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jlgaddis

Re:Brocade ICX Switches – Cheap and Powerful 10GbE/40GbE on Saturday October 29, 2022 @05:27PM (#33388116)
I upgraded my home network from a Cisco 3750G to a Brocade ICX 6610 a couple years ago...

  - 40 GbE to the "new" (in process of being set up and deployed) NAS

  - 10 GbE to the "old" (being phased out) NAS (was: 40 GbE)

  - 40 GbE to my workstation

  - 10 GbE to the "other machine" on my desk

  - n x 10 GbE to the cluster of ESXi servers

  - 10 GbE to other misc. servers in the rack

  - Multiple 10 GbE and 1 GbE links to the PTP GrandMasters and NTP servers

  - Plus all the various PoE devices (APs, VoIP phones, etc.) and miscellaneous other hosts (NTP appliances, DRACs, PDUs, NetBotz, etc.) at 1 GbE and/or 100 Mbps
Unfortunately, I'm just about out of 10 GbE ports so I may need to get another ...

Highly recommend the ICX 6610 in particular. The only other Brocade (Ethernet) switches I've personally managed are the "access layer" FCX switches (in an old position 10+ years ago).

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
10BASE-T1{S,L} [0] are "only" 10 Mbps but they also need only a single pair of wires (with the latter working up to 1 km).

They aren't exactly in widespread usage yet, though.

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(ETA: And apparently there are even 100 and 1000 Mbps variants now too [0] -- with lower maximum distances, of course.)

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#S...

Re:New motorcycle lighting design could save lives on Thursday October 20, 2022 @04:21PM (#33280160)
As a "normal" driver, the pulsating lights absolutely are annoying... and don't even get me started on those loud ass pipes!

Now, as a motorcyclist who has been hit head-on more than once by drivers who swore "I didn't even see him!" -- with the last crash leaving me with multiple broken bones and an inability to walk for several months -- you better believe I now have both a pulsating headlamp and a nice set of loud ass pipes (they're even called "Street Cannons")! on my bike.

I've also lost a non-zero number of friends due to folks who swore they didn't see them.

It's now been eight years since I've gotten hit... so I really am sorry if my headlight or pipes bother you as I pass by but, well, I have loved ones I'd like to see again so I hope you'll forgive me.

Re:Ask HN: Weird Credit Card Stuff on Monday August 15, 2022 @05:57AM (#32467746)
Too little info to provide any real advice besides the obvious (see below). Out of curiosity, though, do you recognize the name of the merchant?

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Anyways, there's a toll-free number on your card. Call it and explain the situation to them. They'll likely re-issue your card and call it a day, unless the specific transactions trigger some sort of "red flag" (although, if that were the case, the fraud department would likely have noticed before you did and already took action).

There are certain types of questions that aren't really appropriate for an "Ask HN". This is one of them.

GitHub is only slightly better (in this regard). You can't perform an "advanced search" without logging in.

Still, I'd rather use GitLab ober GitHub.

If they're just now patching it, I kinda feel like they deserve to spend their weekend patching Windows boxes.

> This bug was patched by Microsoft in June 2022 ...

I believe you are mistaken, as HB2319 [0] itself directly states:

> The occupants of a vehicle that is the subject of a police stop may record the encounter if the occupants are not interfering with lawful police actions.

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On a side note, I encourage everyone to carefully read the actual bill.

There's a lot of intelligent people here on HN but it seems that many of those commenting can't quite comprehend plain English (not as well as I would have expected, at least).

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[0]: https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/55leg/2R/laws/0376.htm

Re:Hetzner subsea fibre cut outage on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @03:39PM (#31496633)
Yes, using an OTDR [0].

These used to be big, expensive, standalone devices (I'd occasionally use one in a previous job). Nowadays, there are portable, handheld units specifically for identifying where a break has occurred and the same, basic functionality is often even built into the gear used at either end of connections (e.g., even the "enterprise" switches -- from Brocade and Cisco -- that I use at home).

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time-domain_reflectome...

Re:RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects on Saturday May 07, 2022 @07:35PM (#31299690)
I was just a teenager around this time, in middle school or perhaps high school, and still in the early stages of programming (after moving on from the Commodore 64 and 6502 assembly), but -- even three decades later -- it's nice to finally have an answer to that one particular question that was asked so often and by so many all throughout those years:

> Just WTF were those Microsoft guys smoking when they designed this shit?

