Welcome to Technology Short Take #185, the first of 2025! I’m excited for the opportunity to continue to bring readers articles and links of interest across data center- and cloud-related technologies (along with some original content along the way). I had originally intended for this post to be my last post of 2024, but personal challenges got in the way. Enough of that, though—on to the content!

Networking

• Rasika Nayanajith has a detailed overview of Wi-Fi 7.
• Just before the end of 2024, John Howard (whose blog I only recently discovered—lots of great content there!) posted a write-up on using Vault to provision TLS certificates onto a network appliance.
• Federico Paolinelli shared information on running Podman pods as systemd units in the context of an architecture to terminate EVPN inside Kubernetes nodes. Federico’s blog is another one I only recently discovered; there’s lots of great networking content here.
• Julio Perez has a nice write-up on Codespaces for network engineers and educators. (Hat tip to Ivan Pepelnjak for pointing me to Julio’s site.)

Servers/Hardware

• Bryan Cantrill shares some thoughts on why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel.

Security

• Brian Krebs’ article on the operations of a prolific voice phishing crew was both enlightening and frightening.
• ESET has an article with information on Bootkitty, which they label as “the first UEFI bootkit designed for Linux systems.”

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• I haven’t personally used mirrord, but this article on port forwarding with mirrord piqued my interest. I might have to give this a try soon.
• Rory McCune asks the question, “When is read-only not read-only?” (This is in the context of a Kubernetes RBAC and, in Rory’s words, “a possible sharp corner”.)
• Frederic Branczyk with Polar Signals discusses kubezonnet, a tool for identifying and measuring cross-zone pod network traffic in Kubernetes clusters.
• This article is a good write-up on troubleshooting/identifying a memory leak that wasn’t actually there.
• Dan Slimmon reviews the metrics that are relevant to latency- and throughput-optimized clusters.

Operating Systems/Applications

• This article from Edward Zitron is a scathing indictment of generative AI, but I can’t really disagree with any of it. My hope—and the hope of others I’ve talked to that share the same perspective—is that the fall of GenAI doesn’t mean the fall of the entire tech economy.
• Matthew Sanabria shares a list of tools worth changing to in 2025. None of these tools are new to me, but it’s nice to hear about another user’s direct experience. I will say that I have thus far dismissed LLMs—see my thoughts about generative AI in the previous bullet—but I may reconsider local use of an LLM via Ollama. I don’t have a GPU to throw at it, so the experience may be subpar.

Virtualization

• William Lam kicks off his 2025 blogging content with an article on an easier way to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS hardware strings.

Career/Soft Skills

• Does social media count as a soft skill? I’m going to say “Yes” so that I can put Virginia Craft’s article on how to quit mainstream social media and join Mastodon in this section. Twitter/X is the only “mainstream social media” platform I use, and—if I’m honest—I’m using it less these days in favor of Mastodon and Bluesky.
• Something Tom Hollingsworth said in his recent post looking back at 2024 really stuck with me: “I want to make sure I’m bringing you the kind of content that you want to read instead of just posting because I need to create something.” That really resonated with me. I know my blogging frequency has gone down in recent years, but I don’t want to sacrifice blogging quality just for the sake of posting more often. Thanks, Tom—it’s nice to know that other writers have the same struggles I do.

That’s all for now. If you have any feedback, or if you just want to reach out and say hello, you can find me online in a variety of places. My email address isn’t too hard to find, so you’re welcome to drop me an email message if that’s your preference. Otherwise, find me on Bluesky, on Mastodon, on Twitter, and in a variety of Slack communities. I’d love to hear from you!