I was taking part of PLNOG for the last two days. i didn’t have opportunity to take part of the last edition and it’s a shame - we created this conference with Andrzej Targosz. a lot changed during last couple of years. but what was always key of the whole PLNOG - community - is only developing. i’m not about the direction, but the sole fact we have a lot of discussions about direction gives hope. ...
…because of that, for example. contrary to ‘beliefs’ and dogmas, that until being ridiculed are broadcasted widely, only the scientific method works. actually works. it allows us to continously attempt to verify by experiment our theories, build theorems and laws - and realistically predict and describe behavior of the universe around us. i highly recommend using it.
from everything read up to date and noted as worth reading: Think like a freak - great set of anecdotes coming strait from author real experiences. there’s a lot of examples that if you don’t know that something can’t be done - you’ll succeed and amaze people around you. so called “ground truths” are serious problem those days. in most of the cases because people have very shallow knowledge or lack it - so can be easily manipulated. Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics - both good ones, driving such simply yet powerful narrative through our world economy First, break all the rules - interesting one, targeted at people managing other people. a lot of interesting examples, recommendations (4 generic and 12 worth more attention) and a lot of survey results. you could imagine all of that is well known - but it isn’t, believe me. fresh look can save you a lot of problems Dealers of lightning - fascinating story about Xerox PARC. you’ll find a lot of familiar names that extended ideas taken from their time at Xerox, including way of thinking and innovation approach that we could only imagine here in Poland Tankists - “true” history of 1st Armor Bridge. worth reading to understand both context of our popular TV series but also get a clue about how decisions were made on tactical and strategic level during second world war Command & Control - book that mixes narrative of real accident with a lot of background information about nuclear warfare in US. this is accompanied by information about how knowledge and experience shaped operations and helped to avoid errors. it’s worth reading, as nuclear weapons are hard to get right, with a lot of misconceptions. i’m still fascinated by Fight Club. with quotes like ‘Losing all hope was freedom’ it’s book that should be read couple of times. and think it over. ...
while looking through recent IETF meeting notes i found interesting idea - splitting OSPF area zero without incurring outage. it’s very interesting idea for flawless, in-service migrations. on the other side, another OSPF concept that I was afraid somebody will bring up is… enabling FlowSpec capabilities. oh my… also, overlay networking effort is gaining grounds, with architectural choices as well as security. it’s interesting how much longer it will take. the I2RS interface is moving forward as well, which is a good sign. problem space is enormous, but progress here means we’re closer to deploying vast number of different SDN architectures. ...
quite recently Piotr Jabłoński, one of the best architects and consultants in Polish Cisco Systems office presented session very similar to this post topic during our CCIE club meeting. independently, this topic is often brought back on CCIE.pl forum, and Mirek Burnejko asked for couple of comments with regards to growth of whitebox networking. so… does rise of SDN really mean end of the world for CCIE? yes and no. let’s define first what’s SDN at all, because as you can imagine - there’s bunch of definitions. so, for the sake of the post, lets assume SDN is: ...
as I read a lot of books, at some point I decided to share those worth mentioning here. partly so you can see what I’m reading, partly - to have a good summary about those books. let’s start - over last two weeks I’ve managed to read: How Google tests software - great book for everyone that deals with software development, process optimization or simply building their own company. it demonstrates how important is to get feedback from users, and how hard it is to built whole compliance system right from the beginning. on the other side, the things Google builds and rebuilds - are usually masterpieces Elements of networking style supposedly a classic book, written in very difficult language. it’s worth to read just for the sake of it, but there’s nothing very interesting or suprising inside What If - great book authored by xkcd.com geek. highly recommended! on top of that, I’ve found recently great company selling stickers - stickermule. if you’re in that kind of things, we have polish startup providing printing services. they’re doing this on t-shirts - TeetBee. ...
i’m just finishing upgrading my different servers from FreeBSD 9 to FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE. …and i just realized, that my FreeBSD adventure started around 4.1 (well, i may have got older 3.4 CDs, but didn’t install it then yet). and it was 14 years ago today. it was just after i, like thousands of linux users around the world, tried to upgrade glibc libs on the fly on my beloved (at that time and today) Slackware installation. ...
it seems that F-35 can’t end it’s failure series. despite GAO audits, model of building military equipment for biggest army in the world didn’t change a bit since end of second world war. they’re still ordering and building things that will bring maximum revenue to military vendors and not what military customers actually need. i immediately got back to one of the articles i’ve read recently in ACM Queue - responsive enterprise: embracing the hacker way. it’s great piece and synthezies todays world - not only corporations are dinosaurs of our current times. a big portion of industry is. on normal market, companies that can adapt or use feedback loop tu build better and better products thrive. and those, who need years and still are not able to produce competitive products should vanish in history books. ...
…on the performance of virtualized network stack different cloud providers. plus - couple of slides and some speculations about how AWS is built.
…people using dialup connections. those poor people stay need them to take advantage of restricted Internet services provided by AOL. a year ago at that time, still around 2.6 million of US citizens were connecting to internet that way. …and you think that your 1Mbps upstream link is not enough? ;P