At 7AM (UTC) on Wednesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major B
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024
The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) documents.
At this point I am a bit of a BGP protocol implementation connoisseur thanks to
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at the first NetUK. You can watch the talk on YouTube that was recorded by the wonderful AV team below if thatβs your preferred medium:
Iβve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I donβt hate, the problem with a lot of higher
At the start of the year a very interesting (and some would say inevitable) event happened involving internet routing security, the first case study of a large-scale victim o
Something that bgp.tools (my company) does a great deal is joining internet exchanges.
Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has βmoved outβ of Twitter/βXβ on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or
Much like a previous talk of mine at Chaos Computer Congress this blog post is a direct write-up of a talk, if you prefer to consume this kind
Border Gateway Protocol is the de facto protocol that directs routing decisions between different ISP networks, and is generally known as the βglueβ
We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frust
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, itβs so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your compu
Itβs an established fact on the internet that we have ran out of IP(v4) addresses, and we are st
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long t
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of [SFP optic](https://en.wikiped
βJPEGβ or the image encoding specification by the βJoint Photographic Experts Groupβ (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file
Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infra
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and [this post (EvE)](https://blog.b
Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. Itβs simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the f
This story, like another in the past, started as an eBay purchase that I wo
[Impact by Eric Wienke, edits by Ben Cartwright-
cURL. The wonderful HTTP plumbing tool that powers both a lot of command line debugging and bash scripts, but also exists as a strong foundation in our applications in the form of libcurl.
This post is a textual version of the talk I gave at NLNOG 2019, You can watch the recording of the talk on youtube below if thatβs your preferred medium:
<iframe width=β700β height=β328β src=βhttps://www.
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pac
In the fall I did a blog post and talk on RPKI about how the current methods of measuring RPKI deployment are broken because they do not take
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but Iβm a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page
As a British person, I admittedly conform to the stereotype of tea consumption, and giving Iβve been consuming tea for most of my life I have gained opinions on all kinds of tea based variables. The bigge
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLDβs that clearly just didnt work out.
In the last week, ICANN removed the documentation
Itβs that time again where once every 4 years people get very hyped over kicking a ball around a grass pitch, however this time my own country is actually doing pretty well! At the time of wr
DNS is fundamental to how the web works, and for most of the population itβs completely transparent. Everything on the web is accessed by a DNS name.
Since DNS is an old protocol ([November 1987 in fact](http
Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having cont
I hate card networks.
Visa and MasterCard are a pair of companies that I feel definitely make the world a worse place to live in, due to the fact that they sit in front of a critical part of how modern society wo
BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on βonlineβ computers is hard and sometimes
SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development itβs what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations itβs what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.
SSH
[Warning: Those who canβt stand EDM/dubstep, oh boy do I have bad news for you in regards to this blog post]
Dubstep songs are often criticized as sounding extremely computer generated and often just too aggressi
Tor has a neat feature called Onion Services [(A)](https://web.archive.org/web/20180330000120/https://www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.h
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their m
While the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea were/are currently beefing on Twitter about who should destroy the world first, North Korea was also causing me some pers
Generally speaking there is nothing that people want to talk about less than email delivery and for good reason, Email is continuously seen as one of those archaic protocols that everyone wants to improve but unfortu
Sometimes I like to think that I do βseriousβ blog posts like βThe strange case of ICMP Type 69 on Linuxβ or [βAnycast possibly done betterβ](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post
I love obscure protocols, and while most of the worldβs legacy X.25 equipment is slowly being shut down. Itβs amateur radio derivative AX.25 is getting along pretty wel
Anycasting IP space has become quite a meme in the networking world in the last few years, with it being used sparsely in the past for UDP based services like DNS. Now itβs being used for TCP based services too,
Iβm sure this has been done before, but you do hear stories from time to time where someone will either drop or increase their DNS TTLβs and either see a massive difference, or none at all.
A lot of pro
In the consumer world you will likely encounter networking devices that donβt have a easy way to poll for their network stats, or in some cases you hate <abbr style=βborder-bottom: 1px dotted green;β title=βS
Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as o
Some people change their SSH port on their servers so that it is slightly harder to find for bots or other nasties and while that is generally viewed as an action of [security through obscurity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
Almost every year a joke RFC is made on April 1st (these have caught on so well, that itβs now common to see more than one of these every year
I run collectd stats on many of my servers and one thing I enable on some (but not all) of the
If you ever had to deal with bots while running a site you will have at least at some point looked into robots.txt, a system that isnβt rea
This is a blog post that I had written for my employer CloudFlare You can find the full link here
CloudFlare operates a
(Side note, this blog post was written and then forgotten about quite a while ago, So Iβve finished it off, it was halfway done.)
While on holiday in the evenings with downtime to spare, I had realised that
Anycast networks are a pretty interesting way to fix quite a few issues with networked services that involve needing global spread. One of the interesting things is that a computer cannot really tell (unless it
A game that I really liked the visuals off, Crysis 3 uses a video file format called USM, This is a rather odd to me, since when I am used to pulling games apart for their assets, I am used to BINK video being used for th
One of the things that I like to play from time to time is Minecraft, however one of things ( at least with me this is ) is that Minecraft is best played with other people, This however means you have to go throu
From time to time you may want to debug TLS, Now this is not as easy as you might think, Because of the nature of TLS, you donβt really want to have anyone (even if they technically may have the key on the se
Thought it might be a good idea to brain dump on my thoughts of βWrite Code Everydayβ and more to the point the [github challenge](http://ryanseys.com/blog/177-days-of-gith
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