This is a story about six months of work that didn’t ship, and what I’m still figuring out about why. The surface story is technical: I implemented RFC 8362 Extended LSA support for FRR’s ospf6d. The code works. The tests pass. It wasn’t accepted upstream. The deeper story is about what happens when…

In 2014 I wrote about the state of Linux network configuration, lamenting the proliferation of netlink libraries and how most projects hadn’t progressed past shell scripting and iproute2. I concluded that “there is a need for a good netlink library for one of the popular scripting languages.” A deca…

In my previous post, we hit a wall with the kernel’s multicast forwarding logic. The core issue was the RPF (Reverse Path Forwarding) check failure for sources on unroutable networks. While digging deeper into this, I found it’s a well-documented challenge in multicast literature, often called the “…

Many consumer and industrial devices—from home security cameras to the HDMI-over-IP extenders I investigated in a previous post—are designed as simple appliances. They often have hard-coded, unroutable IP addresses (e.g., 192.168.1.100) and expect to live on a simple, isolated network. This becomes …

The Universal Challenge: From Events to Insight Every field that deals with streams of events over time shares a common challenge. A factory manager tracking items on a conveyor belt, a data scientist analyzing user clicks, and a network engineer monitoring packets are all trying to turn a series of…

Introduction: The Rosetta Stone In Part 1, we introduced the “ghost in the machine”—an aliased signal created by the very act of measuring a stream of discrete events. We established that any time-bucketed analysis is a form of filtering. But to truly understand our measurements and build a trustwor…

Introduction: Applying the Framework In Part 1, we introduced the DSP lens and the problem of aliasing. In Part 2, we built a detailed theoretical framework, our “Rosetta Stone,” connecting the concepts of sample rates, filters, and critical frequencies. Now, in this final part, we apply that framew…

My long-running project, Jittertrap, had been neglected for a long time… Mostly, because of a lack of interest. However, I recently had need for it at my day job, and I dusted it off, wrote down a list of things I need to fix for it to be useful to me in that one particular use case, and decided to …

Thanks to rapido, it’s become much simpler to test Linux device drivers for real PCIe devices in VMs. The advantages of this approach are: the host is protected from memory corruption errors caused by buggy kernel drivers the PCI peripheral can be physically installed in a multi-use machine, reduci…

On a good day, my day job involves building networking tools in python. Too many python networking tools look like shell scripts, spawning subprocesses for basic tools like ‘ping’ or ‘ip’ - often resulting in a fragile mess due to poor, or inconsistent error handling. I was quite excited to find icm…