rob.sh

The Right-Sized Tool: Building Software with 100% AI

An experiment in building a highly specific cycling data analysis tool without writing a single line of code myself.

Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Low FODMAP Biryiani

A recipe for biriyani, modified for those with dietary restrictions.

v3 Gallery

Updating the gallery on this site has been an on-again off-again project for a long time. Mainly because I was running in to some issues with Expose. This version is built as a project from the ground up: exercising my rusty front-end “skills” and seeing how some of the Gemini tooling can help with such projects. The new gallery is at p.rob.sh/v3 .

NANOG 90: Pondering Abstractions

I had the pleasure of giving the keynote presentation at NANOG90 - sharing some thoughts and lessons that we have learnt in the 10 years since we started the OpenConfig project. This was a really enjoyable presentation to put together and give. It balanced being able to look back at what we’ve learnt, and also think about some important lessons that I wanted to share with the networking…

Lessons from Career Coaching

In the autumn of 2022, I got an opportunity to attend an external leadership course. One of the things that it involved was some coaching sessions. I didn’t really think that talking to someone about work was something that I needed (and honestly probably didn’t understand what a coach did…), but engaged with it anyway. Cue the start of 2023 — Google went through some big changes, and…

Published IETF RFCs

Over the years I have published a number of RFCs in the IETF. They are listed below. As primary author: RFC7684 - OSPFv2 Prefix/Link Attribute Advertisement RFC7777 - Advertising Node Administrative Tags in OSPF RFC7855 - Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Problem Statement and Requirements RFC8355 - Resiliency Use Cases in Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Networks RFC8370 -…

SailGP San Francisco

SailGP's event on the San Francisco Bay, May 2023

Reimagining Network Devices

Some reflections on the development of Software-Defined Networking, and how it has impacted the ongoing re-imagining of network devices that OpenConfig, and associated projects has driven. Almost 10 years ago, there was a shift in the IP networking industry. The move towards SDN, and its adoption by hyperscalers as a means to break apart traditional network architectures had set the scene for…

Big Pine Lakes

We spent a few days in the High Sierra, off the grid, hiking the Big Pine Lakes trails. Highly recommended. I uploaded a gallery of some photography from that trip, including a few taken as we passed through Yosemite. The gallery can be found here . Lake 1: Big Pine Lakes Trail, High Sierra, CA.

NANOG 86: Emulating Network Topologies in k8s

Marcus Hines and I spoke at NANOG86 on some of the work that we’ve been doing related to emulating network topologies in Kubernetes, and how this relates to improving network testability. The slides can be found here and there is a video on YouTube .

Photo gallery

A while ago, I removed my instagram account. Since then I have been wanting to find a way to share a photography portfolio. I’ve been taking more photos over the last few years, currently using a Canon R5 mirrorless, mainly with the RF 28-70 f/2 lense, but sometimes with the 100-500mm (again, sometimes with the 2x multiplier), 16mm f/1.8 prime, and 50mm f/1.8 prime. I decided to use the…

Brain Fog

I originally posted this as a comment on hackernews in response to a post about this article in The Atlantic. I have briefly shared thoughts in a few contexts about the chronic health conditions that I experience, and wanted to share something here as it was very interesting to me to see brain fog, especially that which has developed post-infectiously, discussed in this forum. I have looked for a…

Radio silence

For more regular updates, you can generally find me on instagram , or Héloïse on instagram . Héloïse on Mt. Tam at Sunrise - October 2021

Blog Post Index

Michelin Stars for Celiacs: Angler, San Francisco: Not recommended

As some folks might be aware, I became allergic to gluten and dairy through the spring of 2019, and have been avoiding them in my diet since. Becca and I have not lost our passion for eating great foods, and visiting some of the fantastic restaurants in the cities we visit (although, in 2020, this has meant a lot of places in the Bay Area). One of the things that we’ve struggled a bit with…

Silence isn't OK: Black Lives Matter

I haven’t ever used this site to post anything about my political beliefs. I’m compelled to right now, because of what is happening in my adopted home country. In a time where a great leveller has impacted everyone’s life, where circumstances beyond our control have impacted an aspect of everyone’s plans we couldn’t use this time to unite and have compassion for all humans. The outrage at events…

OpenConfig Public Projects

There are a number of public projects that we’ve been working on over the last few years in OpenConfig, and published from Google. It seemed like it might be worth giving a brief “hitchhikers guide” that glues together some of the different projects that we’ve published on GitHub. Of course, the initial output of OpenConfig, which has motivated much of this ecosystem is the data models…

Moving to Google Cloud Run

Last night I moved this site from a VM in the UK to a static deployment in Google Cloud Run . It’s a neat service that can take a pre-packaged container and route HTTP and gRPC requests to that container. The concept of having immutable versions of infrastructure deployed, such that it’s clear what the deltas between versions were, and rollback is clearly nothing new, but it’s…

Swing

Inspired by Becca on the swing at Bernal Heights. October 2018, spray paint on layered card.

