Network engineers do not need to become full-time coders to succeed—but some coding skills are really useful. In this episode of the Hedge, David Barrosso (you can find David’s github repositories here), Phill Simmonds, and Russ White discuss which programming skills are useful for network engineers.
According to Michael Natkin, “in the tech industry, with our motto of “strong opinions, loosely held” (also known as “strong opinions, weakly held”), we’ve glorified overconfidence.” Michael joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the culture of overconfidence, and how it impacts the field of information technology.
BSD is one of the first UNIX implementations, and the IP stack in BSD is one of the first widely used open-source implementations of TCP/IP. Rodney Grimes joins us at the History of Networking to talk about the origins of BSD and these first IP implementations.
In a previous episode, Pavel joined the Hedge to talk about the origins and architecture of the Fastnetmon open source network monitoring tool. In this episode, Pavel joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about the many creative use cases to which you can apply this tool.
Interop is the longest running “show” in the networking space—but it didn’t not start as a “show” at all. Dan Lynch, the founder of Interop, joins us at the History of Networking to talk about how Interop really started (hint, it’s in the name). One important lesson to learn through this discussion: it is not enough to have standards or open source; in the realm of network protocols, being able to prove multiple vendors can work together is important, too.
SRv6 uses IPv6 header fields to perform many of the same traffic engineering, fast reroute, and other functions available through MPLS. The size of the header with a large label stack, however, can be problematic from a performance perspective. Further, adding the concept of actions to SRv6 would bring a lot of new functionality into view. On this episode of the Hedge podcast, Ron Bonica joins Russ White to talk about SRm6, or Segment Routing Mapped to the v6 address space, which compacts the label stack and actions into a smaller space, resulting in an easier to deploy version of SRv6.
MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) is an effort towards enabling the simultaneous use of several IP-addresses/interfaces by a modification of TCP that presents a regular TCP interface to applications, while in fact spreading data across several subflows. Benefits of this include better resource utilization, better throughput and smoother reaction to failures.
In this episode of the Hedge, Tom Ammon and Russ White are joined by Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net to talk about being old, knowing about how things are going to break before they do, and being negative. Along the way, we discuss the IETF, open source, and many other aspects of the world of network engineering.
There is a rising tide of security breaches. There is an even faster rising tide of hysteria over the ostensible reason for these breaches, namely the deficient state of our information infrastructure. Yet the world is doing remarkably well overall, and has not suffered any of the oft-threatened giant digital catastrophes. Andrew Odlyzko joins Tom Ammon and I to talk about cyber insecurity.
JJ Garcia is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Jack Baskin Endowed Chair of Computer Engineering at USC Santa Cruz. He first became involved in packet networks in the 1980’s, eventually inventing the Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL), which later became the basis for the Enhanced Interior Gateway Protocol (EIGRP). You can find more information about Dr. Garcia at his personal page.