I think it was in 2016 that 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet was standardized. After a year or two the first USB to 5GE adapters started to appear at about €/$ 100 and about two years ago the first €/$ 50 2.5GE ones. Right now, there's a ton of USB 2.5GE adapters at good prices.
I got a Cable Matters one for € 31 off of Amazon.
Read the article - posted 2021-03-03
As I'm preparing for the arrival of more > 1000 Mbps Ethernet equipment, I did an inventory of the Ethernet cables I've collected over the years. Turns out there's more variety than expected: I have cat 5 UTP, cat 5e UTP, cat 5e STP and cat 6 STP...
For my BGP lab/training setups I have a bunch of routers, real or virtual, that each need several IP addresses to talk to other routers. VLANs are the perfect way to keep all of this manageable: with VLANs, it's possible to have separate IP interfaces, but still just use a single Ethernet port to hook everything up. Simple unmanaged switches simply forward the packets to the right port without looking at the VLAN header, so no need to configure the network.
Until I got my Mikrotik hAP ac³ this week...
Read the article - posted 2021-04-04
I love podcasts. So I'm every happy to be interviewed about BGP on Software Engineering Radio:
Iljitsch van Beijnum, author of the book BGP: Building Reliable Networks with the Border Gateway Protocol https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/970 discusses internet routing and BGP – the border gateway protocol used by ISPs to update routing information. Host Robert Blumen spoke with Iljitsch about the topology of the internet, autonomous systems (AS), regulatory bodies that coordinate the AS space, IP addresses, the assignment of IPs to ASs; tier-one ISPs, carriers, and home/business ISPs; Internet routing; the path of a packet; routing tables, what they contain, and how they are constructed; routing algorithms; BGP and its role in updating routers with the knowledge of routes held by other routers; and BGP messages. Drill down into the update message. How updates progress from BGP into routing algorithms and then routing tables. What can go wrong. Attacks on BGP.
Read the article - posted 2021-07-13
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.
