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  • Human Infrastructure 416: Netlab Details, Wireshark Contributions, a Technical Manager's Dilemma, and More

Human Infrastructure 416: Netlab Details, Wireshark Contributions, a Technical Manager's Dilemma, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
September 11, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Markku Leiniö contributes to the open source Wireshark project from time to time, and documents how he handles this. Not a lot of text here, but should be helpful if you struggle to get your head around git concepts. Markku further recommends that you “read the Wireshark Developers’ Guide if starting your own contributions to the Wireshark project.” - Ethan

Hey! I was a guest on the return of Ivan Pepelnjak’s Software Gone Wild podcast. We talked about how I’m using Ivan’s baby, netlab. Ivan suggests that you listen to the podcast (MP3 link) or watch us on YouTube. - Ethan

Daniel Karrenberg, co-author of RFC 1918, explains why 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16 were selected. The reasons are, frankly, boring and pragmatic…but still somehow fascinating. - Ethan

Technical professionals who get promoted into management roles often struggle in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, you might find it hard to let go of that technical role, so you micro-manage your team and double-check everything they do. On the other hand, you might worry about losing your technical chops and fret about losing credibility with the people who report to you. Pat Allen writes about what technical credibility actually looks like for a manager or leader, and how to move from doing everything yourself to enabling your team to become more effective. This is good stuff! - Drew

Bart Dorlandt is writing a series on Pydantic and JSON. In this installment he looks at how to validate your data structure and ensure that you can return the same output as you got the input. - Drew 

This short post recommends common sense strategies for dealing with feedback, especially feedback you disagree with. How do you handle this? How do you make feedback, whether you agree with it or not, actionable?

I’ve often struggled receiving negative feedback on my technical work, because I get emotionally tied up in “my” network. If someone calls my baby ugly, I take it personally. That’s even more true if I think the person calling my baby ugly is an idiot. Now, that’s gotten better as I’ve gotten older and more mature (at least in theory). But the time to ponder how you’ll handle feedback isn’t as the words you don’t want to hear are incoming. It’s before. This article might help. - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

What do popcorn, AI and automation have in common?

They’re all part of Nokia’s new Event-Driven Automation (EDA) playlist on YouTube.

Designed for network pros like you, this video series guides you step-by-step through automating multivendor environments with ease. Andy Lapteff, EDA product marketing manager, shows you how to:

  • Spin up your lab with Proxmox and Linux to install EDA for the first time.

  • Navigate the EDA UI to confidently manage and interact with your network.

  • Access pre-built workflows from the EDA Store to accelerate automation adoption.

  • Build a full data center fabric faster than it takes to microwave popcorn!

If you want automation that’s simple, safe and seriously fast, Nokia EDA and this playlist are for you. Watch now to see EDA in action. Need a refresh? Nokia EDA simplifies data center network operations and eliminates human error. Want to try EDA? Go to https://docs.eda.dev/

TECH NEWS 📣

6502 BASIC was, possibly, my very first programming language. It appeared first on the Commodore PET. It’s unclear to me if the Commodore 64 I cut my teeth on was using the same BASIC, but I suspect so as the C64 used the 6510, a descendant of the 6502. Plus, Commodore got one heck of a deal licensing Bill’s BASIC.

“In 1977, Commodore licensed Microsoft's 6502 BASIC for a flat fee of $25,000. Jack Tramiel's company got perpetual rights to ship the software on unlimited machines—no royalties, no per-unit fees. While $25,000 seemed substantial then, Commodore went on to sell millions of computers with Microsoft BASIC inside. Had Microsoft negotiated a per-unit licensing fee like they did with later products, the deal could have generated tens of millions in revenue.”

