The Grass is Always Greener
This last week I was talking to someone at a small startup that intends to eliminate all the complex routing from campus networks. In the past, when reading blog posts about Kubernetes, I’ve read about how it was designed to eliminate routing protocols because “routing protocols are so complex.”
Color me skeptical.
Hedge 94: Josh Slater and Quantum Networking
If you’re like me, you’ve heard a lot of hype about quantum—but you’ve never really been able to understand what quantum networking might be useful for. On this episode of the Hedge, Josh Slater, who works in the field of quantum networking, Ethan Banks, and Russ White discuss the current state of quantum networking and potential use cases for the technology. Things are farther along than you might think.
It Always Takes Too Long
It always takes longer to find a problem than it should. Moving through the troubleshooting process often feels like swimming in molasses—it’s never fast enough or far enough to get the application back up and running before that crucial deadline. The “swimming in molasses effect” doesn’t end when the problem is found out, either—repairing the problem requires juggling a thousand variables, most of which are unknown, combined with the wit and sagacity of a soothsayer to work with vendors, code releases, and unintended consequences.
Hedge 93: Dinesh Dutt and Observability
We talk a lot of about telemetry in the networking world, but generally as a set of disconnected things we measure, rather than as an entire system. We also tend to think about what we can measure, rather than what is useful to measure. Dinesh Dutt argues we should be thinking about observability, and how to see the network as a system. Listen in as Dinesh, Tom, And Russ talk about observability, telemetry, and Dinesh’s open source network observability project.
Leveraging Similarities
We tend to think every technology and every product is roughly unique—so we tend to stay up late at night looking at packet captures and learning how to configure each product individually, and chasing new ones as if they are the brightest new idea (or, in marketing terms, the best thing since sliced bread). Reality check: they aren’t. This applies across life, of course, but especially to technology.
Hedge 92: The IETF isn’t the Standards Police
In most areas of life, where the are standards, there is some kind of enforcing agency. For instance, there are water standards, and there is a water department that enforces these standards. There are electrical standards, and there is an entire infrastructure of organizations that make certain the fewest number of people are electrocuted as possible each year. What about Internet standards? Most people are surprised when they realize there is no such thing as a “standards police” in the Internet.
Listen in as George Michaelson, Evyonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White discuss the reality of standards enforcement in the Internet ecosystem.
Whatever it is, you need more (RFC1925 rule 9)
There is never enough. Whatever you name in the world of networking, there is simply not enough. There are not enough ports. There is not enough speed. There is not enough bandwidth. Many times, the problem of “not enough” manifests itself as “too much”—there is too much buffering and there are too many packets being dropped. Not so long ago, the Internet community decided there were not enough IP addresses and decided to expand the address space from 32 bits in IPv4 to 128 bits in IPv6.
Hedge 91: Leslie Daigle and IP Addresses Acting Badly
What if you could connect a lot of devices to the Internet—without any kind of firewall or other protection—and observe attackers trying to find their way “in?” What might you learn from such an exercise? One thing you might learn is a lot of attacks seem to originate from within a relatively small group of IP addresses—IP addresses acing badly. Listen in as Leslie Daigle of Thinking Cat and the Techsequences podcast, Tom Ammon, and Russ White discuss just such an experiment and its results.
Free Speech is More than Words
A couple of weeks ago, I joined Leslie Daigle and Alexa Reid on Techsequences to talk about free speech and the physical platform—does the right to free speech include the right to build and operate physical facilities like printing presses and web hosting? I argue it does. Listen in if you want to hear my argument, and how this relates to situations such as the “takedown” of Parler.
