When I first met David Gee, he worked for a large system integrator. A few years later, he moved to a networking vendor, worked for a few of them, then for a software vendor, and finally decided to start his own system integration business.

Obviously, I wanted to know what drove him to make those changes, what lessons he learned working in various parts of the networking industry, and what (looking back with perfect hindsight) he would have changed.

It’s been over four years since I published the last Software Gone Wild episode. In the meantime, I spent most of my time developing an open-source labbing tool, so it should be no surprise that the first post-hiatus episode focused on a netlab use case: how Ethan Banks (of the PacketPushers fame) is using the tool to quickly check the technology details for his N is for Networking podcast.

As expected, our discussion took us all over the place, including (according to Riverside AI):

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

In today’s evolving landscape of whitebox, brightbox, and software routing, a small but incredibly comprehensive routing platform called FreeRTR has quietly been evolving out of a research and education service provider network in Hungary. 

Kevin Myers of IPArchitechs brought this to my attention around March of 2019, at which point I went straight to work with it to see how far it could be pushed.

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

In the original days of this podcast, there were heavy, deep discussions about this new protocol called “OpenFlow”. Like many of our most creative innovations in the IT field, OpenFlow came from an academic research project that aimed to change the way that we as operators managed, configured, and even thought about networking fundamentals.

For the most part, this project did what it intended, but once the marketing machine realized the flexibility of the technology and its potential to completely change the way we think about vendors, networks, provisioning, and management of networking, they were off to the races.

We all know what happened next.

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

As we all know, BGP runs the networked world. It is a protocol that has existed and operated in the vast expanse of the internet in one form or another since early 1990s, and despite the fact that it has been extended, enhanced, twisted, and warped into performing a myriad of tasks that one would never have imagined in the silver era of internetworking, it has remained largely unchanged in its operational core.

The world as we know it would never exist without BGP, and because of the fact that it is such a widely deployed protocol with such a solid track record of “just working”, the transition to a better security model surrounding it has been extraordinarily slow to modernize.