Packet network technology enthusiast: Internet, security, BGP, automation/programmability. GTT AS3257. Ham M0IPX, OK8CHP. 8-bit ZX fan. Author, blogger, writer.
Joined November 2010
- Tweets 435
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- Likes 3,156
31 Photos and videos
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.
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I want to believe that there exists a draft of this post with the slug, Transparent Route Servers considered harmful!
blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-…
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Jan 16
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!
📚 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): leanpub.com/learningrussianv…
👉 Learn the basics of Russian verb grammar and learn 133 common verbs, chosen from well-known Russian learning textbooks and by frequency.
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Jan 12
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...!
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23 Nov 2025
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)
github.com/hexagonal-sun/mos…
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19 Nov 2025
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()
19 Nov 2025
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
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19 Nov 2025
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!
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19 Nov 2025
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.
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19 Nov 2025
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
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12 Nov 2025
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
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12 Jul 2025
If you’re doing anything with Juniper XML using Rust and quick_xml (reasonably common an performant XML decoder and deserialiser), it could be useful to know that since 0.38 it is now preserving the leading and trailing whitespace. This can be quite significant interacting with the JUNOS XMl APIs. trim() liberally
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26 Feb 2025
It’s easy to dismiss IPv6 as a 30-year distraction that has failed to fix any of the deficiencies in IPv4 that we really need in a global packet protocol (end to end QoS, admission control, multihoming etc), obsessing only on inflating address space, removing NAT and allowing p2p. But then one sees a real gem such as iroh, an incredible effort to provide a pragmatic p2p network framework for developers given the constraints du jour in IPv4
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26 Feb 2025
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6 Jan 2025
Intrigued by pqconnect, a new endeavour (from @hyperelliptic @hashbreaker et al) to provide post-quantum protection of client/server network apps (currently on Linux) using a Python-based wrapper layer. Server-based capability is announced using DNS CNAME and clients connect via local proxy IP using UDP encapsulated/encrypted of payload
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12 Dec 2024
Nice Christmas trip home to visit family brought to an abrupt end when @British_Airways lost luggage LHR-PRG and I am reminded of the continuing fascination with no-contact customer services that big business still seems to have. Exception time is absolutely when you win and maintain customer loyalty. It’s not the to time to hide behind robot IVRs, broken web captchas, piss poor AI chatbots etc. Just pick up the phone, get a human to engage and you’ll find you have an begrudgingly understanding customer rather than a complaint, a claim and lost future business.
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