Category: humor

When someone starts complaining about networking device CLI, remind him that other parts of IT aren’t doing much better. For example, it’s oh-so-easy to install a package on Linux or OSX.

Andrew Lerner, my favorite Gartner analyst, recently published a hilarious blog post describing what vendors mean when they say “our product is software-defined” or “we’ll make it work”. Enjoy!

Need more vendorspeak? Try eight levels of vendor acceptance (carefully documented during a particularly stressful on-site test in Poland).

A link on Bruce Schneier’s blog pointed me to the latest article by the truly awesome James Mickens, this time making great fun of security researchers. Exactly what you need with your coffee on a Saturday morning. Enjoy!

The OSCON keynote by Simon Wardley explains a number of things, including (lack of) enterprise IPv6 adoption. Enjoy!

I was talking about “application-layer gateways” on firewalls and NAT boxes with a fellow engineer, and we came to an interesting conclusion: in most cases they are not gateways; they don’t add any significant functionality apart for payload fixups for those broken applications that think carrying network endpoint information in application packets is a good idea (I’m looking at you, SIP and FTP). These things should thus be called Application Layer Fixups or ALFs ;)

You might remember my blog post claiming we had a system with SDN-like properties more than 20 years ago.

It turns out SDN is older than that – Rob Faulds found an old ComputerWorld ad from 1989 promoting AT&T SDN service, and it seems SDN was in operation as early as 1985.

An interesting message appeared on v6ops mailing list a few days ago: the first interconnect between independent IPv6 implementations was established 20 years ago. No wonder some youngsters who don't know any better treat this venerable protocol like a modem and ignore it in favor of IPv4 ;)

Stumbled upon a hilarious description of challenges encountered when trying to scale distributed systems (cluster of controllers running centralized control plane comes to mind).

It starts with “If someone tells you that scaling out a distributed system is easy they are either lying or drunk, and possibly both,” and gets better and better. Enjoy!

This post SHOULD have been published on April 1st, but I need to define the terminology for another upcoming post, so here it is ;)

RFC 2119 defines polite words to use when something really shouldn’t be done. Some network designs I see deserve more colorful terminology.

2014-11-02: Updated with reference to RFC 6919 (/HT to @LapTop006)

True old-timers might appreciate the analogies I got while writing the Network Infrastructure as Code article. Let’s start with “do you remember this thingy?”

If you recognized the state-of-the-art (in those days) box in the picture, you might be able to relate to this screenshot:

This is pretty close to some SDN architectures I was privileged to see in the last three years.

Idiots posting random comments with (not-so-very) hidden links to whatever warez they're selling are utterly annoying, but there's always one-in-a-million chance for a hilarious one. This is what I got on the Traffic Trombone post:

The traffic across the network core and the end-to-end latency would be minimal (the same packet would traverse the core only once), increasing visits to my adult site.

An interesting startup is launching their SDN solution @ Interop Las Vegas today: Quantum Networks use the latest quantum computing technology to solve some of the hardest problems of controller-based networking.

One of the fundamental problems of hardware-based OpenFlow solutions is the flow update rate – most switches using merchant silicon can insert around 1000 new flows per second into their forwarding tables. Technologies based on quantum mechanics effects change all that – a quantum entanglement technology patented by Quantum Networks can install new flows instantaneously across the whole network.

This is totally out of context, but imagine the consultants and marketers promising us unicorn-generated nirvana like follow-the-sun VM mobility or large-scale flow-based forwarding encountering Alice.

Just in case you've missed it: the ultimate explanation of DevOps, NetOps and other automation ideas.