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  • Human Infrastructure 438: VXLAN and Proxmox, AI Ghosts, Live Events, and More

Human Infrastructure 438: VXLAN and Proxmox, AI Ghosts, Live Events, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
March 05, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Meta has been awarded a patent that describes how to simulate a user’s social media presence, even after that user has died. This ghost presence, trained on the user’s historical data, could generate content indefinitely.

Picture social media overrun by AI specters. The deceased follow the deceased, and comment on hot takes generated by the demised. The departed upvote memes shared by the defunct. Entire platforms drift like ghost ships across a digital sea, their chattering dead online for eternity.  - Drew  

Sanjay points out several IT failures that come because of the deep interdependencies our services have on being able to resolve hostnames. He also suggests what DNS is good and not so good at, opining that perhaps we rely on DNS for things beyond what it’s actually good at. - Ethan

Phil describes Agent2Agent protocol as, “a standard, open way for agents to discover each other, communicate, collaborate, exchange context, and complete tasks together, regardless of framework, vendor, or environment. It’s vendor-neutral, built on open web standards, and designed for real-world enterprise use.”

As network automation adopts the agentic approach, A2A gives us a predictable way for agents to interact. - Ethan

Markku Leiniö suggests, “VXLAN as a network virtualization feature fits nicely in Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE). Using VXLAN makes it possible to create layer 2 virtual networks without configuring them separately on the physical network. The virtual networks can be used for the virtual machines running on the PVE cluster.”

The rest of Markku’s blog describes exactly how to get this done, complete with UI and CLI screen grabs. - Ethan

Mike Lossmann concludes a multi-part series on OSPF with a helpful guide that lists 10 areas to check when you need to figure out what’s gone wrong. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

  1. Vxlan Using Bridge Groups - The Forwarding Table

  2. Running the Azure CLI in a Container - Scott’s Weblog

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TECH NEWS 📣

The vulnerability described in this article has been fixed, but you’ll need to update to the most recent version to get that fix. That said, it’s clear that OpenClaw is getting lots of attention from malicious opportunists, so expect more articles like this one. - Drew

How can the new MacBook Neo laptop be cheaper than an Apple watch? This piece has answers. - Drew  

Google, Oracle, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, Open AI, and Oracle have all signed on to a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” in which they pinky-swear to insulate Americans from rising electricity costs associated with massive data center buildouts. I, for one, feel better because these companies are well-known for their honesty and ethical behavior. -Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared by Phil Gervasi

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

There are 48 videos in this playlist from the latest WLPC event. Each video ranges from about 10 minutes to about 30. Get your Wi-Fi on. - Ethan

Ivan Pepelnjak reports, “In the first EVPN/VXLAN lab, we added the EVPN control plane to bridging over VXLAN. Now, let’s try out a more complex scenario: several EVPN MAC-VRFs mapped to different VLAN segments on individual PE-devices.”

Fun! - Ethan

lldp2map - Nick Buraglio via GitHub 
https://github.com/buraglio/lldp2map 

From the description: “A Go CLI tool that recursively walks SNMP LLDP neighbor tables across network devices and generates a topology diagram as PNG, PDF, Draw.io, or Excalidraw.” - Drew 

You can use this tool to upload a packet capture to visualize wireless traffic anomalies. You can do this in Wireshark itself, but Ali is sharing this tool he developed because “there are so many filters and at times you don’t immediately remember some of them. So I thought, it would be great if there is a script that will help me generate the graph based on the filters easily.” As a bonus, AIi has also written a detailed blog on how he developed this tool despite not being a professional developer. - Drew 

MORE RESOURCES

  1. F5 BIG-IP VE - Containerlab Release 0.73   

Policy Is Power. Who’s Actually In Control?

You can deploy microsegmentation.

You can automate firewall changes.

You can push policy updates at scale.

But can you see how policy enforcement actually aligns across firewalls, cloud security groups, and segmentation platforms as your network evolves?

