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  • Human Infrastructure 460: Good Scripting Practices, Building Your Own PTP Server, and More

Human Infrastructure 460: Good Scripting Practices, Building Your Own PTP Server, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
August 20, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

There are several tips in this piece to help you make your scripts easier to develop and maintain. If you implement the features here that you might need, the result will be that satisfying feeling of having created a script more correctly. My favorite tip was on how to configure any text you like to appear when the user types yourscript.py -h. - Ethan 

Malcolm Frazier reports on building his very own Precision Time Protocol server for that sweet nanosecond precision using a Raspberry Pi and several other hardware components. He compares his build with a TimeHAT option (spendier), breaks down his software setup and discusses the final result. He wrote a Part 2 where he describes a similar build with a NanoPi. - Ethan 

Tony Mattke opines on RFC 10005, which standardizes a BGP community used to signal link capacity. This helps with load balancing, since default ECMP behavior assumes links have the same capacity.

Tony also ponders why RFC 10005 was standardized now, as it was kicking around the IETF for about seventeen years, with plenty of operators simply using it. In that pondering, you’ll find lots of useful insight as to what’s going on in AI data centers, sundry challenges with fabric capacity, and other approaches that have been taken to make ECMP most efficient for various workloads. - Ethan

Which countries have made the most spectrum available for Wi-Fi? David Coleman asked himself that question, and then set out to answer it. He looked at regulatory filings in 14 countries over several decades and then animated the results, which you can watch in the link above. Why does it matter? Coleman writes “Spectrum is incredibly valuable, and countries have made very different decisions about how much should be available for licensed cellular services and how much should be available for unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi. Those decisions have a direct impact on the networks we can build and, more importantly, the Wi-Fi experience we can deliver.” - Drew   

Sophisticated Vs. Effective - Marcus Hutchins via LinkedIn 
https://lnkd.in/p/g5s5ECjq 

Security researcher Marcus Hutchins notes that while internal Red Teams are writing sophisticated malware that folds in lots of evasion techniques, state-sponsored attackers will keep it simple and just do things like install Python scripts. He writes “Realistically, the more sophisticated/complex a piece of malware is, the more behaviors there are for a security product to detect.” I thought it was an interesting observation. There are probably lessons to be derived for other endeavors, such as network design or building automation frameworks. - Drew   

MORE BLOGS

5 ways AI is reshaping data center connectivity

As AI infrastructure scales at unprecedented speed, service providers, enterprises, and neoscalers are rethinking how networks are built, connected, and operated. These five routing and switching use cases show how the industry is evolving to meet that challenge.

TECH NEWS 📣

I read plenty of John Dvorak’s work over the years. His contributions to tech journalism were significant, and his passing feels notable to me. - Ethan

The headline is just slightly more alarming than the actual feature described in this article. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is offering a new desktop feature called “Computer History” that “turns your clicks, keystrokes, web browsing and more into a searchable timeline,” according to the article. The idea is to turn this stream of events into text-based summaries. If you switch from one task to another or otherwise get distracted, and now need to switch back to the original task, you can ask ChatGPT to get you re-oriented via the history it’s collected. Note that this feature is not recording audio nor is it taking screen captures (in other words, it’s not Microsoft Recall). 

OpenAI says it isn’t using this data to train its models, and that it deletes raw files off its servers after 48 hours. Computer History is also off by default.

To me, the privacy tradeoffs are not worth whatever marginal productivity improvement I might gain from such a feature. I also don’t want to encourage AI and other software developers to lean even further into developing products driven by data collection. But that’s me. You do you. - Drew 

Mark Zuckerberg’s “The Future Is For Everyone” memo/manifesto advocates for delivering “superintelligence” to everyone. He writes “Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it.” The memo then proceeds with the standard bullshit you get from tech oligarchs: let us do whatever we want without constraint or consequence, and in exchange we’ll deliver you a paradise (somehow, someday, we’ll figure it out later). 

This post from Tech Policy Press highlights one of the (many) contradictions of Zuckerberg’s aim to deliver “superintelligence” to everyone. Ellen P. Goodman writes “...empowerment will never happen if Meta and other hyperscalers monopolize compute.” She describes how control of compute serves as a chokepoint against the democratization of AI. She also suggests different mechanisms that could allow more public access to compute and infrastructure, and thus more opportunity for the wider public to actually reap meaningful benefits from AI.  - Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared by Chris in the Packet Pushers Community Slack

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Rached describes his site as follows. “A field guide to agentic AI in networking. Every major networking vendor now ships something called an AI agent. Some of them reason step by step, call tools, and take action on your infrastructure. Others are a chatbot wearing a new name tag. This site tries to tell the difference, and to keep a running account of the open source projects, protocols, and standards work happening underneath the announcements.” 

Rached maintains the site independent of any other company, and discloses his potential conflicts of interest (minimal). Looks like a great resource. Rached has covered much of what I anticipated seeing in here. - Ethan

Josh describes his book as follows. “Run a modern network management platform — entirely on open source. From source of truth to full observability, on your own infrastructure, on your own terms. Thirteen hands-on chapters, one coherent stack.”

Josh is someone I know a little bit. He’s contributed to Packet Pushers podcasts over the years, and authored a course on Ansible for Network Automation (free, YouTube) with Packet Pushers as well. Based on that, the book (not free) should be an excellent resource for those of you who like to build your own network solutions on open source. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

  1. The coolest anti-surveillance tools at DefCon - Naomi Brockwell via YouTube   


Attend CYBR.SEC.CON, September 15-16, 2026!

CYBR.SEC.CON brings together cybersecurity leaders, practitioners, researchers, and innovators for two days of education, networking, and community at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on September 15 - 16, 2026.

See the full agenda and speaker lineup here.

Packet Pushers is a media sponsor and Packet Protector podcast hosts Drew Conry-Murray and Jennifer “JJ” Jabbusch will be live on site. Find them in the Broadcast Alley to say hello and grab an exclusive Packet Protector fridge magnet and other fun swag.

Ready to register? You can save 15% off the already-reasonable ticket price with the code CSCPacketPushers-26

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.

SEPTEMBER 2026

(KY)NUG Lexinton Fall Event (USNUA)
1 September | Lexington, KY

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!)

NetBrain Live 2026
22 - 24 September | Boston, MA

(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

NOVEMBER 2026

Layer 8 by Lightyear
4 November | New York City, NY

Wi-Co Washington, DC
10 November | Washington, DC

IETF 127 | Internet Engineering Task Force
14 - 20 November | San Francisco, CA

AutoCon 6 | Network Automation Forum
16 - 20 November | Tucson, AZ

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

RFC 9234 is intended to reduce route leaks by providing a mechanism for BGP neighbors to establish an “Only to Customer” (OTC) path attribute. Cloudflare did a deep dive to evaluate the adoption of this mechanism across the Internet. Among its findings was that two Tier-1 networks are stripping out the OTC attribute from any routes they forward. The post describes “our analysis, why the OTC stripping matters, and how to enable BGP Roles in your own network.” - Drew 

Dell’Oro Group forecasts that DRAM prices will stay high through 2026 and 2027, but prices should “moderate” as new supply enters the market in 2028. As for HBM, the article notes “Increasing stack heights, density, bandwidth, and packaging complexity could keep the cost per bit elevated even as the technology advances. As a result, simply scaling today’s HBM architecture to ever-larger capacities could significantly increase the cost of future AI systems.” - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared by Kaj in the Packet Pushers Community Slack. Come join us!