Why does Microsoft open-sourcing an ancient BASIC matter? “While modern computers can't run this 1978 assembly code directly, emulators and FPGA implementations keep the software alive for study and experimentation. The code reveals how programmers squeezed maximum functionality from minimal resources—lessons that remain relevant as developers optimize software for everything from smartwatches to spacecraft.” Emphasis mine. - Ethan

I highlight this to put a new computing paradigm on your radar in case it someday turns into something we care about. “The emerging paradigm of Quantum-Centric Supercomputing (QCS) does not seek to replace the silicon-based machines that power modern industry, but to augment them. In this new architectural vision, a Quantum Processing Unit, or QPU, acts not as a successor to today’s CPUs and GPUs, but as a specialized accelerator, much like the GPU became indispensable for graphics and later, artificial intelligence.” - Ethan

TL;DR. Oracle Cloud is making money because they have AI infrastructure other companies need. So…what you think of Oracle Cloud’s long-term growth potential might correlate to what you think of AI’s future. Bullish today, but for how long? - Ethan

The Associated Press details how US tech giants have sold billions of dollars of hardware and software to China to build a country-wide surveillance system used to abuse human rights, track and target  ethnic minority populations, and crack down on political and religious dissent. 

The article notes that many companies were perfectly aware of what their products would be used for, because it was in the marketing materials. Consider this from the article: “Though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate show.” 

What do the tech companies have to say? The article notes “IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies.” That’s an anodyne way of saying that even if these sales might be distasteful, perhaps even immoral, they didn’t break any laws. I understand that companies, especially publicly traded ones, are under tremendous pressure to increase revenue. I also think it’s fair to tally the human costs that might come with driving up the share price a few more cents each quarter, and ask if it’s worth it. - Drew

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared in the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

From the README. “A simple command-line tool to list network ports and their associated binaries. Perfect for developers who need to quickly identify what's using a specific port.”

Sure, there’s lots of ways to get this information. But this is a simple, handy tool that works on my Mac. I like it, although I found myself asking why certain apps were sitting there listening. - Ethan

A Technical Update on Submarine Cables (video) - Liam Taylor from EXA Infrastructure via SwiNOG#40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYblPwg70Ns

Here’s the abstract of this talk. “Over 90% of international Internet traffic is carried over submarine cables and some sources citing they carry 99% of intercontinental traffic. As traffic demand continues to grow, how are cable and transmission technologies developing to keep up and what are the latest technologies being deployed today. How are we maximising capacity per fibre pair and per cable? This presentation will provide an up-to-date overview of developments in world of submarine cables and what is being deployed today.” - Ethan

From the README. “🚀 Kubernetes Service Port Forwarding with ngrok. A CLI tool that helps you expose Kubernetes services to the internet using ngrok tunnels with interactive configuration.” - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

ServiceNow has added new AI features to its platform in its Zurich release. Key features include the Build Agent, which is meant to allow non-developers to create apps around the ServiceNow platform by requesting features and capabilities using natural-language prompts. The Zurich release also includes a developer sandbox, which provides professional developers with “isolated environments within a single instance, so multiple teams can collaborate, build, and test new features without conflicts,” according to ServiceNow. 

Also on offer are new security controls, including the ServiceNow Vault Console to help organizations discover and classify data types across workflows to ensure that privacy and compliance policies are being appropriately applied. The new Machine Identity Console aims to give visibility into API integrations that use machine identities to help enterprises track bots and AI agents. - Drew

Nokia is putting its SR Linux NOS on Supermicro 800G switches to tap into the AI infrastructure spending boom. The partnership will also integrate Nokia’s Event Driven Automation (EDA) for data center networking lifecycle automation. From the press release: “Data centers are at an inflection point, driven by the growing demands of AI and cloud workloads. Meeting these challenges requires a new approach—one that puts networking at the center of data center architecture, with a focus on performance, scalability, and automation.” - Drew 

Chris Grundemann, co-founder of the AutoCon conference series, shares practical thoughts about deploying the SONiC network operating system in the average enterprise. SONiC is intriguing because of the seeming cost savings (let’s leave opex aside for the moment), but Chris goes into detail pointing out that SONiC, at least the Community Edition, is too heavy of a technical lift for most enterprises. Missing features, automation challenges, and an unusually insular userbase are part of the problem.

Don’t get me wrong. Chris doesn’t think SONiC is all bad. You need to know what you’re getting into, though. Chris concludes with practical recommendations to help you know if you should go the SONiC direction.

A thought provoking and worthy read from Chris. - Ethan

Cloudflare talks about the 1.1.1.1 bogus certificate issuance by Fina CA. They have thoughts. Many thoughts…with diagrams. If you don’t quite get what the problem is with a certificate authority doing what Fina did, give this a read, and you will. - Ethan

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared in the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj.