Programming, Networking and some things I found hard to fix at some point
How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? 

 

 On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch 

Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs 

 

 These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached 

Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data 

 

 If the device you are reading this on has an IPv4 address, it is very likely not a publicly routeable one. This is because the wide scale dep 

BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability 

 

 At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP 

Building Ultra Long Range TOSLINK 

 

 This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024 

The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC 

 The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) documents. 

Flexing the Windows RRAS BGP implementation 

 

 At this point I am a bit of a BGP protocol implementation connoisseur thanks to 

Better IX network quality monitoring 

 This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at the first NetUK . You can watch the talk on YouTube that was recorded by the wonderful AV team below if that’s your preferred medium: 

Reclaiming IPv4 Class E’s 240.0.0.0/4 

 A video recording of 

Sysadmin friendly high speed ethernet switching 

 

 I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher 

Signed but not secure 

 

 At the start of the year a very interesting (and some would say inevitable) event happened involving internet routing security, the first case study of a large-scale victim o 

Appreciation of automated IX Quarantine LAN testing 

 

 Something that bgp.tools (my company) does a great deal is joining internet exchanges . 

Where is all of the fediverse? 

 

 Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or 

The browsers biggest TLS mistake 

 Much like a previous talk of mine at Chaos Computer Congress this blog post is a direct write-up of a talk, if you prefer to consume this kind 

Grave flaws in BGP Error handling 

 

 Border Gateway Protocol is the de facto protocol that directs routing decisions between different ISP networks, and is generally known as the “glue” 

Driver adventures for a 1999 webcam 

 

 We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frust 

Going multipath without Multipath TCP 

 

 Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your compu 

Who is squatting IPv4 addresses? 

 

 It’s an established fact on the internet that we have ran out of IP(v4) addresses , and we are st 

LTO Tape data storage for Linux nerds 

 

 Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long t 

Ghost in the ethernet optic 

 

 A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of [SFP optic]( https://en.wikiped 

One of these JPEGs is not like the other 

 “JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file 

Imaging mounted disk volumes under duress 

 

 Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infra 

Hunting down the stuck BGP routes 

 BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and [this post (EvE)]( https://blog.b 

Splitting the ping 

 

 Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. It’s simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the f 

Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards 

 

 This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I wo 

Stressing the network when it’s already down 

 
[Impact by Eric Wienke, edits by Ben Cartwright- 

How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet 

 Translations 

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices 

 Transl 

You cannot cURL under pressure 

 cURL . The wonderful HTTP plumbing tool that powers both a lot of command line debugging and bash scripts, but also exists as a strong foundation in our applications in the form of libcurl. 

The year of RPKI on the control plane 

 This post is a textual version of the talk I gave at NLNOG 2019, You can watch the recording of the talk on youtube below if that’s your preferred medium: 

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Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks 

 

 Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pac 

The speed of BGP network propagation 

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What would a EvE online Internet look like? 

 Translations a 

A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses 

 Translations are available in: <a hre 

The state of RPKI: Q4 2018 

 In the fall I did a blog post and talk on RPKI about how the current methods of measuring RPKI deployment are broken
because they do not take 

From VNC to reverse shell 

 Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page 

Are BGPs security features working yet? 

 Translations are a 

Building telemetry for tea aka Tealemetry 

 As a British person, I admittedly conform to the stereotype of tea consumption, and giving I’ve been consuming tea for most of my life I have gained opinions on all kinds of tea based variables. The bigge 

The death of a TLD 

 Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out. 

 In the last week, ICANN removed the documentation 

Calling the world cup goals 5 seconds before they happen 

 It’s that time again where once every 4 years people get very hyped over kicking a ball around a grass pitch, however this time my own country is actually doing pretty well! At the time of wr 

The ISPs sharing your DNS query data 

 DNS is fundamental to how the web works, and for most of the population it’s completely transparent. Everything on the web is accessed by a DNS name. 

 Since DNS is an old protocol ([November 1987 in fact](http 

x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (interactive) 

 Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having cont 

Payments with less of the evil 

 I hate card networks. 

 Visa and MasterCard are a pair of companies that I feel definitely make the world a worse place to live in, due to the fact that they sit in front of a critical part of how modern society wo 

Playing battleships over BGP 

 BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the 

Yubikey/Smartcard backed TLS servers 

 

 It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes 

Making art with SSH key randomart 

 SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers. 

 SSH 

Mapping the whole internet with Hilbert curves 

 Translations are available in: 

Encoding data in dubstep drops 

 [Warning: Those who can’t stand EDM/dubstep, oh boy do I have bad news for you in regards to this blog post] 

 Dubstep songs are often criticized as sounding extremely computer generated and often just too aggressi 

Giving every Tor Hidden Service a IPv6 address 

 Tor has a neat feature called Onion Services [(A)]( https://web.archive.org/web/20180330000120/https://www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.h 

DNSFS. Store your files in others DNS resolver caches 

 A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their m