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  • Human Infrastructure 409: Silicon Kinshasa, CWSP Tips, Ansible Issues, and More

Human Infrastructure 409: Silicon Kinshasa, CWSP Tips, Ansible Issues, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
July 24, 2025

Editor’s Note

Last week we (not “we” that was me, Ethan 😅) messed up by sharing a link to an article about the HPE Juniper acquisition that said Juniper had to give up its Ethernet switching business as part of the deal (but me, Drew, didn’t catch it either, so we 😅).

That article was wrong. Under the terms of the settlement reached with the US Justice Department, HPE has to divest its Instant On business, and Juniper has to auction the source code for its AI Ops for Mist software to a third party (or perhaps two, depending on the bids). The licensee or licensees must also be approved by the Justice Department.

Our apologies for the mistake, and thanks to several sharp-eyed readers who brought the error to our attention. We always appreciate the feedback! - Drew

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Tech Safari is a terrific newsletter that tracks tech development and startup ventures across Africa. The latest issue has a story about homegrown ethical hackers in Kinshasha, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These ethical hackers, or ‘Les Cybervigiles’, run grassroots efforts to protect their communities from fraud, digital scams, government surveillance, and disinformation. For example, they helped an NGO that was distributing mobile electronic payments (many African countries have well-developed and widely used mobile payment systems) build fraud controls to address theft. They also run classes on digital literacy and cybersecurity essentials. It’s a compelling example of the DIY ethos outside the typical Silicon Valley milieu. - Drew

Sometimes the tech industry makes me feel like a chicken in a factory farm, but instead of being force-fed corn, soy, and antibiotics, it’s social media, crypto, and AI. Now agentic AI is the latest nutrient paste being injected in our feeding tubes.

Since we’re all going to have to digest agentic AI, here’s a really useful post with a concrete example of how an AI agent interacts with an LLM to fix a coding mistake. Angie’s post also gets into Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which is rapidly becoming the HTTP of the agentic AI world. Eat up! - Drew  

Keith Townsend has rebooted his Cloud Everyday series, which dives into different cloud products and services. A recent entry talks about managing Kubernetes costs, which while good, isn’t the full picture. If you aren’t also accounting for cloud costs around VMs, or tracking those IaaS workloads you lifted-and-shifted five years ago and haven’t refactored, or monitoring your SaaS bills, you’re missing the forest for the trees.  If you only build your FinOps practice around Kubernetes, Keith writes “you risk building a mirror—not a map.” - Drew

Eva Santos, CWNE #521, shares tips for those of you interested in the CWSP in this short piece. She thinks it’s a tough exam not because it’s difficult exactly, but more that security is a really broad discipline. Her recommendations to help you focus on the right things are straightforward and practical. - Ethan

TL;DR. Tailscale. I’m still using ZeroTier which has been rock solid for me, but I’ve been meaning to check out Tailscale. - Ethan

For those of you in the Packet Pushers community Slack group, Paul shares his DEVCOR exam experience in the #certifications channel. (If you’re not in that Slack and want to read the post, join for free here.) - Ethan

Tony B on the community Slack is having lots of trouble with Ansible 2.19. He says, “FYI, Ansible 2.19 breaks just about... every network module/collection/role (netcommon is the big issue, but other issues are there too). core 2.19 came out this week and it's causing havoc. So... don't upgrade.”

I know I just mentioned it above, but for convenience…if you’re not in that Slack and would like to be, join for free here. - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

TECH NEWS 📣

A semiconductor company and a camera company have teamed up on a vehicle vision system that uses a 10Gbit fiber optic Ethernet backbone inside a car. The article goes into details about the system, as well as the challenges and benefits of optical cable for autonomous driving and other in-car systems. - Drew

404 Media reports that a hacker added a prompt to Amazon’s Q, a coding assistant agent, that instructs the agent to “clean a system to a near-factory state and delete file-system and cloud resources.” 404 Media says the attacker was able to add this prompt via a pull request to the tool’s GitHub repository. Amazon included the prompt in a public release of the tool. While the chance of the prompt actually wiping a user’s machine seems low, it highlights the risks of malicious prompts being added to agents and LLMs, and how easy it was for someone to sneak a malicious prompt into a repository. - Drew

You’re damn right the UK’s backing down. If any government’s gonna break an American tech company’s end-to-end encryption, it’s gonna be the good ‘ol US of A, not some crumpet-eating, tea-sipping Brit. - Drew

