A quiet shift over the last couple of decades in many places has been the disappearance of the traditional copper phone line. First the corded landline phone was replaced by cordless, then the phone migrated to a mobile device, and finally DSL connections are being supplanted by fiber. This leaves copper-era infrastructure in houses, which […]
The Internet has spoiled us. You assume network packets either show up pretty quickly or they are never going to show up. Even if you are using WiFi in a crowded sports stadium or LTE on the side of a deserted highway, you probably either have no connection or a fairly robust, although perhaps intermittent, […]
Courtesy of the complex routing and network configurations that Cloudflare uses, their engineers like to push the Linux network stack to its limits and ideally beyond. In a blog article [Chris Branch] details how they ran into limitations while expanding their use of soft-unicast functionality that fits with their extensive use of anycast to push […]
This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Tom Herbert about XDP2! It’s the brand new framework for making networking really fast, making parsers really simple, and making hardware network acceleration actually useful with Linux. https://medium.com/@tom_84912/xdp2-this-changes-everything-at-least-for-ai-ml-infrastructure-850c1ba82771 https://medium.com/@tom_84912/programming-a-parser-in-xdp2-is-as-easy-as-pie-8f26c8b3e704 Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone […]
It’s hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1980s, the Internet came close to collapsing due to the number of users congesting its networks. Computers would request packets as quickly as they could, and when a router failed to process a packet in time, the transmitting computer would immediately request it again. This tended to […]
If you’ve ever been configuring a router or other network device and noticed that you can set up IPv4 and IPv6, you might have wondered what happened to IPv5. Well, thanks to [Navek], you don’t have to wonder anymore. Just watch the video below. We will warn you of two things. First, the video takes […]
Portability has been a goal of a sizable section of the computing world for many decades now. While the obvious products of this are laptops, there are a number of “luggable” PCs that pack more power while ostensibly maintaining their portability. Going back in time past things like the LAN party era of the 90s […]
What’s Forgotten Internet? It is the story of parts of the Internet — or Internet precursors — that you might have forgotten about or maybe you missed out on them. This time, we’re looking at Unix-to-Unix Copy, more commonly called UUCP. Developed in the late 1970s, UUCP was a solution for sending messages between systems […]
Raw network sockets are a curious beasts, as unless you have a strong urge to implement your own low-level network protocol, it’s a topic that is probably best left to the (well-paid) experts. That said, you can totally use raw sockets in virtually every operating system, but one should be aware of a few things, […]