Recent posts on routerjockey
In 2015, Matt Griswold was fresh off launching United IX here in Chicago, his own gear, an investor behind him, and he spent that era arguing a commercial, privately owned exchange was the right way to build one. Eleven years later he came back to CHI-NOG and took the other side. “I spent a lot of time arguing why commercial private was the way to go in 2015. I think I was right at the time.…
Three months ago you ran a docker run command from a blog post and got Pi-hole working. Three weeks later it died on a reboot and never came back. The blog post is gone, the shell history on your home lab box rolled over, and now there’s a directory called ~/pihole-data on disk that you’re not sure if you can delete or if it has six months of your DNS config in it. You don’t even…
You finally caved and started using Claude. You opened a new chat and typed something like this. prompt My BGP session keeps dropping. How do I fix it? What came back was a CCNA-level checklist. Verify ASN numbers. Check route filters. Confirm connectivity. The kind of answer you’d get from a sales bro who used the Yahoo search plugin on his browser.
Somebody asks in standup: “why did we change the ACL on edge-fw-02 last quarter? Who did it, and what else did they touch?” You know the answer lives in the repo. Every change is in there with an author, a timestamp, and the company it kept. What you don’t have yet is a fast way to pull it back out. This post closes that gap. Part 1 made git your save button and Part 2 made it…
192.168.10.37/26. Network, mask, broadcast, first host, last host, usable count. No calculator, no cheat sheet. If you rattled all six off without breaking stride, you got your reps in somewhere. For most of us it clicked because someone took the time. A coworker who explained the same thing four different ways until one stuck, or a senior engineer who handed over lab gear and said go break it. I…
I’ve been listening to “you should care about IPv6” talks for two decades. I’ve given a few myself… so when Nick Buraglio took the stage at CHI-NOG 13, I knew the script. Nod politely, agree with the framing, walk out thinking the same things I thought walking in. I was surprised. Nick is one of the planning and architecture folks at ESnet , the Department of…
Doyle had just wrapped his automation-framework talk, and Tyler Conrad was up next. Principal engineer at Arista, Austin, fifteen years split between customer-side and vendor-side. He plugged in and dove right in, “I’m Tyler Conrad with Arista. I build AI networks. Let’s talk about it.” No agenda, no thesis slide, that was the whole preamble. The next half hour was the most…
I went into NFD40 thinking the AI networking pitches were going to be the marketing layer dressed up in new vocabulary, and I came out convinced it’s a different design problem. Ethernet, BGP, and a lot of the merchant silicon underneath are the same. What changes is the math, the failure modes, and the rules for what counts as “fine.” This post is the wrap-up… the things…
This month RFC 10005 quietly became a Proposed Standard. It describes the BGP Link Bandwidth Extended Community, a way for a router to tell its neighbors how much capacity sits behind a given path so they can split traffic in proportion to it instead of evenly. If that sounds familiar, it should. Cisco has shipped a version of this for well over a decade as “BGP DMZ Link Bandwidth.”…
You’ve had git in your daily workflow for a few weeks. You’ve got the basics down, until you do one of these… You committed vault_password.txt and pushed it before your second coffee. You ran git reset --hard to “clean up” and watched four hours of work disappear. You’re three commits into a feature when somebody pings you about prod, and you can’t switch…
Brad Gorman’s ARIN workshop laid out where routing security stands today, ROAs you can trust, ASPA shipping, BGPSec quietly retired. The takeaway that morning was that origin validation works, and the 60% global ROA coverage stat means real attacks are getting stopped. Then I sat down for Bryton Herdes’ talk the next day, and that’s the one I couldn’t stop thinking about on…
Declared bias up front. Jeff Doyle is a friend, but that doesn’t influence what comes next. If you’ve cracked open Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 or 2 in the last twenty-something years (and if you sat for the CCIE, you have) you’ve read his work. So when Jason introduced him as the CHI-NOG 13 keynote and Jeff opened by admitting this was his first CHI-NOG, that landed for me. Longtime…
I sat in Brad Gorman’s RPKI workshop at CHI-NOG 13 with the kind of attention you give a talk when somebody on stage just admitted the security model has known holes. He’d been laying out the standard origin-validation story for forty minutes when I asked the obvious question. “What stops a bad actor from spinning up a sub-AS that masquerades as the legitimate origin?”
