The second demo1 I did during the Segment Routing workshop @ ITNOG10 illustrated how easy it is to set up and explore a small SR-MPLS network with netlab. The lab topology described a small three-router network (you need three routers to see “true” labels besides the penultimate-hop popping ones):
In part one, we covered the basics of pytest and wrote our first network tests. We tested BGP and OSPF on a single device, then extended it to multiple devices. We also looked at parametrization and how it helps treat each device and each neighbour as an independent test.
In this part, we will cover inventory management with Nornir and pytest fixtures.
Suresh Vinasiththamby
Nornir is a Python automation framework designed for network engineers. Instead of writing your own logic to connect to devices, manage inventory, and run tasks in parallel, Nornir handles all of that for you. We have a dedicated series on Nornir, which you can check out here, so we are not going to do a deep dive in this post.
The reason we are using Nornir here is for inventory and task management. Instead of hardcoding a list of IP addresses in our collection file, we define our devices in a hosts file with groups, credentials, and Continue reading
Kyle Kingsbury published a long (10-part) article about his frustrations with AI, aptly named The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess.
Regardless of where you are on the skeptic-to-fanboy spectrum, I would highly recommend you read it, even if you believe you’ll disagree with everything he wrote.
Modern AI and HPC workloads place extraordinary demands on the underlying network infrastructure. And as network engineers, we are often pulled into conversations about GPU clusters, maybe without a clear…
The post Understanding Scale-Out, Scale-Up, and Scale-Across Networking appeared first on JTnetwork.io.
I created nine sample SR-MPLS topologies for the ITNOG 10 SR-MPLS workshop, and of course, we ran out of time. I plan to cover those topologies and resulting printouts in a series of blog posts; to prepare for those, I cleaned up and reorganized the Segment Routing blog category, which is now split into two:
Hope you’ll find them useful! Also, if you know of other non-vendor Segment Routing resources, please leave a comment, email me, or submit a pull request.
I’ve previously pointed out that the AX.25 implementation in the kernel is pretty poor. It’s not really being maintained, and even when it gets fixes after I reported it, with people running LTS OSs it can take like 5 years before before the fix actually reaches users, if ever. So when writing applications, you still have to work around kernel bugs from a decade ago. This makes it kind of pointless to upstream patches.
The exception is security patches, and reading between the lines of why the AX.25 code is now being removed from the kernel, it sounds like maybe some LLM (like the looming “Mythos” and the related Glasswing) may have found some severe problems. But even if there aren’t any known security problems yet, having code is now more of a liability than ever. Code needs to be removed, or taken responsibility of. (tangent about ffmpeg at the bottom of this post)
With the kernel code removed, say goodbye to the old walkthrough.
Well, not “new”, per se, but “replacement”.
With the socket based API about to be gone, we need some other way for applications to send packets and Continue reading
If you’ve ever had to move a large session library from SecureCRT to SuperPutty, you know the pain — there’s no built-in migration path, and manually re-entering dozens (or hundreds) of sessions is a miserable afternoon. I wrote SCRT_2_SPUTTY to handle it automatically. Point it at your SecureCRT XML export, and it spits out a...
The post SecureCRT to SuperPutty – Migrate Your Sessions with One Python Script first appeared on Fryguy's Blog.If you’ve ever been curious about what an advanced degree in network engineering looks like, you’ll want to join us for this episode of the Hedge. Levi Perigo from the University of Colorado at Boulder joins Tom and Russ to talk through what earning a Master’s in Networking involves and what kinds of things you would learn.
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Welcome to Technology Short Take #195! It wasn’t planned this way, but it seems like this Tech Short Take is heavily slanted toward AI/LLM-related articles and posts. Topics like security concerns around improper storage of API keys, how developers are using AI tools, spyware getting installed with AI assistants, and how AI/LLMs might be creating barriers to entry for new IT profesionals are all on tap this time around. I hope this unintentional focus doesn’t prevent you from finding something useful!
netlab.
In the spring of 2017, Jeff Tantsura, the IETF Routing Area chair, delivered a short “Introduction to Segment Routing” webinar. In mid-April 2026, we had ~100 people at ITNOG 10 attending the excellent “Segment Routing: From Theory to Practice” workshop by the great Tiziano Tofoni. The future is obviously not evenly distributed.
If you’re in the early stages of your Segment Routing journey, you might appreciate the videos from Jeff’s webinar; you can now watch them without an ipSpace.net account.
This afternoon, we sent the following email to our global team. One of our core values at Cloudflare is transparency, and we believe it's important that you hear this directly from us because it’s a major moment at Cloudflare.
Team:
We are writing to let you know directly that we’ve made the decision to reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally.
The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
Today is a hard day. This decision unfortunately means saying goodbye to teammates who have contributed meaningfully to our mission and to building Cloudflare Continue reading