Assurance on a budget#

Tim Warnock - Superloop

• Why: A catalog of low-cost lab techniques for validating vendor claims, supplier conformance, and regressions — exactly the kind of tooling others can adopt, and the talk openly exists because "vendors often tell porkies about capabilities."
• What: How Superloop built an assurance lab on MikroTik CCRs, x86 compute, and open-source software: bulk traffic generation (MikroTik traffic-gen, snake tests that loop ports and multiply traffic uplinks — with pitfalls: rate adaptation hammers buffers, invalid MACs, generated frames with bad CRCs); RtBrick BNG Blaster for emulating PPPoE/IPoE subscribers at scale (tested to 32k sessions on a 10-core server; a multi-hour 4,000-session / 48k pps full-duplex test with zero flaps ran on an HP T740 thin client under Proxmox); MikroTik vCPE for simulating Q-in-Q DHCP subscribers with per-subscriber option-82; ROS7 "fantasy routing" for RIB/FIB stress testing (with the real insight that not all TCAM is the same — LEM vs LPM vs eTCAM, IPv4 vs IPv6 key sizes); scripted Python PCAP generation for traffic no tool produces (16,000 ICMP requests, each with unique source IP, MAC, S-TAG/C-TAG, and valid CRC); tcpreplay/MikroTik PCAP injection with speed control; thousands of RFC-compliant DHCP requests to test CoPP. Process advice: keep a problem register, maintain a regression suite with reference PCAPs.
• How: Cheap hardware + open-source tooling, with concrete configs and commands in the deck.
• Where applicable: Any operator without a vendor-grade test lab. The NBN TC4 conformance specifics are Australian, but the techniques are general.