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  • Human Infrastructure 456: When the Firewall Is the Wrong Enforcement Layer, Wiring Consequences, and More

Human Infrastructure 456: When the Firewall Is the Wrong Enforcement Layer, Wiring Consequences, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
July 23, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Chris chronicles the challenges of old buildings wired with CAT5 back in the day. It’s a short, practical blog that talks about the requirement he faces for 10Gbase-T at times, even though most folks just use wireless even when there’s a shiny new CAT-6 jack with 10GBase-T available. - Ethan

Jeff covers Real Time Black Hole (RTBH) routing, comparing how it works as a defense against bad actors vs. blocking a specific host at a firewall. If RTBH is unfamiliar to you, Jeff explains it well. - Ethan

Ed Zitron compares the financial instruments that led to the 2008 financial crisis to today’s financial vehicles being used to obfuscate billions of dollars of debt raised by tech giants to fund AI data centers. If you think a collapse of the AI bubble will only hurt those tech giants, Ed notes that every major financial institution owns some of this debt, which means a collapse would have widespread repercussions throughout the financial system. Ed can be hyperbolic (and long-winded) in his decrying of the AI bubble, but it’s hard not to see the parallels he draws between sub-prime mortgages in the early 2000s and today’s gap between the immense debt being accrued to build AI compute capacity and the actual revenues being earned. - Drew 

The title says it all. Hold on to your butts! - Drew

MORE BLOGS

TECH NEWS 📣

In this study, test subjects all read the same book. Some readers read the first half of the book on screens, and others on paper. All readers read the second half of the book on paper. Then their brains were scanned during a comprehension quiz. The findings are interesting. 

For simple questions about the second half of the story, both groups performed the same. But when the researchers asked trickier questions that required readers to piece together information from both halves of the narrative, they noticed something interesting. Those that had read the first half of the story on a tablet were slower to answer. The pattern of activation in their brains was different too. 

Regions at the front of the brain associated with language processing, narrative integration, and difficult mental tasks lit up less in the on-paper contingent. This suggests their brains were working less hard to recall events from the first half of the story and mentally connect them with what they read later.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. I really like reading on screens. The convenience. The portability. But this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that paper books are better for humans. - Ethan

An Instagram exec (Instagram is owned by Meta) literally says in the above article "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can."  

Uh, have you tried not making and selling the product that is purpose-built for surreptitious recording and harassment? - Drew 

See my commentary in the Tech Blogs section on Ed Zitron’s post about sub-prime data centers. - Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Dodge Ram or dodgy RAM?

Shared by Kaj on the Packet Pushers Community Slack. You can join and get Kaj’s memes (plus lots of engineering conversations) right from the source.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Ivan Pepelnjak has announced netlab 26.07. In this release, several new things including…

  • The multiserver plugin by @muddyblack distributes containerlab devices across multiple servers.

  • The GRE tunnel plugin supports GRE tunnels on Cisco IOS, FRR, VyOS, and Junos (vSRX and vJunos-router) (most device implementations done by @ssasso and @jbemmel).

  • The WireGuard tunnel plugin by @jbemmel supports WireGuard tunnels on FRR.

  • The bgp.session plugin and the OSPF module support graceful restart on Arista EOS, BIRD, FortiOS, and FRR (by @jbemmel and @a-v-popov)

  • The bgp.policy plugin supports the bgp.role attribute on FRR and BIRD (by @jbemmel).

There’s more to read about on the click. - Ethan

SLIM stands for Structured Low-bandwidth Information Markup, and it’s the brainchild of Caleb Queern. The idea is to offer a quick-loading, stripped-back version of a web page to help folks who are in a bandwidth constrained situation. Caleb explains.

SLIM is an opinionated, unofficial standard that, in my testing, reduces the data required to load a page by 99%. You can visit GitHub to read the detailed requirements. For our sake here, suffice to say that SLIM is primarily text-based, requires the entire page to load in a single request from the browser, and may guarantee the web page loads under austere network conditions.

Growing up in the modem-era, the desire for efficient web pages has always appealed to me. Whether SLIM will take off or not is to be seen, but I applaud the effort.

Read the SLIM draft proposal from Caleb here. - Ethan

Why this old post appeared in my feed from Andy Lapteff’s blog, I’m not sure. But appear it did, and it’s one of those practical posts for home labbers. Console servers, especially ancient eBay specials still soldiering on, are really helpful when you’re working with physical networking gear. Andy’s referencing this Cyclades box, and I’ve had a museum-worthy Digi32 console server--that still works!--in my collection for years. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

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).

Subscribe to events.packetpushers.net in your calendar software.

AUGUST 2026

SEPTEMBER 2026

NLNAM Meetup 3 | NL Network Automation Meetup
9 September | Utrecht, Netherlands

Wi-Co Manchester
9 - 10 September | Manchester, UK

2026 Summer Social | TORNOG
10 September | Toronto, Canada

Zeek Workshop
10 - 11 September | Berkeley, California

Cybr.Sec.Con
15 - 16 September | Houston, Texas (Drew and JJ will be there!)

(MO)NUG | Missouri Networking User Group (USNUA)
23 September | St. Louis, Missouri

Wi-Co Cleveland
24 September | Cleveland, OH

Higher Education NETCOMM Workshop 2026
29 September | Denver, CO

OCTOBER 2026

Wi-Co Montreal
7 October | Pointe-Claire, QC

(PA)NUG | Pennsylvania Networking User Group (USNUA)
14 October | Philadelphia, PA (Drew will be there!)

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Fleet makes device management software. The company has released the results of a new survey of 500 enterprise IT leaders. One finding is that while nearly half of respondents are prioritizing AI-driven automation, “only 29.6% are prioritizing infrastructure as code (IaC), the version-controlled, auditable operating model that enables AI to make changes safely, with human review and rollback capabilities. This means 70% of organizations are trying to buy a finished outcome while missing the baseline requirement,” according to the release. You can see a report summary here or get the full report here with no need to register. - Drew 

AlgoSec has announced the latest version of its Horizon platform. Updates include additional support for Check Point Smart-1 Cloud, Palo Alto Networks Strata Cloud Manager, Azure Firewall automation, Google Cloud security services, and AWS Network Firewall.

It also adds new automation capabilities for Azure Firewall and other capabilities to reduce manual policy management, which can help cut down on human error. 

More details about the Horizon A33.30 release are available in the link above. - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. What's Love Got To Do With It? - Chris Grundemann via LinkedIn   

LAST LAUGH 😆