Modulate Demodulate - The ModemCast

In this episode of MODEM, we get super nerdy about the current state of multihoming IPv6 and all of the gory details and exposed limitations. Join Chris Cummings, Nick Buraglio, and John Osmond as we discuss a new IETF draft that describes the current state of multihoming in the IPv6 world. And no, we aren't just talking about BGP.

And just for Jay Stewart, we've added in a handful of movie references.

Ed Horley (of IPv6 Buzz podcast fame) listened to the last show about point to point addressing and hit me up to say "Hey! You're doing it wrong!", and since there is never a bad opportunity to learn from the masters and improve, John and I said "great, let's do another show! And this time we'll bring along Jay and Chris! Listen in as we wander through a lot of interesting facts about TCAM, RFCs, and deployment models. 

"Quality of Service". That nebulous term that is very capable of bringing out the frothing-at-the-mouth, highly opinionated engineers that either love it or hate it. As polarizing as it is, the real question is "what in the heck *is* it?!". For a topic that is so, so able to cause a cavernous divide between even the most sane, seasoned, and and stoic engineers, the definition is exceptionally hard to nail down. So, in keeping with the theme of "giving the people what they want", Nick, Chris Cummings, Chris Young, John Osmon, and special guest star Jay Stewart try to define it. Do we succeed? You'll have to listen to find out. 

Never fear, for we have news of the front, and that news is encouraging. Once again we have Kevin Myers from IPArchitechs (not anointed an official co-host, for whatever that means), who - even according to Mikrotik is "part of the family - to tell us all the pieces, parts, details, and hidden gems about their new 100G platform, and we can confidently say, it's a doozey. So much greatness in here. We talk Mikrotik ROS7, 100G performance, unboxing (kevin had the first ones live in the US), future features, chipset capabilities, and as always, charming banter. Tune in and join Chris Cummings and Nick Buraglio along with Kevin, you won't be disappointed. 

Marvell Prestera Switching Ship Family

IPArchitechs

CCR2216

CRS504

RFC 4193 

RFC 6724 

RFC 3484 

IPv6 Buzz 

ULA is broken in dual-stacked networks

We’ve been busy! At least that’s our excuse. We recorded this episode with Dave Taht and Seth David Schoen about some new drafts they wrote for the Unicast Use of the Formerly Reserved address blocks such as 240.0.0.0, 127.0.0.0 and a few others, back in February. Needless to say, it was pretty interesting. Full of very polarizing topics (for oh-so-many reasons) this winding and wandering podcast lays out the history as well as the justifications for taking such address blocks - historically held as “untouchable” - and advocates for moving them into general use. Take a listen and decide for yourself!

The IPv4 Cleanup Project GitHub Repo

Original Bufferbloat MODEM episode with Dave

Is this a crossover episode? Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net and the SGW Podcast joins Chris Cummings and Nick Buraglio to discuss his latest project, netsim-tools! Tune in to learn about how Ivan has gone all-in on using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) prinicipals for building network labs with his latest project netsim-tools. This project lets you not only define your lab topology using a declarative syntax, but also removes the minutia of building a lab by pre-configuring all of the basics for you. Listen to learn more about all the juicy details!

Tune in to MODEM as Kevin Myers and Vince Schuele join Nick Buraglio and Chris Cummings to discuss their thoughts around the inaugural Networking Field Day Service Provider!

IP ArchiTechs

Kevin's Blog

RouterOS v7 First Look

RouterOS v7 Performance Testing

PQ 134: Meet ZeroTier – Open Source Networking  

Off for the summer - after a short hiatus we're back!

Actually, we recorded this in July (of 2021) but then summer ramped into full swing and editing took a back burner.  With this episode we shift gears, change direction, flip-flop, do a roundabout and talk about less technical topics. We all have ways that we learn, and hindsight is 20/20. In this from-the-heart and retrospective episode, Chris Young, Nick Buraglio, and John Osmon wax poetic about the the things we wish we knew and dole out our deepest, most sincere learn-from-our-experience advice. We get deep, but we go old school and make it personal.  Welcome to fall, everyone.




Terry Slattery talks about packet loss and the Mathis equation
Interop

Building large-scale network labs can be tedious and error prone—More importantly, they can be notoriously hard to spin up automatically. Containerlab is a new tool that promises to "redefine the way you run networking labs" and I really think it hits that target. On this episode of the Modulate Demodulate podcast, Nick and Chris C. are joined by Roman Dodin, one of the brains behind Containerlab.

Thread Group Website

Thread Group Resources

Thread Networking Fundamentals

Connect on Social Media

Jonathan on Twitter

The Thread Group on Twitter

The Thread Group on LinkedIn

BGP is one of the most versatile routing protocols out there, but let's be honest—It kinda sucks when it comes to... Well, a lot of things. Specifically, there are a lot of issues with BGP's security (or lack thereof). BGP comes from a time when The Internet was much smaller and everyone knew everyone. Now that The Internet has exploded in growth, hijacks, both malicious and inadvertent, have required countless hours of pain-staking manual intervention and deep knowledge of BGP and the global routing table to diagnose—keeping your routes secure in this landscape almost seems like a sisyphean task.

