20211102 ‘Dune’ Has a Desert Problem don’t quite know how i landed on this article. but i found it a fascinating read on the influences and whitewashing of dune over its various incarnations. research!rsc: Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco - great read; passed along to me during a crypto discussion at $DAYJOB. 20211106 Who Controls the Internet? And should they? - Bert Hubert’s writings gone are the heady dreams of my 20s....
i got this little gem of a reminder from the folks at RIPE this morning. i suspect that actual uptime has been a bit better than noted, but i haven’t been the most rigorous about keeping the lab/monitoring segment online over the years. this covers connectivity through comcast, centurylink/qwest and USI over the past 10 years. it also includes stints at cisco (partially), juniper, palo alto networks and arista. a lot’s happened over the past 10 years....
a year in lockdown: how the waves of COVID-19 impact internet traffic (PDF) if you’re in the internets biz, this is well worth sitting down to read. summary a group of european researchers look at traffic data from a variety of sources in the EU. an IXP, a university network, a large EU ISP, and a mobile operator. they have the benefit of a couple of years worth of flow and traffic records for comparison....
scenario you have a switch facing a firewall port and you’re seeing some spurious DHCPv6 hits against the native VLAN despite having no switchport native vlan being set on the trunk interface facing the firewall. a quick look at the link local addresses points at the switches themselves in the network. then you remember that you have cisco switches and that you need to check the most holy VLAN 1. mercifully, the following fixes this broke ass behavior....
tl;dr - make a list of all of the annoying places where you need to hardcode DNS entries. you’ll thank yourself later. i retired a DNS server this past week. couple that with the expiration of a couple of guest wifi passes and i discovered that there’s a hidden DNS setting on the APs that can make captive portal DNS resolution miserable if the DNS server is offline. on ubiquit APs the preferred DNS server in the AP is what’s used for the resolution of DNS for the hotspots....