insomniac's lair

Hello stranger,
my name is Andrea Barberio, and this is my home. Welcome.

I work as Site Reliability Engineer at NVIDIA since 2024, where my current focus is DSX (AI factories), and previously on NVIDIA Omniverse (physics simulation platform). For the previous 12 years I worked at Facebook and at Amazon AWS, where I focused on software development and reliability for products and infrastructure. I spent many years working on open source firmware, on ARM and x86 platforms. My last firmware work is LinuxBoot, which runs on tens of millions of servers across hyperscalers and cloud companies. My main focus at Facebook was company-wide incident response (Feb Foundation), web infrastructure, open source system firmware, DNS/DHCP and OS provisioning, datacenter automation, cluster lifecycle. At Amazon AWS I worked mainly on active network monitoring.

More about my work life in my résumé or on my LinkedIn page.

To get in touch with me, write me an email.

I’m also on Mastodon: @insomniac@mastodon.online or @insomniacslk@fosstodon.org.
My wildlife photos are on Instagram: https://instagram.com/gattografo.

Dublin-Traceroute

If you are looking for Dublin Traceroute, you’ll find it here: https://dublin-traceroute.net . The Python bindings with visualization and statistic analysis are at https://github.com/insomniacslk/python-dublin-traceroute . As far as I know, dublin-traceroute is used by several hyperscalers, network monitoring companies, ISPs, and network enthusiasts.

The Israel Institute of Technology had a few students working on dublin-traceroute for their M.Sc., see their work at https://github.com/CS236340/RocketFuel . Thanks to Itzik and his students!

Here are the slides of my talk Visualizing Multipath Networks with Dublin-Traceroute at MOCA 2016.

BitWarden setup with Tailscale and a Raspberry Pi

You can read about it here, Private BitWarden setup with bitwarden_rs and Tailscale

Public talks

Past:

[2020-12-02] Open Source Firmware Testing with ConTest at OSFC 2020 (video, slides)
[2020-03-05] Open Source Firmware Testing at Facebook at OCP Global summit 2020 (slides)
[2020-05-13] Open Source Firmware Testing at Facebook at Open Compute Global Virtual Summit 2020 (video not available yet, slides)
[2020-02-02] Open Source Firmware Testing at Facebook at FOSDEM 2020 (Video recording is embedded in the talk page, slides)
[2019-06-13] Open Source Firmware @ Facebook: Design, deployment, and demo at SRECon 2019 Asia (slides and video in the description page)
[2019-02-03] Open Source Firmware @ Facebook, if you don’t own your firmware, your firmware owns you at FOSDEM 2019 (video) (slides)
[2018-10-31] Make Your System Firmware Faster, More Flexible and Reliable with LinuxBoot at LISA 2018 (slides) (video)
[2018-10-02] Turning Linux Engineers into Firmware Engineers at OCP Regional Summit (slides) (video)
[2018-09-13] Open Source Firmware @ Facebook at OSFC Open Source Firmware Conference (slides) (video)

Our work is cited in various places. Some of which I kept track of:

[2021-06-01] More performant cluster management (PDF)

Assembly riddles

I’ve published my solutions to the fantastic [xchg rax,rax] book from xorpd. Find it at https://insomniacslk.github.io/xorpd-solutions/ .

Other projects

Some public projects I created:

dublin-traceroute, my multipath traceroute with NAT support, and its Python bindings. Also in Debian’s testing repo, ArchLinux, and Slackware slackbuild. Packaged versions may be old
dhcp, a DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 library written in Go, for protocol encoding/decoding, client and server. This library is widely adopted by several hyperscalers and open source projects (like tailscale and Facebook’s dhcplb). See the list of github software that uses it. See examples at exdhcp
coredhcp, a fast, multithreaded, modular and extensible DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 server written in Go
ConTest, a framework for continuous hardware and firmware testing, born to test LinuxBoot / Open System Firmware, but used for much more than that. Used by some hyperscalers, and even offered as a commercial product
irc-slack, an IRC-to-Slack gateway in case you want to use Slack from your IRC client
systemboot, a LinuxBoot distribution for bootloaders based on u-root to implement boot from network and from local storage for LinuxBoot. Can be used to replace the UEFI firmware on supported hardware
uefi (now fiano), a toolkit for parsing and manipulating UEFI images, now moved under linuxboot/fiano

And I also contribute to or maintain:

LinuxBoot, a project to use Linux as your system firmware (e.g. instead of BIOS or UEFI). Some press coverage:

u-root, an initramfs written in Go that, together with a Linux kernel, can replace most of UEFI firmwares. Part of the NERF project
fbtftp, Facebook’s open-source dynamic TFTP server
fbtracert, Facebook’s open-source multi-path traceroute

Some project I created for my Computer Forensics exams:

ForeWork, the forensic framework, a framework for triaging, automating and scaling digital forensic analysis
mergelogs, a tool to merge and analyse OpenStack logs
ntfs-hound, a tool to inspect $MFT records in NTFS volumes, plus a plugin and a script for 010Editor

Other projects can be found on my github page and my bitbucket page

Technical reviews

I have helped with technical reviews of the following books and articles for O’Reilly:

Building Secure and Reliable Systems, O’Reilly
A Brief Guide to Running ML Systems in Production, O’Reilly
more to come

I also host a mirror of PoC||GTFO