“We haven’t announced any products yet.” Aravind Srikumar opened Upscale AI’s sixty-minute NFD40 session with that line, a strange way to start a vendor pitch and exactly why I started paying attention. What followed was the most rigorous engineering tutorial of the week, wrapped around an architecture preview from a company whose silicon doesn’t exist in shipping…
Last Tuesday you made changes to a playbook because the on-call engineer needed an ACL pushed in a hurry. This morning the same playbook is failing, and the version that worked last week is on a random jumphost renamed to backup-configs.yml.bak , or backup-configs_FINAL_v2_tony.yml in a shared drive. Or it’s just gone… Every network engineer eventually has the moment where the…
Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model. The dashboard says the cloud gateway is the problem, the chat box says open a ticket with your circuit provider, you’re supposed to take its word for it. Selector showed up to NFD40 with the opposite pitch. Every recommendation traces back through an explicit reasoning chain. Every chat-bot answer…
Somehow I’ve never made it to CHI-NOG , the Chicago Network Operators Group’s annual gathering. That changes this year. I’ll be at CHI-NOG 13 on May 27-28, 2026 at the Voco Chicago Downtown (350 West Wolf Point Plaza). For those unfamiliar, CHI-NOG is one of the regional NOGs that consistently draws a strong operator crowd. Vendor-neutral in spirit even when sponsors are footing…
Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior. Human behavior cannot really be modeled, which is why the models hallucinate. Networks, on the other hand, were built by humans, run on documented protocols, and have explicit structural relationships…
Alex Saroyan had about ninety seconds onstage before he made the architectural claim that the rest of the AI-networking conversation has been ducking. SDN won the data center virtualization fight a decade ago. NSX , ACI, and the whole “network in software” story carried the day for traditional virtualized workloads, and most of us got used to drawing the abstraction layer in software.…
Thomas Scheibe walked on stage and said the quiet part out loud. Most “AI for networking” pitches you’ve sat through this year work the same way: vendor has a controller, they bolt-on an LLM and call it agentic. Thomas’s exact words were that this is “10% of the problem”… that’s a generous read. Aviz Networks presented the delgates at NFD40 with the…
Field Day vendors pay real money to get in front of a room full of independent engineers. These engineers have zero obligation to write a post, produce content, or even discuss anything they see. Some vendors turn that into years of attention, others fade. I’m not going to name names. (You know who you are, so does Tom.) But I am going to put together the field guide I wish someone had…
Halfway through Tom Emmons’ scale-out segment at NFD40, a fellow delegate looked at Arista’s load-balancing slide and said what most of us were thinking… this could have any vendor’s logo on it. Tom’s answer was honest: it’s really just the polish. You can solve load balancing for individual tests, but tuning the configuration so it still performs across…
Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. System Settings, which used to be one of the cleanest preferences UIs ever shipped, now feels like a bad Electron app…
So… the merch store is back. Don’t act surprised. For those of you who don’t remember, back in 2015 I ran a “PCAP or it didn’t happen” Teespring campaign that somehow turned into an actual little storefront . It was a fun run, and I’m still grateful to everyone who bought a shirt (or three) along the way. I’ve brought the store back at…
Cisco showed up to NFD40 selling two different pitches in the same session, and nobody on stage reconciled them. Richard Licon, Faraz Taifehesmatian, and Paymon Mogharabi walked through Silicon One G300, P200, the N9300 family, the N9100 family, liquid cooling on OCP ORv3 and MGX racks, and 800G LPO optics. The technical content is deep and mostly excellent. Fellow delegate Scott Robohn certainly…
Anyone who has managed carrier circuits for a living knows the pain. Quoting takes forever. Installs drag on with zero visibility. Renewals sneak up because everything lives in a spreadsheet that someone built four years ago and nobody trusts anymore. Invoices show up with charges that don’t match the contract, and disputing them means calling a number and sitting on hold. It’s 2026,…
I’ve been building networks for nearly thirty years. I understand leaf-spine fabrics, BGP design, VRF isolation, ECMP, and congestion management. I’ve designed data centers for financial institutions where microseconds mattered and ISP backbones where five nines was the floor. None of that prepared me for the port math inside an AI data center. Nokia brought five speakers to Networking…
