New Year Network Resolutions
Not just DNS doing the hard work resolving stuff
This episode we see why AI Networks fail even with enough bandwidth 🤖; build an Vibe Code up `n IPv6 Subnet Planner 😎; hunt for fibre cables in North Korea 🇰🇵; integrate NetBox with DNS ☎️; check our fave AI Model on an AI Leaderboard 🎯; slowly lose data on those SSDs in our drawers 🗃️; get creative without taking drugs 🌱; get the state of GenAI in Enterprise 🤖 and lose the Internet in Europe 🇪🇺. 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 🔧
Why AI Networks Fail (Even With Enough Bandwidth) goes into Networks for AI (AI Fabrics) and why the mouse versus elephant flow looks a bit different on them to traditional Ethernet or FC Storage networks 🔎
Building an IPv6 Subnet Planner with AI Assistance combines the two things we love - Vibe Coding and Networking - to combat one thing we don’t - IPv6 subnetting 👊
RDMA — The Network Powerhouse of an AI Fabric (For Now Anyway) which is finally displacing InfiniBand (y’know, the Storage thing that isn’t Fibre Channel?) from being that “other Ethernet” sat humming away on your Data Centre LUNS, WWNs and SANs… but now it’s for AI instead 🦿
Hunting For North Korean Fiber Optic Cables is a fascinating look into uncharted parts of the Internet that most don’t know about 🇰🇵
CDN Up and Running - Building a CDN from Scratch does exactly that, with code examples and screenshots to help you build your own competitor to Cloudflare, Bunny CDN or Akamai 📦
NetBox DNS is a NetBox plugin for managing DNS data and it’s a pretty great integration from the DCIM world into the often opaque DNS Management world ☎️
Why Routing Protocol Choice Still Matters even in a world of AI and where everything feels “done”, sometimes it can be a good time to evaluate if what IS good IS actually good…IGRP BGP OSPF (too obvious?) 😆
Book Club 📚
Training 🎓
🏦 Cisco U CE Credits
💡 Re-certify your CCNA or CCNP with these free Cisco U courses Continuing Education (CE) credits:
Cisco U: Understanding Cisco Data Center Foundations (DCFNDU)
(Course, 25 CE Credits, 33h)
🪚 Tools
Network Monitor (FastAPI, React, Celery, PostgreSQL)
(FOSS, NMS, Observability)Jodies IP Subnet Calculator
(Subnetting, IPv4, CIDR)LLM Stats AI Leaderboard
(AI, LLM Models, Benchmarking)Visual Subnet Calculator
(Subnetting, IPv4, CIDR)
🎓 Learning
Infrastructure Review (CCC)
(Video, 1 hour, Hacking)pyATS AI Agent: Dynamically Self-Testing Network Agent
(Video, 30 mins, NetDevOps)Large Scale IPv6 Reconnaissance
(Video, 30 mins, 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 👂
🔥 (just some of) This week’s Hot Hirings
🇦🇺 Senior Data Center Engineer @ Fastly, Australia, Melbourne
🇮🇳 Infrastructure Automation Engineer @ Workday, India, Pune
🇮🇪 Associate Network Engineer @ SMBC, Ireland, Tralee
🇵🇹 Infrastructure Deployment Engineer @ Cloudflare, Portugal, Lisbon
🇬🇧 Junior Network Engineer @ SUEZ, UK, Maidenhead
🇬🇧 Principal Network Security Engineer @ Entrust, UK, Newbury
🇺🇸 Staff Cloud Network Engineer @ Gemini, USA, New York, NY
🇺🇸 Senior Network Engineer @ Google, USA, Thornton, CO
🇺🇸 NetDevOps Engineer @ Vultr, USA, Remote
🇺🇸 Junior Network Operations Engineer @ Vultr, USA, Remote
NotEng 🤔
Vibe Check: Opus 4.5 Is the Coding Model We’ve Been Waiting For especially if you thought the jump to Gemini 3 was good, Opus is really, really good for vibe coding 😎
How good engineers write bad code at big companies is a story of misaligned incentives meets Conway’s Law - or namely, it’s hard to be great when the people and process around you are setup to be mediocre on purpose 💡
The unpowered SSDs in your drawer are slowly losing your data, so it might be time to dust off that Iomega Zip Drive after all (always wanted the Jaz, couldn’t afford…) 😷
How to be creative (without taking drugs) is solid advice, but hard to follow - to do really is not to try, but to do 🥷
AI becoming sentient is risky, but that’s not the big threat. Here’s what is… it’s the side effects that normally get you into weird and unexpected ways, which AI just might be on course for ⚡️
2025: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise has some surprises, including how far behind your workplace probably isn’t and what the success rate of AI initiatives is (clue: it’s less than wiping spit on an LC connector and plugging it back in again) 💦
Can I just check - are my emails holding me back at work?! is great advice to sometimes withhold your p’s and q’s to get rid of a mounting list of To Do’s 😤
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
NL Network Automation Meetup, Amsterdam, 5 February 2026
📢 Conferences
🎩 Hat-tip to the wonderful Pete Crocker @ OpsMill for the help
LeNetDevOps, Toulose, 27 January 2026
NANOG, San Francisco, 2 - 4 February 2026
APRICOT 2026, Jakarta, 4 - 12 February 2026
Cisco Live EMEA, Amsterdam, 9 - 13 February 2026
IETF 125, Shenzhen, 14 - 20 March 2026
Upperside World Congress, Paris, 24 - 26 March 2026
SwiNOG, Geneva, 28 April 2026
RIPE 92, Edinburgh, 18 - 22 May 2026
Cisco Live USA, Las Vegas, 31 May - 4 June 2026
BalticNOG 2026, Riga, 23 - 24 September 2026
Cisco Live APJC, Melbourne, 9 - 12 November 2026
Industry 🏭
Europe has ‘lost the internet’, warns Belgium’s cyber security chief but we reckon it’s definitely at the back of the sofa somewhere, just left of that long-lost Hi-Fi remote control 🔊
Critical 0-Day RCE Vulnerability in Networking Devices Exposes 70,000+ Hosts including Sd-WAN appliances and some well-known Router devices 🚨
5 Azure Networking announcements you probably missed summarised expertly by Mr Pinto ☁️
Oracle’s $248 Billion Rent is Another AI ‘Bombshell’ and is going to suck all the power out of the grid to power the AI to tell people that there’s not enough power in the grid 🔌
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 💬.