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  • Human Infrastructure 439: Changing Times, A Strait Jacket for Chip Production, and More

Human Infrastructure 439: Changing Times, A Strait Jacket for Chip Production, and More

AuthorAuthor

Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
March 12, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

With daylight savings time making its mark on America’s springtime and elsewhere, I spied a few time-related posts.

  1. Geoff Huston revisits time on his notable Potaroo blog, touching on leap seconds and universal time before going deeply into Network Time Protocol including NTP security.

  2. An effort to secure the Network Time Protocol on LWN.net discusses RFC 8915’s Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, as does Geoff in his blog above.

  3. Finally, Tim Parenti shared with the IANA mailing list a bulletin stating that there will be no leap second in June 2026.

TIL that the earth’s rotation turns out to be kind of a poor time source. Huh! - Ethan

The author wrote and shared this post while working at Amazon. While it’s geared toward neurodivergent folks working at the largest of enterprises, I think a lot of her advice is appropriate for neurodivergent people who work in high-pressure tech jobs regardless of the company size. My favorite is her advice on how to sort a To Do list. She recommends organizaing around a mix of “what’s Interesting, what’s New, what’s Challenging, and what’s Urgent.” - Drew 

This is a terrific blog post! It’s easy enough to start a threat hunt, but when should you stop? Obviously, if you find the threat, you stop. But what if you haven’t? Does it mean the threat isn’t there? Or you missed it? How much more time and effort should you expend? Vibes aren’t a useful or defensible metric, so Sydney provides a clear, rational framework for how to determine when it’s time to conclude a threat hunt. While this is written for threat hunters, the principles likely transfer to other exercises such as troubleshooting and root cause analysis. By the way, I’m hoping to have Sydney on an upcoming episode of Packet Protector to talk about her framework.  - Drew

MORE BLOGS

  1. Dave Farber And Gigabit Networks (Bruce Davie on Dave’s passing at 91.) - Systems Approach

  2. The Rapid Evolution of Transport Lasers - POTs and PANs

  3. How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS (cautionary tale of AI woe) - Alexey On Data

  4. Detection Is Not Protection: What Azure WAF Detection Mode Actually Does (and Doesn't) - Ebby Builds!

  5. You Store Data and You Do Stuff With Data • The OOP Mindset - The Python Coding Stack

  6. Using Mitmproxy to Observe kubectl Traffic - Scott’s Weblog

  7. Reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol (the multi-tenancy problem with a possible solution) - tamarack.cloud

  8. My Homelab Setup (TrueNAS, TailScale, more) - Bryan Anthonio

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TECH NEWS 📣

Oil isn’t the only commodity being disrupted by the US attacks on Iran and Iran’s subsequent blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. This is a detailed look at how key semiconductor inputs, including helium and bromine, are being affected by the blockade.

Of course, oil is also an issue. Taiwan, a major producer of advanced semiconductors, relies heavily on oil from the Middle East. The war in Iran is raising oil prices and reducing supplies. The article cites an analyst report that notes “every dollar added to a barrel of oil acts as a direct tax on the world’s computing power, raising production costs for every fab on the island.”  - Drew 

Anthropic is suing the US Defense Department in federal court over being designated a supply chain risk. I’m not a lawyer, but based on legal analysis I’ve heard, Anthropic has a strong case. 

However, the suit is likely to progress slowly. Can the company stay in business long enough to see it through? The Trump Administration has already ordered companies that have government contracts to sever ties with Anthropic. It could also signal that any company that does business with Anthropic, whether a government contractor or not, might risk the administration’s ire. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors can position themselves as a safer political alternative. Risk-averse CEOs (and would-be investors) may decide that playing it safe outweighs any other criteria, cutting off Anthropic from much-needed revenue. - Drew

The circular “I’ll lend you money to buy my stuff” investments Nvidia has been making are slowing down. The official reason? IPOs are happening soon, so the investment window is closing.

Is there more to the story? Perhaps, and the article speculates. Someone’s got to pay for all of this build-out, and not all of the “someones” are desirable, depending on your point of view. Nvidia is watching the landscape and placing thoughtful bets on who to sell shovels to without upsetting the wrong entities. - Ethan

This gives me “Bugs Bunny outwits Elmer Fudd” vibes. Props to the founders for pulling it off. I hope they take Meta’s money and run. - Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Nomios is a commercial entity that have contributed some of their work to the FOSS community. Pytest-clab is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.