Every network engineer has that moment. You’re troubleshooting something, you reach for the tool that should exist, and it either doesn’t or it was last updated when Obama was in office. Curious how many of you have hit that same wall. What’s the one tool you wish existed? I’m not sure how many of you know this, but when I was in school, I wanted to be a software developer.…
I’m Heading to Networking Field Day 40 I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected as a delegate for Networking Field Day 40 , taking place April 8–10, 2026 in Silicon Valley. For those unfamiliar, Tech Field Day brings together a panel of independent IT practitioners and puts them in a room with vendors for deep-dive technical presentations. Not analysts, not journalists.…
If you’re a contractor, consultant, or anyone who VPNs into multiple client networks, you’ve experienced the pain. You connect to a Client’s VPN, and suddenly you can’t print to your local printer. Or worse, you’re trying to hit 10.1.1.50 on the client network, but your traffic is going to your own NAS instead. Split tunneling helps, but it’s not always an…
Yet another day brings another meeting about another security product recommending SSL Decryption at our network edge. Your Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), your web filter, the damn packet broker —they all want decrypted traffic to function at “optimum efficiency”. I’ve always opposed this, even CISA (previously US-CERT) issued a notice in 2016 advising the community against…
Routerjockey has transitioned to Hugo , a fast and flexible static site generator. Hugo utilizes a straightforward, markdown-like syntax for content creation, and has a robust theming system. It’s perfect for blogs, documentation, and portfolio websites. The main reason for the migration was the growing security concerns linked to WordPress. I sought a solution that met my functional needs…
In 2012, we saw the launch of Viptela, a pioneer in SDWAN network solutions. While they weren’t the first in SDWAN, I believe that badge goes to Talari; Viptela was the first company that caught my interest. I first saw what they were doing in 2015 on the Packet Pushers Podcast . Back then, the networking world was on fire with SDWAN offerings. Sadly in 2017, Cisco purchased Viptela . I’m sure the…
Gartner has been saying that “ next big thing ” in network security is the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for years now… Mainly because these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way that network security is managed by enabling systems to learn and adapt to new threats in real-time. One of the main benefits of using AI and ML in…
As businesses continue to shift towards remote and distributed work environments, the need for secure and reliable network infrastructure has never been greater. Enter Graphiant, a new network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider that offers edge-to-edge security and scalability for businesses of all sizes. Graphiant offers a unique approach to networking, leveraging advanced technologies like…
With the release of the new 9200 series switches many enterprise organizations are starting to look towards the future. Cisco has also been looking towards the future… of their profit margin. With the 2960x platform is nearing it’s EOS/EOL announcement, Cisco has been working to promote the new hardware. And by now most Cisco enterprise customers have realized that DNA Center licensing is…
But how does all of this relate to IT Infrastructure and Operations? AIOps is the combination of AI and IT Operations. And while the IT community hears the AI related buzzwords, not many of us know where or how it can help. Lucky for us other large IT focused businesses continue to pour big money into AI. Which means the capabilities of the systems we see at an enterprise level will only continue…
In the past I have personally given a lot of flack towards Gartner, but that was when I was in a different stage of my career. Over the past two years I’ve transitioned into management, and with that had to learn several valuable lessons. The most important, for me, being expectation management, but that’s for another blog post. The second most important would have to be effectively leveraging…
I made a couple changes to the RouterJockey store this week and I wanted to make sure I got the word out. Previously the store worked in sprints that I tried to open up 2-3x a year. Instead of trying to manage these sprints, and keep the products updated, I’ve now made the store available year round. It still operates in sprints, but instead of being 2-3 weeks long, they’re only 3-4 days each.
