GeoIP your Out of Office at work
Yes, MaxMind, this Cable ISP /32 is really based at Office HQ...
This episode we test our Public DNS for malware 🐞; go on adventures in Google GCP Routing 🧗; use Containerlab as an anti-pattern for good 🤔; automate Network Backups with Ansible playbooks and Git 📕; get an IPv6 Certification to prove our knowledge 🧑🎓; estimate availability by calculating raw SLAs 🤒 & smuggle data out through an emojii stuffed with Unicode 🍱. Let’s dive in; ⬇️
Poll 🗳️
Are we covering the NetDevOps and Network Engineering content you want to see? Vote now to shape the Reload in 10 Newsletter to be more relevant to you:
NetEng 🔧
Public DNS malware filters to be tested in 2025 tests public DNS resolvers for malware and malicious content protection, and has interesting results 🧪
GCP Routing Adventures (Vol. 1) shows that networking and routing is the same… but different in Google Cloud vs what you may be used to in AWS or Azure ☁️
Small-Mid is the new Large! explores AI Fabrics and performance differences between InfiniBand and Ethernet for AI workloads 🧮
Automating Network Config Backups with Ansible and Git takes you through the whole playbook (yeah, yeah, it was an obvious Ansible pun…) of how to go from zero to open-source NMS backup hero 🦸♂️
Containerlab – The Anti-Pattern but it feels and works, so, so, so good and it uses a lot less power; Labs as Code anyone? 🧑💻
AI / ML network performance metrics at scale gives some ideas and dashboards on what signals to monitor for in RoCEv2-based AI Network Fabrics 🌡️
Videos, Tools and Papers 🎓⚒️
🏦 Cisco U - Free CE Credits
💡 Re-certify your CCNA or CCNP with these free Cisco U courses worth over 100 CE Credits
Cisco U: Managing Cisco Network Operating Systems (CNIOS)
(Course, 37 CE Credits, 37h 15m)Cisco U: Enhancing Cisco Security Solutions with Data Analytics (ECSS)
(Course, 32 CE Credits, 31h 30m)Cisco U: Understanding Cisco Network Automation Essentials (DEVNAE)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 28h 40m)Cisco U: Troubleshooting Cisco Enterprise Networking Solutions (ENTSHRU)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 16h)Cisco U: Introduction to Network Simulations with CML (CMLLAB)
(Course, 6 CE Credits, 8h 30m)
🎓 Network Engineer Learning
Secure Cartography is a Python-based network discovery mapping tool
(Tool, GitHub, Inventory)Can You Re-IP Your Network Underlay with ZERO Packet Loss?
(Video, Arista, 40 mins)Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
(Course, AI, 18+ hours)IPv6 Certifications
(Exams, Free, IPv6)
Hiring 💼
📢 The Reload in 10 Jobs Board is here 🥳, with a hand-picked selection of awesome Network Engineering, NetDevOps and Network Automation jobs.
It’s also free to list a job if you’re hiring and want to let us know 👂
🤫 Secret Subscriber-only Jobs
🇬🇧 Network Support Engineer @ Meter, UK, London/Remote
🔥 (just some of) This week’s Hot Hirings
🇨🇦 OSS Network Automation Solution Architect @ CGI, Canada, Toronto
🇨🇳 Senior Data Center Network Engineer @ NVIDIA, China
🇮🇪 Senior Cloud Network Engineer @ Microsoft, Ireland, Dublin
🇸🇬 Network Automation Engineer @ Google, Singapore
🇪🇸 Network Engineer @ DXC, Spain, Remote
🇪🇬 Senior Network Engineer @ Mastercard, Egypt
🇬🇧 Network Engineer @ BCA, UK, Hook
🇺🇸 Senior Network Deployment Engineer @ Crusoe, USA, CA
🇺🇸 VP Network Automation @ Pfizer, USA, PA
NotEng 🤔
Convenient ‘Copy as cURL’: explicit, executable, editable request replays and something we couldn’t live without when reverse-engineering some shoddy Network vendor API or hacking a frontend together 💪
Parallelization Strategies in Neural Networks goes deep, with diagrams and explanations, into how parallel-processing reaps rewards in AI as well as Python programming 🤔
Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them - and Why Did I Love It? shows how careers in the IT world are changing a bit thanks to advances in AI, ride the wave people 🌊
Wrangling the Wild West of MCP Servers shows a real-world, practical example of using MCP and Cisco Meraki to great affect 🤖
Automating Kubernetes & Network Inventory Management using AWS EKS Auto-Mode & Nautobot has Nautobot (NetBox) go into the non-traditional networking world of Containers, Ingress, k8s and more 🚢
The NSA selector fits in a Eurorack to convert RJ-45 “Ethernet” into audio signals for recording, and while we’re here for it, we don’t really get it; Gigamon without the, err, mon? 🕵️
Fogg Behavior Model measures what happens when Motivation, ability and a Prompt come together at the same time 🔮
Estimating Availability - Four 9s is the Ceiling uses a lot of maths and UML models to work out a real 99.xxx% SLA and has the maths to prove it ➗
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji details the approach and how Unicode can be abused and added to AI as a data exfil vector 🚰
Events 📅
🤜 Meet-ups
NetLdn, London, Monthly, Every 2nd Thursday
NetMcr, Manchester, Every Monthly, 2nd Thursday
NetBCN, Barcelona, See schedule
London Network Automation Meetup, London, 29 January 2026
📢 Conferences
🎩 Hat-tip to the wonderful Pete Crocker @ OpsMill for the help
IETF 124, Montreal, 1 - 7 November 2025, Canada
DENOG 17, Essen, 9 - 11 November 2025
EMEA Arista Cloud Builders, Munich, 13 November 2025
AutoCon 4, Austin, 17 - 21 November 2025
France IX Tour, Paris, 27 November 2025, France
CoNEXT 2025, Hong Kong, 1 - 4 December 2025
APRICOT 2026, Jakarta, 4 - 12 February 2026
Industry 🏭
VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India, scrub that CV up and look on our Network Engineer Job Board if you’re affected ❤️
Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together shows how little those outside the industry know how much duct tape and gum is doing some serious heavy lifting and keeping those fibres from going beyond… uh oh 💥
Microsoft Teams Starts Telling Your Company If You’re Not At Work, time to pay MaxMind and IPinfo.io some dollar to change your Broadband’s Static IP to be based from the meeting room near your Office HQ… 💰
‘Workslop’: AI-Generated Work Content Is Slowing Everything Down because fact checking now takes longer when you’re one of the few remnants of human intelligence in town 🧠
That’s all for this week, but if you have any tip-offs, blogs, events or job posts you’d like us to feature then please feel free to let us know at newsletter@reloadin.net 📮 and we’ll see if we can add them in 💬.