From the README. “While containerlab simplifies spinning up network topologies, integrating it into test workflows still requires boilerplate for deployment, teardown, and node interaction. This plugin provides a convenient pytest fixture to manage containerlab topologies with automatic lifecycle management.”

Under the features section of the README, there’s a bit more to help you understand what you can do with the package.

  • Lab lifecycle management: Deploy and destroy containerlab topologies directly from pytest.

  • Multiple lab support: Interact with multiple labs within a single pytest session, for tests that depend on more than one topology.

  • Topology readiness checks: Verify dependent labs are ready before running tests.

  • Dynamic node inventory: Retrieve node addresses and connection parameters at test runtime instead of hardcoding them in tests.

  • Containerlab CLI access: Run containerlab commands from tests for operations not covered by plugin helpers.

I wonder how pytest-clab might work with NUTS. At a glance, I believe these are complementary and not overlapping tools, but haven’t dug in enough to have a strong opinion. But it feels like you could built unit tests with NUTS and then spinup/teardown a network lab to run the tests with pytest-clab. - Ethan

Ivan Pepelnjak reports, “We haven’t implemented support for Cisco SD-WAN in netlab yet, and we might never do so; after all, netlab isn’t meant to be a kitchen sink of vendor-specific features. However, having an open-source tool that uses input and output files with standardized encoding (JSON or YAML) makes it easy to develop an independent solution that adds functionality.

That’s exactly what Sebastien d’Argoeuves did: he developed a solution that automates Cisco SD-WAN deployment after the corresponding netlab lab is started, and published it in a GitHub repo. If you’re an SD-WAN fan, you must give it a try ;)”

Thanks, Ivan & Sebastien! - Ethan

Ryan Booth, a network engineer and automation expert, has developed a game! It’s a builder sim with a tech hook. Ryan provides more details in the post linked above, including this: “I tried to make it feel like something tech professionals would actually recognize, not a sanitized "server room" but the kind of duct-tape-and-prayers infrastructure that actually runs things. If any of that sounds familiar, I'd love your feedback and input.” - Drew 

TL/DR: They all hallucinate “at a non-trivial rate”, and model selection outweighs all other factors. Of course, there are nuances, so if you’re helping to inform an organization’s model choice, this could be worth your time. - Drew  


Are you gonna take the survey, or do we have to do this again next week?

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). Want an ICS calendar? Follow events.packetpushers.net.

MARCH 2026

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

(WA)NUG | Washington Networking User Group (USNUA)
12 March | Northeast Bellevue, WA

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

Extreme Connect
4 - 7 May | Orlando, FL

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 💬 

Aliro Networks is a quantum networking startup. Aliro’s ecosystem makes it easy to design & operate a quantum network, which is no small feat considering the physics involved.

A part of what Aliro does is support the transmission of entangled photons to distributed endpoints. From there, the entangled photons can each be measured independently, knowing that the value derived from one photon guarantees a specific value in the other. That’s what Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” is about.

While working with quantum entanglement is tricky, the use cases are both real and tantalizing. For instance, consider cryptographic key generation. If a bad actor intercepts key-related exchanges used in classical cryptography, they might be able to derive the key and then use that in an attack to decrypt traffic you encrypted for a reason. With quantum entanglement, it’s possible for both sides to generate an identical key without key-generation traffic ever going the wire. In other words, there’s nothing for the bad guys to intercept.

“But what if they intercept an entangled photon?” you ask. Measurement of the photon, even by a man in the middle, causes the particle state to collapse. That’s detectable by the intended receiver. In other words, you are guaranteed to know you’re being spied on and can take appropriate action.

There are other use cases for quantum entanglement. Aliro helps simulate, build and operate the networks that support entangled operations. The “laws of physics” phrase in the announcement title is referring to that. The takeaway is that quantum physics is real and increasingly well understood with a growing number of use cases and an ecosystem of hardware & software around it. Aliro’s right in the quantum thick of things.

While $15M isn’t the biggest funding round you’ll hear about in 2026, it’s a vote of confidence from the investor community that quantum networks matter. Entanglement isn’t science fiction.

My thanks to Jim Ricotta at Aliro for helping me get my head around quantum networking tech. Any details I got wrong are my errors. I’m new to this space, and I’ve spent several hours falling down a quantum well since chatting with Jim. A deep well it is. - Ethan

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Posted on LinkedIn by Chathuranga https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7435097180014743552/. Shared with Drew by Chad C. via LinkedIn.