Founded by Kunihiro Ishiguro and Yoshinari Yoshikawa the founders of GNU Zebra , came together to form IP Infusion back in 1999 as a commercial-grade, hardware-independent networking software company. If you’re not familiar with Zebra, you probably know it’s little brother Quagga which powers everything from Cumulus Linux to Vyatta and even my old digs.. Imagestream routers. Ishiguro and Yoshikawa…
At times I have trouble focusing on writing articles for some of the presentations I am exposed to at Tech Field Day. Because of that, I really wanted to try something different. This article is more of my free-formed thoughts about NSX and why I’m excited to deploy it at my current $job. From the time I heard that the NSX team was going to be presenting at TFD15 for 4 hours, I knew that I would…
Hey guys, I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that I’ve relaunched my teespring shirt campaigns with enough time that you should get your orders before Cisco Live US 2017. I’ve got several types of clothing under each design, so make sure you look to see if I have what you’re looking for. This campaign is only open for 14 days – so get yours while you can!
During Networking Field Day 15 our friends from the Linux Foundation, including Lisa Caywood , briefed us on a recent “acquisition” from Cisco. PNDA (Panda) is an open source P latform for N etwork D ata A nalytics , which aggregates data from multiple sources on a network including, real time performance indicators, logs, network telemetry, and other useful metrics… then in combination with…
Yet again I find myself honored, and questioning their selection methods, by being selected for a Networking Field Day event. Networking Field Day 15 kicks off April 6 and 7th in San Jose California. Each and every Tech Field Day event is always an amazing opportunity to engage with vendors and industry peers. But trust me, I’m using the term peer rather loosely… While we may work in the same…
Whenever I start talking about network visibility and aggreagation taps I can’t help but think of The Matrix. Millions of packets flowing through your network every minute of every day, tapping into that can be a daunting exercise. Luckily we have some new blood in this space, at least in my view, Ixia Vision ONE. For those of you that recognize the name, yes I’m talking about that Ixia..…
Forward Networks has stepped out of the shadows to announce their Network Assurance platform, and I was fortunate enough to be a delegate for Networking Field Day 13 to see their first public briefing. We were all excited to set foot onto the Andressen Horowitz campus that day, but none of us were quite sure what exactly to expect. Forward Networks was founded by David Erickson and Brandon Heller,…
Looks like the culprit in the recent Cisco debacle is the Intel Atom “System on Chip” (SoC) that Cisco used in it’s gear. My sources within Cisco won’t give up the goods, but many seem to be pointing to Cisco, although a single source at Cisco seemed to indicate there was another player included in this issue but wouldn’t comment. The real footing of these Intel accusations come from Intel itself.…
A couple months ago many engineers started hearing rumors regarding an ISR 4331 recall, and problems surrounding the device. Until this week, none of us had very good information, but it seems that today Cisco has officially released some information regarding the problem. Many of us have received phone calls at this time from our account managers… while some of us, myself included, have been left…
This is going to be a busy week for the Tech Field Day family. They have delegates en-route to Tech Field Day 12 this morning, and Wednesday the crew for Networking Field Day 13 arrive. I can’t express how excited I am about going to Networking Field Day 13 this week. I haven’t been to an actual NFD event since NFD2 , although I did get to go to the TFD9 event in Austin a couple years ago. I can’t…
Today’s IT landscape if full of software defined marketecture, and lore of a dystopian future full of network engineers that do nothing but write code. But in reality, there are plenty of actual reasons you should be learning programming, or at least some basic scripting. For many network engineers programming is not new, we have all been hacking together shell, Perl and Python for a VERY long…