Protocols, infrastructure, performance — explained clearly, with a little humor.
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RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) lets network adapters read and write remote memory without involving the CPU, eliminating the kernel networking stack, context switches, and...
Network forensics is the practice of reconstructing digital crimes from packet captures, flow logs, and DNS queries, but encryption has turned detailed packet inspection into...
Containers are virtualization stacked on virtualization, giving every process its own network stack complete with namespaces, overlay networks, and CNI plugins that create enough...
Asymmetric routing gets blamed for everything that breaks in networks, but it's actually essential for the Internet to scale and route traffic efficiently. The real problem isn't...
Denial of Service attacks aren't all distributed botnets and amplification chaos, but understanding the different types and how to defend against them is critical for keeping the...
From MPLS to VXLAN to the experimental chaos of tunneling over QUIC, encapsulation protocols let us pretend the network is whatever we need it to be. Just because you can wrap...
For decades, buying a router meant marrying the hardware and software in an expensive, vendor-locked package deal. Then hyperscalers decided they'd rather write their own...
We've been running out of IPv4 addresses since the 1990s, and IPv6 has been the solution since 1998, yet here we are in 2025 still dual-stacking our way through life. It's time to...
For decades, network security meant building taller walls and thicker doors, trusting anyone who made it inside. Then we realized the call was coming from inside the house, and...
Every byte traveling through your computer takes a bus, and not all buses are created equal. While USB and PCIe have been dutifully ferrying data for decades, NVLink showed up...
The Linux kernel's networking stack is a marvel of engineering that works brilliantly for 99% of applications, but when you need to push millions of packets per second, sometimes...
InfiniBand delivers sub-microsecond latency and native RDMA that Ethernet's RoCE still can't match, dominating supercomputers and AI training clusters despite being a...
SD-WAN is overpriced automation around VPN tunnels, path monitoring, and policy-based routing that any competent network engineer can build in a weekend with WireGuard or...
Network physical media evolved from copper carrying kilobits at a fraction of light speed to fiber carrying terabits at 67% of light speed, with hollow core fiber now approaching...
Maximum Transmission Unit seems simple until you add tunnels that reduce it, Path MTU Discovery that breaks when firewalls block ICMP, and TCP connections that blackhole...
IPSec's journey from CPU-crushing single-core bottleneck to multi-gigabit performance showcases how hardware acceleration (AES-NI) and better ciphers (AES-GCM) finally made strong...
Open Shortest Path First promises fast convergence and hierarchical scalability, but delivers area design nightmares, CPU-intensive SPF recalculations, and the routing flexibility...
Border Gateway Protocol is fundamentally broken, built on trust in an era of nation-state attacks, and has caused countless Internet outages through hijacks, leaks, and...
From Netscape's SSL to TLS 1.3's streamlined handshake and emerging post-quantum cryptography with ML-KEM, TLS has evolved continuously to protect Internet communications. This...
From Paul Mockapetris's 1983 design to modern extensions like DoH and DNSSEC, DNS has evolved from a simple name lookup protocol to critical Internet infrastructure. This deep...
From its origins solving ARPANET's reliability problem to modern extensions like MPTCP and BBR congestion control, TCP has quietly powered the Internet for four decades. This deep...
That innocent click to load a webpage triggers dozens of network packets racing across the internet, from DNS queries and TCP handshakes to TLS encryption and HTTP requests. While...
The internet's development from ARPANET's 1969 origins to today's global infrastructure represents a convergence of protocol innovation, physical connectivity advances, and...
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The Internet Papers is a technical blog dedicated to exploring the intricate world of computer networking. Our mission is to demystify complex networking concepts and share insights about the protocols, technologies, and infrastructure that make global connectivity possible.
Comprehensive analysis of networking protocols from the ground up.
Understanding the hardware and software that powers the internet.
Exploring network performance, optimization, and troubleshooting.