Cue ARTEMIS. ARTEMIS (Automatic and Real-Time dEtection and MItigation System) does the hard work of detecting hijacks for you and it can even step in and attempt to mitigate them on your behalf. Okay, that sounds great, but how much does it cost? Nothing! ARTEMIS is free, open source, and even simple to install and use. Check out this episode of the Modulate Demodulate podcast as the lead developer for ARTEMIS and Co-founder/CTO of Code BGP, Vasileios Kotronis joins Chris C. and Nick to talk about the inner-workings of ARTEMIS.

ARTEMIS Live Demo

Route Views Project

ARTEMIS BGP Hijacking Survey with Network Operators Paper

Buffer Bloat. Most folks in the networking industry have at least heard this term, and may have a vague idea of what it means. It's certain that all of us have experienced it at one time or another - and likely thought it was a different problem. Over the last few years a couple of queuing disciplines have emerged that have allowed the users of the internet to experience fewer and fewer of those odd symptoms, and we wanted to know more about how those problems are getting solved. Fortunately, we managed to pin down Dave Täht and get him to talk to us about fq_codl and cake. Or so we thought. Turns out, that's a really, really big topic. Luckily, we had the expert to take time and really get down to the root of the problem, how it is solved, and give us a fantastic bit of history about how it came to be. This one has it all, folks. Boats, guitars, stickers, Dave even plays us a song at the end. It's a fun one, and the deep knowledge does not disappoint. Join me, Chris Cummings, Dan Siemon, and Dave Täht as we wander through the complex forest of buffer bloat, queuing codecs, and queue theory.

Bufferbloat and Beyond Book

Netstat command for looking at fq_codl:

Linux tc -s qdisc show dev eth0 netstat -c fq_codel -vvv

OSX 

netstat -c fq_codel -vvv

Benchmarking fq_codel

SFQ, DRR, SQM, other queuing disciplines

The Flow Queue CoDel Packet Scheduler and Active Queue Management Algorithm

Photo: 

Tune in to this installment of Modulate Demodulate as Darren O'Connor joins Chris C., Nick, and Dave to discuss his side project—BGPStuff.net. This tool is a modern BGP looking glass built in Golang that anyone can use to gather a wealth of information on the BGP Routing table. Some of the things you can see are AS_Path, Origin AS, ROA, ASName, RPKI Invalids, DFZ RIB size, and more. In addition to a nice web interface, the latest version of BGPStuff introduces an updated RESTful API. Come check out our discussion of the architecture and technology behind BGPStuff.net!

On this first episode of the MODEM Non-Blocking series, Nick and Chris C. wax ineloquent about the latest networking gossip straight from the DFZ. Recently, the DoD started announcing a lot of IPv4 address space that had been previously unannounced. How much is a lot? We're talking 13 /8s of IPv4. Tune in to hear our un-scripted thoughts on what this might mean for your network, The Internet as a whole, and the deployment of IPv6.

On this episode of the MODEM Podcast, Nick and Chris C. bring on a special guest, Kevin Myers, to talk about the latest software updates from one of the underdogs of networking—MikroTik. MikroTik RouterOS v7 is the next version of MikroTik's routing software that promises to solve a lot of the longest-standing requests from users. Kevin and his consulting firm IP ArchiTechs have been hands-on users of MikroTik since the early days, so come and listen to us discuss multi-threaded BGP, IS-IS, RPKI, and maybe even a few war stories!

How hard is it to describe the difference between a tunnel and a VPN to a completely non-technical person? Come to find out, it is fairly difficult! Chris Young - one of our esteemed co-hosts - tweeted out a seemingly simple question: “Explain the difference between a tunnel and a VPN to a non/technical audience.”. Proposed answers were given, a variety of interpretations of "non-technical audience" were made. Hilarity ensued. which really begs the questions: what the heck ARE tunnels? What are VPNs? Think you know? So did we. Take a trip with us through our winding exploration as we dive into the abyss of the ocean of possibilities - all aboard the RV Calypso of encapsulation.

List of Tunneling mechanisms:

Encapsulation

Control Plane

Label Stacks

All in One

That is there the Internet Exchange Point (IX) come in to fill the gap. On this episode of the MODEM Podcast, Chris C., Nick, and John talk to Mike Hammett of the Midwest IX about what an IX is, what it does, and how to build your own.  

IPSpace: Surviving in the default free zone webinar

The Brothers WISP Podcast

FRR is a well traveled and well established routing suite. It has a comprehensive and very complete stable of protocol support, which is ever expanding. In this episode, Chris Y., David, and Nick chat with Donald Sharp about some of the finer details of the newer protocol support including IPv6 FlowSpec, BGP BMP, and IS-IS-SR. We delve into the finer points of component integration, discuss the nuance of how tunneling interfaces work, take a walk down the edge of why IS-IS is less traveled (including some of the fun protocol details therein). We even give a pretty fun little jaunt into the origin story of FRR. 

Behavior Tree concepts are something that most network engineers probably do not spend a lot of thinking about on a day-to-day basis, but their usefulness and relative ease of understanding will be made clear by the guest of our inaugural podcast, Tomas Kirnak. Tomas is the CEO of a company called Unimus that leverages behavior tree concepts to make configuration backup and automation of network hardware very straightforward. In this episode, John, Chris C. and Nick tease apart the details of what it takes to make that process as pain free as possible - and oh, boy, it is some cool stuff.