Cryptocurrencies

The concept of having no central entity control currency seems attractive to a lot of people. However, trust in some decentralised entity means trusting the way that they operate their business - how they’re able to audit their code, and write bug-free software. The only thing I know about software is that it isn’t ever bug-free. To reduce MTBF, you implement things multiple times, in…

IETF98: OpenConfig Observations

Anees Shaikh and I put together some thoughts that we shared with rtgwg at IETF 98 in Chicago. The slides are linked below.

Migration of Site to Hugo!

Welcome to a new rob.sh, apologies for the outage. I needed to migrate the site to something that was lower maintenance. I’m working on migrating the old rob.sh content to this new site, but it may take a little time to do so. Please let me know if there are specific articles from the old site that you’d like me to prioritise! The site now uses hugo rather than django. This means that…

FutureNet: Model-Driven Automation

Anees Shaikh and I presented at future:net talking about automation work that we’ve been doing in OpenConfig, and I shared some of the NMS implementation I’ve been working on recently. Slides are linked below.

OpenConfig and IETF YANG Models: Can they converge?

At IETF96 in Berlin, the chairs of the NETMOD working group, and Operations Area Director (Benoit Claise) published a statement to say “Models need not, and SHOULD NOT, be structured to include nodes/leaves to indicate applied configuration”. Now, this might seem a pretty innocuous statement, but it actually has a number of implications for the data models for network configuration and…

Lecture at Ecole Polytechnique: Taking Network Management into the 21st Century

Mark Townsley and Jean-Louis Rougier again invited me to come and lecture at École Polytechnique this year. Their course there focuses on analysing the success of network protocols - using the (fantastic) framework laid out in RFC5218. Given that I’d spoken about SR for the last couple of years in my lecture there, and was giving a (slightly) updated version of the SR lecture at Telecom…

OpenConfig Interfaces - Some Examples

I’ve talked a little on this site before about what we’re trying to achieve with OpenConfig . However, one of the observations that it’s easy to make is that YANG models alone don’t really achieve anything in terms of making the network more programmable. To make the network more programmable, we need to have tooling that helps us create instances of those modules,…

The right tool for the job: Choosing where to use RSVP-TE or SR.

I noted that at NANOG64 this week in San Francisco, there are talks (both from Juniper) about both SPRING/Segment Routing and RSVP-TE. These are both protocols/technology approaches (since one can’t really call SR a protocol) that I’ve been involved in the evolution of over the last few years. A question that I’ve been asked more times than I’d like is why we chose to look…

Working with YANG Models - A brief intro to 'pyangbind'

Both the Hawaii IETF meeting (IETF91) and the subsequent meeting we had a few weeks ago in Dallas were somewhat YANG-heavy. Following work to move towards YANG as a standard modelling language for network configuration, and the subsequent IESG statement effectively deprecating SNMP as the way that we present network configuration - the IETF, and especially the routing area, has dived head-first…

March 2013 - December 2014 on TfL

Oyster usage data from TfL for my Oyster card, March 2013 - December 2014. Data visualisation is with D3.js - mouse-over a station to isolate journeys to and from that location. Larger version .

RFC5218, RSVP-TE and Segment Routing.

After my presentation at UKNOF on SR , Mark Townsley asked me whether I'd be interested in presenting to his class at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, around the thinking (from an ops perspective) of delivering the 5218 concept of "net positive value" through the SR technology, and how the existing protocols that are available might measure up against the criteria that 5218 gives us to consider.…

SPRING Forward(ing)

I recently gave a talk at UKNOF relating to Segment Routing/SPRING and the operational challenges that we are trying to resolve through it. You can see it on YouTube below - or the slides are on this site - SPRING Forward(ing) - UKNOF27

Almost Two Years On: Where is SDN?

Almost two years ago I wrote a post on this site entitled Some Initial Thoughts on the SDN . Clearly, since then the SDN concept gained some more legs (and entered a new stage of the hype cycle) - so, where are we right now? Firstly, I think its fair to say that the concept presented by Scott Shenker of having a single centralised computational element controlling COTS OpenFlow-speaking switches…

Speed of Internet Innovation.

A question that came up at an event I was at yesterday: How will the time between the first (commercial) deployment of a telephony service, and a regulated universal service obligation for telephony compare to that of the time between the first (commercial) Internet services being deployed and a USO for IP connectivity (e.g., Broadband)? Based on this, is the cycle time of the telephony regulatory…

Reinforcing the Kitchen Sink - Another BGP Presentation

On Friday, I presented at the Netnod meeting in Stockholm, Sweden - again about BGP error handling - this time presenting a bit of an update as to why this continues to be a problem for the Internet (and private BGP deployments) - and why this work is still really relevant. In addition, I tried to give an overview of what the solution space looks like. I’m not sure whether there’s…

Some Initial Thoughts on the Software-Defined Network (SDN).