Join FireMon and Illumio for a live technical session built for network and security operators who care about how policy behaves in production.

You’ll see how to:

  • Align segmentation with broader network policy enforcement

  • Reduce operational friction across Zero Trust controls

  • Validate and manage policy consistently across hybrid environments

If you own firewall, cloud, or segmentation policy, this session is for you.

UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS 🍕🍻

A curated list of near-future meatspace events of interest to network engineers. Sometimes a Packet Pusher or two will be there (noted below). Send us your event, and we’ll add it when the time comes.

MARCH
2026

Fortinet Accelerate 2026
9 - 13 March | Las Vegas, NV

(PA)NUG | Pennsylvania Networking User Group (USNUA)
12 March | King of Prussia, PA (Drew presenting)

RSA Conference 2026 
23 - 26 March | San Francisco, CA (Drew attending)

AI For Network Leaders Powered By Selector.AI
25 March | New York City, NY (Ethan attending)

APRIL
2026

TORNOG1 | Toronto Network Operators Group
13 April | Toronto, Canada (Ethan attending)

Wi-Fi World Congress USA 2026
13 - 15 April | Mountain View, CA

Wi-Fi Design Day 2026
16 April | London, UK

MAY
2026

NLNAM Meetup 2 | NL Network Automation Meetup
13 May | Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands

(NH)NUG | New Hampshire Networking User Group (USNUA)
27 May | TBD, NH (Ethan co-organizing)

Cisco Live US
31 May - 4 June | Las Vegas, NV (Packet Pushers likely)

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

I had not heard about ASPA before this blog post. It’s interesting! Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) confirm which BGP autonomous systems are allowed to announce a route. ASPA takes the next step, describing expected AS paths that the route might traverse.

“When data travels across the Internet, it keeps a running log of every network it passes through. In BGP, this log is known as the AS_PATH (Autonomous System Path). ASPA provides networks with a way to officially publish a list of their authorized upstream providers within the RPKI system. This allows any receiving network to look at the AS_PATH, check the associated ASPA records, and verify that the traffic only traveled through an approved chain of networks.”

The rest of the post explains in more detail how ASPA does what it does, and describes ASPA support in Cloudflare Radar. - Ethan

If you’ve done DNS admin work, Infoblox’s description of this attack should prove interesting. TL;DR. Bad guys hosting A records in the .arpa domain (instead of the usual PTRs for IP-to-hostname mapping) have a clever new way to launch a phishing attack. It’s a little tricky to execute, but some public DNS providers are vulnerable. Click through to read the details on how this can be executed, including examples of this attack seen in the wild. - Ethan

RIPE Atlas is a globally distributed Internet measurement platform. This post shares the aggregated statistics from across the massive network of probes, explaining the who, what, and how of this colossal public project. - Ethan

A little birdie has let us know Early Bird tickets are nearly gone for AutoCon 5 in Munich. If you want to take advantage of a lower-price ticket, you should do it now. But AutoCon is worth it even if you pay full fare. AutoCon is my favorite industry event for a lot of reasons: its laser focus, the quality of the presentations, the friendly vibe, and the feeling like you’re part of shaping a new direction for the networking industry. Come and experience it for yourself! - Drew

Mimecast surveyed 2,500 IT security pros and decision makers for its 9th annual “State of Human Risk” report. From the press release: “Organizations reporting increases in malicious insider concerns jumped nearly 10 percentage points over two years up from 33% in 2024 to 42% in 2026. Organizations experience an average of six insider-driven incidents per month at an estimated cost of $13.1 million per incident, while 66% expect insider-related data loss to increase over the next 12 months.” You can get the full report here, but you have to surrender contact details. - Drew

Ostinato has published a step-by-step guide to set up an MTU sweep test inside the Ostinato platform. Instructions include options for teh GUI and for a Python API. - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

I don’t remember where I found this, but it was too good not to share. - Drew