Cultivate questions
Imagine that you’re sitting in a room interviewing a potential candidate for a position on your team. It’s not too hard to imagine, right, because it happens all the time. You know the next question I’m going to ask: what questions will you ask this candidate? I know a lot of people who have “set…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (2)
In part 1 of this series, I pointed out that there are three interesting questions we can ask about BGP security. The third question I outlined there was this: What is it we can actually prove in a packet switched network? This is the first question I want dive in too—this is a deep dive,…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (1)
What would it take to secure BGP? Let’s begin where any engineering problem should begin: what problem are we trying to solve? In this network—in any collection of BGP autonomous systems—there are three sorts of problems that can occur at the AS level. For the purposes of this explanation, assume AS65000 is advertising 2001:db8:0:1::/64. While…
Fear itself: Thinking through change and turmoil
Fair warning: this is going to be a controversial post, and it might be considered a bit “off topic.” Maybe it’s just the time of year for fear. Or maybe it’s several conversations I’ve been involved in recently. Or maybe it’s the result of following over 150 blogs on a daily basis covering everything from…
Why aren’t you teaching?
There is an old saw about teaching and teachers: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” This seems to be a widely believed thought in the engineering world (though perhaps less in the network engineering world than many other parts of engineering) — but is it true? In fact, to go farther, does this…
Innovation and the Internet
Industries mature, of course. That they do so shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s watched the world for very long. The question is — do they mature in a way that places a few players at the “top,” leaving the rest to innovate along the edges? Or do they leave broad swaths of open space…
Assuming the worst is not the best assumption
It was too bad to be true, but I should have known that assuming the worst was not the best assumption. I was driving the “other” car, the Saab, on the way back from the METNAV shop around eight in the morning. Since the shop was located in the middle of the three runways, this…
Rule 11 is your friend
It’s common enough in the networking industry — particularly right now — to bemoan the rate of change. In fact, when I worked in the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC), we had a phrase that described how we felt about the amount of information and the rate of change: sipping through the firehose. This phrase…
Information wants to be protected: Security as a mindset
I was teaching a class last week and mentioned something about privacy to the students. One of them shot back, “you’re paranoid.” And again, at a meeting with some folks about missionaries, and how best to protect them when trouble comes to their door, I was again declared paranoid. In fact, I’ve been told I’m…
Micromanaging networks considered harmful: on (k)nerd knobs
Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway… What…