Category: worth reading
Worth Reading: Comparing GNS3, containerlab, and netlab
You probably know I hate posting links to walled gardens or sites that try really hard to make you sign up. Sometimes, I have to make an exception: Roman Pomazanov wrote a great (and humorous) article comparing how easy it is to set up simple labs with GNS3, containerlab, and netlab.
Worth Reading: Data Protection for Dummies
Another lovely must-read rant from the cranky security professional.
TL&DR: Data protection requirements like PCI-DSS aren’t there to make companies more secure but to make it too expensive for them to hoard excessive customer data (see also: GDPR).
Explore: Why No IPv6? (IPv6 SaaS)
Lasse Haugen had enough of the never-ending “we can’t possibly deploy IPv6” excuses and decided to start the IPv6 Shame-as-a-Service website, documenting top websites that still don’t offer IPv6 connectivity.
His list includes well-known entries like twitter.com, azure.com, and github.com plus a few unexpected ones. I find cloudflare.net not having an AAAA DNS record truly hilarious. Someone within the company that flawlessly provided my website with IPv6 connectivity for years obviously still has some reservations about their own dogfood ;)
Worth Reading: Cybersecurity Is Broken
Another cybersecurity rant worth reading: cybersecurity is broken due to lack of consequences.
Bonus point: pointer to RFC 602 written in December 1973.
Worth Reading: Things We Know about Network Queues
Every time someone tries to persuade you to buy (expensive) big-buffer data center switches, take an antidote: the Things we (finally) know about network queues article by Avery Pennarun.
Worth Reading: History of Ethernet
The March 2024 Internet Protocol Journal has a lengthy article on the history and “future” of Ethernet that might be worth reading (although it’s short on details) if you weren’t around when it all started.
Worth Reading: Talent Gap in IT
If you need a good rant about Thought Leaders, Talent Gap, and Certification-Based-Hiring, look no further than I see a different gap from here!. Here’s a choice tidbit:
Every single job description that requires some sort of certification must be treated with suspicion. Demanding a certification usually means that you don’t know what you want, and you’re just outsourcing your thinking to someone else.
Have fun!
Worth Exploring: PCAP Analysis with Generative AI
John Capobianco published the source code of his Packet Buddy application on GitHub. It’s a Python UI that takes a PCAP file, converts it to JSON, and includes that JSON as part of the ChatGPT chat, allowing you to discuss the captured packets with ChatGPT.
His idea is one of the best uses of generative AI in networking I’ve seen so far, as long as you remember that you’re dealing with an overconfident intern who has no problem making up an answer just to sound smart. Have fun!
Finally, if you don’t want to use ChatGPT (I wouldn’t blame you) or send captured data into The Cloud, someone already adapted his idea to use local LLMs.
Worth Reading: Unbloating the Buffers
In case you’ve heard about bufferbloat but don’t know what it is: Dan Groshev wrote a nice bufferbloat for dummies blog post on the APNIC blog.
Worth Reading: Popular git config options
Another must-explore gem by Julia Evans: Popular git config options.
Side note: I keep collecting links to insightful Git articles in the Git and GitHub section of the Network Automation Tools webinar.
Goodbye, ipSpace.net Subscription
I ran the first webinar as an independent author almost exactly fourteen years ago1, with the first ticket sold just before New Year’s Eve. I kept focusing on individual webinars until someone asked me, “Would it be possible to buy access to everything you did?” His question effectively created the ipSpace.net subscription, with the first one sold in late 2010 (I still have the email that triggered the whole process).
End-of-Year Cleanup: OSPF Blog Posts
After procrastinating for months, I finally spent a few days cleaning up and organizing OSPF blog posts (it turns out I wrote almost 100 blog posts on the topic in the 18 years of blogging).
Worth Reading: The AI Supply Paradox
Eric Hoel published a spot-on analysis of AI disruptiveness, including this gem:
The easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.
TL&DR: AI can easily disrupt things that are easy to generate and thus have little value. Seeing investors trying to recoup the billions pouring into the latest fad will be fun.
Worth Reading: State-of-the-Art AI
Gerben Wierda published another AI-buster article describing what exactly “state-of-the-art” means in AI benchmarks.
Hint: you give an AI model 32 step-by-step examples before asking a question, and it still gets it wrong 10% of the time.
Interviewing a Network Engineer Using a Single Scenario
I always said that the Trivia Pursuit certification tests (or job interviews) are nonsense and that one should focus on fundamentals.
In a recent blog post, Daniel Dib described a fantastic scenario: using a simple “why can’t I connect to a web site” question, explore everything from ARP/ND to DNS and TLS.
Obviously, you’ll never see anything that sane in a certification test. An interactive interview doesn’t scale (beyond CCDE), and using humans (and common sense judgment) creates potential legal liabilities (there were rumors that had been one of the reasons a talk with a proctor who could flunk you was dropped from the CCIE test).