At one of the Ericsson R&D days, Professor Scott Shenker - who's an academic at the University of California in Berkeley, presented on a concept that he calls the "software defined network'. Now, if you haven't seen the presentation - it's definitely worth watching (it's on YouTube, here ), and provides quite an engaging look at the problem of network scaling from the perspective of academia, and…

Progress with Error Handling for BGP

It's been quite a while since I updated this blog, very lax of me, sorry! The lack of updates appears more indicative of how busy I appear to have been since presenting the error handling draft work at NANOG (which looks to be the last post!). Since January, I've presented at the IETF in Prague, and then again in Qu�bec City - particularly on a number of aspects of the work that I've been…

NANOG 51 Presentation

The video from the presentation I gave a NANOG, LINX and UKNOF has now been posted. You can find the video at the following URL - NANOG 51: BGP Error Handling or by clicking on the image below. The full slide deck is also on this site - here .

BGP Error Handling - Developing an Operator-Led Approach in the IETF

As I presented at UKNOF 18, I have now written an Internet-Draft to address the requirements of Network Operators for how BGP should handle errors in UPDATE messages. The draft can be found on the IETF site , and I'm currently seeking opinions as to whether this reflects the an operational consensus! If you're an Operator (DFZ, MSE or otherwise), it would be great to hear from you! I'll be…

LINX71 - 100GE in the Lab

I spoke at LINX71 about the testing that we (C&W) have been doing in the lab with 100GigE - we got a pre-production card and hence had a look at the technology for real. Thanks to LINX, the presentation video can be seen by clicking on the image below. Once again, however, whatever LINX use as a presentation laptop didn't render my slides properly - even though I'd submitted PDF too! Hence the…

Ghent 6

I took some photos of the Ghent 6 day on the Grupetto trip out there. The full gallery is here , but some selected highlights are below:

BGP Error Handling and Enhancements Post IETF-79

With IETF 79 happening last week - I think one of the great things that's coming out of the IDR work leading up to the meeting has been that quite a few drafts have been written around the requirements that exist in BGP for better error handling. I've been vocal about this before, of course, so it's not that surprising that I'm (yet again) banging the drum for this cause, however, we are getting…

Save Herne Hill.

Herne Hill is looking for support, it's both historic, and a fantastic facility in London. It'd be great to see more people supporting this! Here's the campaign page .

UKNOF 16 - Enhancing BGP - Video

Tom Bird of PortFast and Brandon Butterworth of Bogons do a great job of webcasting, and recording UKNOF video. Thanks to them, the video of the presentation I gave at UKNOF16 can be watched here . Or you can download it by clicking the image below! As always, thoughts/comments/corrections most welcome! This is also probably a good time to mention that my new work mail address is rob.shakir (at)…

Cycling Video

Checking out a few videos that people have linked me to recently I thought that this piece was amazing - really great speed. It also looks like the 5D and 7D are really quite awesome at doing 60fps HD! The video presentation over at vimeo is really cool too! PUSH PULL from Landis Fields on Vimeo .

Leaving AS5413

For information, and because it means that I have revoked a bunch of UIDs from my GPG Key I am no longer working at AS5413 (Vialtus, Daisy, GX Networks etc.) as of June 18th, 2010. It's been a good two years, but the company direction no longer co-incides with the direction in which I would like to go. I've enjoyed the projects I've worked on, been in contact with a lot of great people, and learnt…

Ride Report: Paris-Roubaix

"L'Enfer du Nord" ( "The Hell of the North" ), "The Queen of the Classics" , "A Sunday in Hell" - call it what you will, Paris-Roubaix is legendary for being a tough classic race. It stands at 255km in length, with 52.8 km of rough, French pavé (cobblestones) - starting in Compiègne (60km from Paris), and ending in the velodrome in Roubaix. A long, tough day in the saddle with endless dust when…

Paris-Roubaix Sportive 2010

I’m planning to write a ride report up for this, but here’s some preliminary photos, and a link to some ride data.

Digital Economy Bill YouTube Questions

So, if we take a moment to look at the following responses to questions that the leaders of the three parties involved in the “Digital Debate” on YouTube gave, concerning the Digital Economy Bill: Sure, we get some tired old rhetoric, as expected. However, the key point here is that both Labour and the Conservatives appear to believe that they've done the right thing with this bill.…

Tour of Flanders Photo

After ordering from the official Tour of Flanders Sportive photographers , I got a photo of me on the Bosberg. Feel the burn!

UKNOF 16: Enhancing BGP

After a late programme committee request, I presented on “Enhancing BGP” at UKNOF 16. The presentation was intended to be an update on the current drafts in the IDR working group, and give some encouragement to operators to get involved, and contribute. I’ll put the video up when the Tom at PortFast and Brandon of Bogons have done their excellent job on it. For the meantime, the…