This week a Network Engineer’s guide to NCCL 📕; learn the difference between PAM in your Optics 🥛; generate an Optimal Segment List for SR-TE 🍑; 40 years of the .com Domain name 👵; AI for Network Engineers 🧑💻; build Agentic AI with SQL and some cron jobs ⏰; the Open Guide to Equity comp. 💰; hackers help proliferate IPv6 attacks with SLAAC 🍿 and Azure lets you TAP without a sniffer 🚰. Let’s dive in; ⬇️
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NetEng 🔧
Network Engineers' Introductory Guide to NCCL if you want to really get to grips with low-level AI Network Protocols 👓
A fascinating LinkedIn post on how optics (SFPs) are using PAM6 to push Terrabits per second down optic cores 🕵️♂️
Wi-Fi throughput: Expectations and limitations might surprise you to learn that ~70% is the max IP throughput you’re going to get on that 574 Mbps Wi-Fi PHY speed test 🌡️
[Part-1] Let's go on an AI Network Fabric Test Drive! makes InfiniBand real if you’ve never played with RDMA in action, there’s a whole bunch of “show” commands you never thought to even look for 🔎
Generating an optimal segment list for SR-TE if Segment Routing is something you’ve been meaning to get your MPLS SP chops around, wonder if there’s an SR-TP too… 🔧
AI for Network Engineers: Understanding Flow, Flowlet, and Packet-Based Load Balancing because RDMA (and RoCE) don’t do ECMP the same way you’re used to; this LAG ain’t laggin’ 🎀
40 years of .com — from HOSTS.TXT to global infrastructure and there’s probably no.com chance.com of.com getting.com a-decent-looking-one.com these days 🥛
Learning and Tools 🎓⚒️
Google’s AI-powered next-gen global network
(Video, 45 mins, Beginner)Simple Network Map as Code with Ansible
(Video, 10 mins, Beginner)ZeroPath DMVPN with ZeroTier and VyOS (SD-WAN Solution)
(Video, 10 mins, Intermediate)Our automation journey at Gamma
(Video, 40 mins, Intermediate)
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 👂
🇬🇧🔥 This week’s Hot Hirings
🇬🇧 Senior Infrastructure Security Engineer @ Transport for London, UK, London
🇺🇸 Lead Network Analytics and Observability Engineer @ Equifax, USA, GA
🇬🇧 OT Network Engineer @ Anglian Water, UK, Lincoln
🇬🇧 Senior Network Engineer @ thredd, UK, London
🇺🇸 HPC Network Engineer @ TensorWave, USA, NV
NotEng 🤔
The cost of compute: A $7 trillion race to scale data centers will see them popping up everywhere, at vast scale, and at increased cost to build to house our new Robot Overlords 🤖
Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding will get you up to speed with Agentic AI in any LLM model/provider, but biases towards Claude - however is useful for Cline, Windsurf and a few other “AI-enabled Coding IDEs” 🦾
Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs shows AI doesn’t have to be hard; a rubber band, coat hanger, some SQL and the cron scheduling legend is all you need 📆
The Open Guide to Equity Compensation is worth ingesting if your next Network or IT Job pays in anything other than monthly salary, make sure you’re getting the most out of the deal 💰
Less Haste, More Speed – Measure Twice, Cut Once gets us every time when we plough in to Layer 6 troubleshooting at a simple Layer 1 cleaner-unplugged-the-RJ45-cable fault. Again 🙈
Be the node you want to see in the network is applicable not only for your time on p2p networks (Limewire, you always were second-fiddle to eDonkey), but some poignant advice on how to take life as a node in the human network that is society 🫏
Grepping logs remains terrible and
tail -fis still your best friend for whencat | grepis maxing your display lines out 🐈You Can’t Prompt Your Way to Intuition, skills need to be hard-earned at some point, Dreyfus said so 😓
Five Things AI Will Not Change no matter how much everyone hypes it all up 💪
Events 📅
🤜 Meet-ups
NetLdn, London, Monthly, Every 2nd Thursday
NetMcr, Manchester, Every Monthly, 2nd Thursday
NetBCN, Barcelona, See Schedule
📢 Conferences
CHI-NOG 12, Chicago, 15 May 2025
RIPE 90, Lisbon, 12 - 16 May 2025
AutoCon 3, Prague, 26 - 30 May 2025
MORE-IP, Amsterdam, 4-5 June 2025
NANOG 94, Denver, 9 - 11 June 2025
Devopsdays Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 18 - 20 June 2025
SwiNOG 40, Switzerland, 24 June 2025
NetUK2, London, 7 - 8 July 2025
AfPIF African Peering Forum, Lagos, 19 - 21 August 2025
Open Source Summit, Amsterdam, 25 - 27 August 2025
BalticNOG 2025, Vilnius, 24 - 25 September 2025
Industry 🏭
Chinese Hackers Abuse IPv6 SLAAC for AitM Attacks via Spellbinder Lateral Movement Tool which we read twice, looked at the protocol diagram, and get get why it’s so special given the initial payload is yet another .ZIP file? 🤷
Next hop IP support for Virtual WAN brings the equivalent BGP nerd knob to Azure to tweak the next-hop if you’ve got some Active/Active NVA (Firewalls) or something in-path you want to route to 🚀
Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP) public preview announcement brings TAP to the Cloud, but without the usual “let’s build a whole other Sniffer Network” you might be used to 🚰
Microsoft puts $1B US datacenter builds on hold amid AI, tariff uncertainty is the other side of the race to build AI Data Centers, the one that got somewhat top trump’d 👨🏼🦰
Infineon Technologies to buy Marvell's auto ethernet business for $2.5 billion is a reminder that the CAN bus is a thing, and one of the biggest consumers of Ethernet isn’t always one that stays in one place 🚗
Optimizing network footprint in serverless applications for AWS, but applicable elsewhere too; remember, it’s not just an evolution - it’s a different way of thinking about stuff to VMs 🍿
Hackers Exploiting Domain Controller to Deploy Ransomware Using RDP is a slightly new one, presumably they’ll get annoyed when it doesn’t quite scale to the correct window size after a while too… 😅
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 💬.