Verge

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

  1. Network Evaluation Service: ping, jitter, packet loss monitoring - hendemic via GitHub

  2. ProbeForge (beta) - Advanced DNS & Email Diagnostic Tools

  3. tofuref: TUI for OpenTofu provider registry - djetelina via GitHub

  4. Switch-to.eu - guidance switching to European alternatives of popular Internet platforms and tools

  5. Yggdrasil Network - experimental, decentralized routing

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Turnkey NaaS provider Meter offers natural language queries with a Meter network now.

“Command is a generative UI that lets you talk to your network. Through a multi-stage execution architecture, it understands your plain language inputs and builds the custom software needed to surface the information you need and take action. Whether that’s a summary of all the logs about a client device, a complete dashboard, or a configuration change—Command generates the exact software to fit your request in seconds.”

Natural language prompts aka ChatOps seem like table-stakes for network operations now. I’m still curious as to their ultimate practical value. Are these tools for junior engineers who lack technical depth early in their careers? Are they for seniors who know what they’re looking at and just want to reduce MTTR or discover root cause more quickly?

Put another way, is natural language for network operations making us dumber in the same way that vibe coding seems to be making developers? Or is it valuable augmentation? Or can we take it yet another step and say that we actually need a natural language abstraction due to the complexity of modern networks? - Ethan

“Are you using the RouteViews collectors as remote looking glasses? If so, we are now making your life easier. https://lg.routeviews.org/ now provides you with a well-known web front end to all the RouteViews collectors. No need to log in to the individual collectors using telnet any more.” - Ethan

This is keenly interesting to me because of this statement. “[WhiteFiber] uses DriveNets Network Cloud-AI for its back-end network—connecting GPUs to GPUs—and for storage networking—connecting storage to GPUs—in its new AI data center in Iceland.”

If you know about the networking problems inherent in GPU to GPU communications in the AI context, this is kind of a big deal for DriveNets. Solving this specific problem is an arms race right now. - Ethan

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