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Hi, I'm Iljitsch van Beijnum. These are general neworking-related posts.

Upgrading Fiber To The Home to terabit speeds

Last week, Jaap van Till asked me if BGP would be capable of supporting the terabit class interconnectivity that he foresees we’ll need in the future, possibly due to the rise of artificial intelligence. Spoiler: yes, should be no problem at all. But a more interesting question is what terabit class connectivity at home could look like.

Full article / permalink - posted 2024-04-09

Should the datacenter be in the middle?

The other day, I landed on this article: In Focus: Subsea Network Architecture: IXPs. The article takes some time to arrive at the point that undersea internet exchanges would be a good idea. The most eyecatching part is a variation on this image:

But should the datacenter and/or internet exhange in the middle between multiple users?

Full article / permalink - posted 2023-09-07

My BGP minilab

When I wrote my first BGP book I painstakingly made the config examples on actual Cisco routers. In my opinion, it's crucial to make sure that configuration examples that go in a book actually work.

So when I started writing my new BGP book, I did the same. But this time, I used open source routing software (FRRouting) running in Docker containers. Basically, those containers are very light-weight virtual machines.

This makes it possible to run a dozen virtual routers that start up and shut down in just a few seconds. So it's very easy to run different examples by starting the required virtual routers with the configuration for that example.

This was super useful when I was writing the book.

So I thought it would also be very useful for people reading the book.

So I'm making the "BGP minilab" with all the config examples from the book available to my readers. Download version 2022-11 of the minilab that goes with the first version of the book here.

You can also run the examples in the minilab if you don't have the book. And you can create your own labs based on these scripts.

The minilab consist of four scripts:

There are Mac/Linux shell script and Windows Powershell versions of each script.

Permalink - posted 2022-11-11

Oh SNAP! There is more to Wi-Fi ↔︎ Ethernet than I thought

The tag line for World IPv6 Launch ten years ago was "the future is forever". You know what else seems to be forever? The past. Let's talk about IEEE 802 LLC/SNAP encapsulation.

I always thought when you send IP packets over Wi-Fi, the IP packet would go inside an Ethernet frame, and then the Ethernet frame inside an IEEE 802.11 frame. Turns out this is not how it works: ...

Full article / permalink - posted 2022-07-21

OSPF: time to get rid of the totally not so stubby legacy

Recently, I was looking through some networking certification material. A very large part of it was about OSPF. That's fair, OSPF is probably the most widely used routing protocol in IP networks. But the poor students were submitted to a relentless sequence of increasingly baroquely named features: stub areas, not-so-stubby-areas, totally stubby areas, culminating in totally not-so-stubby areas.

Can we please get rid of some of that legacy? And if not from the standard documents or the router implementations, then at least from the certification requirements and training materials?

Full article / permalink - posted 2022-05-12

The HTTPS and HTTP conundrum

The past few days I have added HTTPS support to bgpexpert.com and iljitsch.com. About ten years ago, I experimented a bit with SSL/TLS (HTTPS) support in Apache, and that was rather difficult.

But no more. Thanks to the efforts of Let's Encrypt and the ACME protocol as implemented in certbot, adding HTTPS support to your websites is now almost ridiculously easy.

Full article / permalink - posted 2021-11-22

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