Adam Chappell

Packet network technology enthusiast: Internet, security, BGP, automation/programmability. GTT AS3257. Ham M0IPX, OK8CHP. 8-bit ZX fan. Author, blogger, writer.

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

I want to believe that there exists a draft of this post with the slug, Transparent Route Servers considered harmful!

https://t.co/77VFYo8btB

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

The Cloudflare folks investigating the stubborn issue of first AS verification in BGP AS_PATH attributes, and the surprising difference in default behaviour between JUNOS rpd (stemming from original gated behaviour?) and Cisco IOS. Perhaps it calls for an RFC8212 hot-fix.

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@DireStraits77 Goodness me, I will never complain about Knopfler’s singing again! 😊

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@LundukeJournal Herculean public service effort here that will pay dividends I am sure

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@NetworkQueenX I think the real root (sorry!) of STP issues is the instinctive reaction most of us have to turn something complicated off in order to to reduce the complexity domain of something we are dealing. This serves well for most problems, but it’s a disaster for loop-free networking.

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

If stimulating the grey cells is one of your new year resolutions this year, add a linguistic dimension with “Learning Russian Verbs” from @ChrisPinnock. Get it in January and you may be пла́ча (crying, with happiness hopefully) at the discount!

[Chris Pinnock | drchris.tez @chrispinnock]

📚 I'm offering a $3 discount on my book Learning Russian Verbs for the rest of January on @leanpub.

💸Use this link to purchase (regular price $12.50; discounted price $9.50): https://t.co/hzkb6qqA97

👉 Learn the basics of Russian verb grammar and learn 133 common verbs, chosen from well-known Russian learning textbooks and by frequency.

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

Forget Kandy Krush, Replicube or other word game brain teasers. Juniper/HP have nailed it with their innovative puzzle games! Get that cognitive workout you need with the Juniper Port Checker and see if you can load your box correctly! I can't get past the MX304 level...!

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@anurag_bhatia Yes MED comparison scoped to neighbor AS is disabled at GTT/3257 (“always-compare-med”) which exacerbates this effect I think. Certainly allows a freer fight on IGP distance between different peer routes

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@timClicks @ZacharyIndy Highlights for me, Tim
- Rust’s unsafe is not unsafe! 5m30
- Runtime checks still mean a crash (just as in Rust). 4m30

But crucially, give @filpizlo Mr Pizlo his due. Fil-C is an incredible innovation on plain-old C.

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

From scratch Linux-compatible (userland ABI) kernel for Aarch64, making use of Rust’s async/.await model in order to reduce kernel stack usage to one-per-CPU core (rather than one per kernel task)

https://t.co/ki5DfI45OK

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

Java once boasted of “write once, run everywhere,” which was quickly bastardised to “debug everywhere”. But the Cloudflare folks seem to have managed to earn the “debugged by everyone” accolade for @eastdakota’s unfortunate unwrap()

[Oscar Franco @ospfranco]

I'm amazed that the whole cloudfare outage happened because of an unwrap()

The beauty of Rusts Result monad is that it literally tells you that operations can fail. Anyone with a bit of experience on production knows that everything that can fail WILL fail...

The only time I use unwraps on production code is when I want my server to crash, usually on start up because it might have a wrong configuration or might have failed to lock some resource it needs to start

I wonder if it was AI code that nobody bothered to review because nobody is writing and reading code nowadays

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

Probably easy to criticise the Cloudflare team for using such a construct in production, but I think what we can admire is the rapid diagnostic and reporting effort that must have occurred to get the level of transparent reporting we see, even if it reveals some embarrassments

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

Oh no! Major blow for Rust advocates and afficianados everywhere as Matt Prince @eastdakota reveals a stray unwrap() in Cloudflare’s shiny new FL2 rust code was responsible for yesterday’s quick trip back to books by candlelight!

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

For the uninitiated, Rust's unwrap() is a brute-force "open and use this value" function for use on variables that might be error values or nullable. It's designed for use when any error condition is absolutely fatal and a program abort should be the consequence.

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

https://t.co/WZGDOs7g83

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

Taskman Dave @davepl1968, on the trouble with Windows and why Microsoft should ship a low-friction, predictable, deterministic manual transmission edition as a daily driver for power users who just need to get stuff done with least astonishment and exasperation

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@artofneteng I think we should have done expanded communities to complement extended communities, homage to DOS!

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@artofneteng Swap large and extended here as I recall. Large has the Subject:Object:Verb structure, each field 32 bits. Extended (which preceded Large) is vari-format (64 bits). Extended gets used in VPN for instance with Route Targets, which themselves have three formats, aaargh

[Adam Chappell @packetsource]

@stubarea51 Heasley’s https://t.co/T9gaGggExh branch of the original Cisco reference implementation, tac_plus, might be worth looking at. https://t.co/waa0ERGNBt