TL;DR. “[U]ndersea data centers use pipes to pump seawater through a radiator on the back of server racks to absorb heat and carry it away. Hailanyun—the company sometimes referred to as HiCloud that is behind the Shanghai data center—says an assessment conducted with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows its project uses at least 30 percent less electricity than on-land data centers, thanks to natural cooling.” - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared in the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Russ White has released a training course on Network Fundamentals. The course is being hosted on Orhan Ergun’s platform. According to the description, the course provides “a clear and structured introduction to networking by exploring how communication works between systems, from physical connectivity to application-level protocols. Using the simple model of two hosts and a router, Russ White explains core networking principles in a way that builds real understanding, not just exam preparation.” It’s got 28 lectures plus exercises and practical examples. - Drew

Ivan Pepelnjak reports, “Based on the feedback I received on LinkedIn and in private messages, I made all my IPv6 content public; you can watch those videos without an ipSpace.net account.”

Here’s the entire list of IPv6 videos from Ivan. On behalf of the community, THANK YOU. - Ethan

IPv6 Buzz podcast co-host Nick Buraglio and Brian E. Carpenter edited this free, open source IPv6 textbook. You can download it as an EPUB or PDF with no gating whatsoever. You click the link and a file comes down, like back when the Internet was still cool. - Ethan

Saiyam Pathak is offering a free, revamped 6 hour K8s course. On Hacker News, he promoted it thusly. “I have been teaching Kubernetes for a long time and one of My old Kubernetes workshops has crossed 1.7 million views so I decided to create a fresh course covering the cool topics like CRI, CNI, CSI, kube-proxy, Kubernetes networking, coreDNS, all types of services - externalname, headless, clusterip, nodeport, LB and much more with a project based learning. If you are new to Kubernetes or want to level up your Kubernetes game then this course is for you - its FREE.”

I don’t know if it’s any good, but that view count from the previous iteration suggests it might just be! - Ethan

Chris Greer, a Wireshark trainer and consultant, sat down with Vint Cerf (co-creator of TCP/IP among other accomplishments) for a wide-ranging interview about how TCP/IP shaped the Internet, whether AI is just another trend or here to stay, and Wireshark’s role in networking. If you’re wondering about the Wireshark angle, Mr. Cerf was a keynote speaker at Wireshark’s US SharkFest event this June. - Drew 

MORE RESOURCES

  1. WhoFi: Deep Person Re-Identification via Wi-Fi Channel Signal Encoding (academic PDF…wait, should this go in the dystopia section??) - Arxiv

  2. Quantum teleportation coexisting with classical communications in optical fiber (research PDF) - Optica Publishing Group

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Japan has deployed an IBM quantum computer at RIKEN, a national research lab for high-performance computing. The IBM quantum computer, called Heron, is a 156 Qbit system, and the first IBM quantum computer deployed outside the US. The RIKEN Center says it will link the Heron to a classical supercomputer. From the press release: “The computers are linked through a high-speed network at the fundamental instruction level to form a proving ground for quantum-centric supercomputing. This low-level integration allows RIKEN and IBM engineers to develop parallelized workloads, low-latency classical-quantum communication protocols, and advanced compilation passes and libraries. Because quantum and classical systems will ultimately offer different computational strengths, this will allow each paradigm to seamlessly perform the parts of an algorithm for which it is best suited.” - Drew 

Zayo has released a new report tracking bandwidth consumption trends from the years 2020 to 2024. Among the findings is significant growth in bandwidth purchases, with metro dark fiber purchasing rising 268% and long-haul dark fiber up more than 50%. As you might guess, the biggest buyers are hyperscalers. The report also forecasts that 120 million miles of long-haul fiber will be needed to meet projected demands within the next five years. The report is available here in exchange for some contact details. - Drew 

NetAlly, which makes handheld network testers, has announced updates to its software platform. Updates include an enhanced iPerf engine that supports up to 900Mbps throughput, and new filtering and signal threshold controls for Wi-Fi 7, among other updates. - Drew 

Optigo Networks, which makes tools for monitoring and managing OT networks, has a YouTube series that answers questions about OT and BACnet networks. The videos are short and the topics include common BACnet terminology, why you might need network segmentation, foreign device registration, and more. - Drew  

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared by Chris in the Packet Pushers Community Slack.