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  • Human Infrastructure 434: VXLAN over IGP, GitHub Confronts PR Slop, and More

Human Infrastructure 434: VXLAN over IGP, GitHub Confronts PR Slop, and More

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
February 05, 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE

If this week’s issue feels a little light, that’s because one of us (Ethan) was gallivanting in San Francisco (i.e. recording lots of podcasts at NANOG 96) instead of sifting the mediasphere for choice links. We hope there’s still enough here to keep you reading until next week. - Drew

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Michael writes “I want to explore how EVPN VXLAN can be deployed in a discontiguous enterprise environment, where VXLAN is implemented only at the network edge and stretched across an existing routed core using a simple IGP. The key idea is that we can extend Layer 2 segments between sites without making any configuration changes to the core network itself. All VXLAN and EVPN configuration lives on the edge devices, while the core continues to operate exactly as it does today.”  

His blog shows how he did this. He includes his lab topology and key configurations. BTW, in a LinkedIn update where he shared this blog post, Michael said he was inspired by Jeff McAdams’ “EVPN All the Things” Heavy Networking episode. - Drew 

A good overview of how VLANs work, why to use them, key terminology, and more. - Drew 

A Nigerian entrepreneur named Sheriff wanted to see if it would be possible to build an AI model that could identify skin conditions based on a photo. That’s because there are very few dermatologists in Africa, and such a model might help fill a need. But he ran into a problem: he couldn’t find a labeled dataset of skin conditions on Black skin. It’s part of a broader problem in medicine and tech that includes other areas such as radiology, oncology, and cardiology: “African data is either missing, minimal, or mislabeled.” And as AI inserts itself into more and more systems, he writes “If they’re built without African data, we could be permanently locked out of using them in any meaningful way.” - Drew

MORE BLOGS

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TECH NEWS 📣

One unintended consequence of AI lowering the barriers to software development is software maintainers getting buried beneath an avalanche of low-quality contributions. The Register reports on a GitHub community discussion about how to deal with an increasing number of PRs submitted by people who may not really understand what they’re doing or how the code actually works. It’s breaking the trust model and increasing the cognitive load on reviewers. It’s already having an impact in the open-source world; recently, the maintainers of curl ended a bug bounty program because they were overwhelmed by AI-generated reports of dubious validity. - Drew 

There’s been a lot of breathless social media hype around OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot), an AI agent that can perform a multitude of tasks on behalf of human users. This hype led one person to create an online forum for these bots to congregate and communicate, called Moltbook. Moltbook generated its own round of breathless hype, as observers claimed to see agents organizing communities, forming a religion, and demonstrating other unanticipated behaviors. But it’s not clear how much of that is actually due to prompting by human actors as opposed to independent, emergent behavior by bots. As always, color me skeptical. - Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on LinkedIn by Cecilia Lagnelov

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Lance writes “I got tired of staring at old-school mtr output, wondering which of 8 ECMP paths my packets were actually taking. So I decided to build something better. Meet ttl – a Rust-based network diagnostic tool that does what traceroute should have done years ago.” He says key features include multi-flow probing, NAT detection, MPLS label visibility, and a bunch of others.  - Drew 

Wendell Odom drops a new entry in his YouTube series for folks pursuing network certs. From the description: “How does a router actually choose a path? In this video, we reverse-engineer OSPF. We start with the result—the Route in the routing table—and work backward through the SPF algorithm and LSAs to understand exactly how it got there. The internals of how OSPF operates may be one of the most challenging topics on the CCNA blueprint. But in this video, it’s time to dig into thinking about OSPF operation, at least to the depth required for CCNA.” - Drew 

Jeff McAdams has released a Python library he calls Tether. What is it? Jeff writes “Tether creates bidirectionally "entangled" object references between objects. With such entangled references created, a change to one reference is reflected in a corresponding change to the other reference.” He says the library is pretty new, so approach it as a proof of concept. You can find it here. - Drew 

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Notepad++ was the victim of a targeted attack, likely perpetrated by threat actors in China, in which Notepad++’s hosting provider was compromised, enabling the threat actors to redirect selected traffic to an attacker-controlled site. Users who thought they were updating software were actually downloading a back door. Notepad++ describes what happened and how they are addressing it. - Drew   

Regulation and governance gets a bad rap in tech circles, but we still need it, particularly as the Internet has gone global. This APNIC post argues that low-earth orbit is the next area where governments, industry, and regulatory bodies are going to have to come together to agree on how to deal with thousands, and someday maybe millions, of satellites whizzing around the planet. 

Why? The post notes “Without coordinated global rules, economies face technical, security, and economic pressures, each pushing them to regulate aggressively. The risk of cyberattacks on satellite systems raises further concerns. The LEO satellite revolution is forcing states to choose between openness to global competition and tight control for national security.” - Drew

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