<g>

I almost want to ask if this is a real question.

Obviously, things have changed since then, but there was a time that not everyone had 24/7 always-on access to the Internet. Really, that's only a recent thing. How do you think programming took place -- across a generation or two -- before then?

In my case, it was 1999 before I was able to get an Internet connection that wasn't dial-up Internet -- but I lived in a small, rural town in the midwest, not in a major city. I was the first person in our area (perhaps a 30 mile radius) to have an "oh-my-$deity-this is-so-amazingly-fast" 768k/128k DSL line (besides the two guys who ran my ISP) as I knew them and they asked if I would, effectively, be a "beta tester" to make sure things were working as they 2were supposed to be before they started offering the service to customers.

So, yeah, before then it was possible to program without a Internet connection. That was the "default", normal situation, in fact. We had (dead-tree) books, for example, and could telephone other people, there was FIDOnet ("before Internet"), Usenet ("after Internet"), e-mail and mailing lists and, eventually, even the web (from 1991 on, of course). Plenty of programming happened without Internet access before then (in fact, all of it did, basically).

Of course, some programming is more complicated nowadays, when you need a library for every little thing you do, so I suppose programming without an Internet connection might not be possible if you need to download a library for for .. loops or something.

(By the way, when I was in high school, I'd write code on paper (whatever program I was working on at the time) while sitting in class. When I'd get home after school, then I could type it in on the computer.)

Of course, if you are one of those "programmers" who have to stop and Google something afte every five lines of code, well, it's probably not possible.

For the FBI.
> The exact number of U.S. residents who potentially had their information reviewed isn’t known because there’s no precise way to measure the data, according to the report.

How convenient.

Re:Show HN: A tool to seed your dev database with real data on Thursday April 28, 2022 @01:10AM (#31188966)
I'm (not) looking forward to the future data breach notifications / post-mortems that include something like "... our developers used a tool to copy the production database to a dev database on their laptop ..."

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised by the lack of comments advocating against doing this.

> That's probably too limited actually. Because you can have a whole bunch of stuff in PAM: LDAP, OTP, Yubikeys, and all kinds of other fancy modules. Doesn't seem that unix_chkpwd handles any of that.

Yes, you're right. unix_chkpwd doesn't handle any of that and, in fact, was never intended to handle any of that -- and that's the entire point!

The entire design of PAM is, well, to have separate "modules" that are "pluggable" depending on how you need to handle "authentication" -- LDAP, OTP, Yubikeys, etc.

That is, the pam_unix module (which uses unix_chkpwd) is used when you enter in your (local user account's) password. If you're using something else -- LDAP or NIS or whatever -- for user accounts (i.e., your "passwd" database) there are separate (PAM) modules for that!

> Also, I still think it has to be a network service, ...

No, it really doesn't and, besides, there are other alternatives that would be much better to use instead of a network socket (such as a local UNIX socket, for one).

I really try not to make such remarks here on HN, but in this case it does seem that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of just how this stuff works (which is almost certainly why you're comment has been so downvoted).

Re:Show HN: We launched a new web browser on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @12:07AM (#31163833)
Let me guess: your company ultimately profits somehow, whether directly or indirectly, from the use ("sale", presumably) of these "decentralized domains" and/or ".eth DNS"?
> "... to prevent PRN code duplication and avoid using codes with poor properties that may interfere with receiver performance." (https://www.gps.gov/technical/prn-codes/)
> ... but RTK GPS (where solely atmospheric errors are reduced via local knowledge) gets accuracy down to about ±0.1 meters.

My understanding is this is also possible with GNSS receivers which can use satellites on more than one system or on more than one frequency band (e.g., the GPS L1 and L5 signals) at the same time, as this allows any atmospheric issues to be taken into account when making positioning calculations.

I don't know if any of the cheap, commonly available "multi-GNSS" receivers actually make such adjustments / corrections or if one would need to "upgrade" to one of the (much more expensive, naturally) "RTK-capable" receivers.

(My interest is primarily in timing so I mostly stick with GPS-only units which support fixed position mode, so I haven't bothered to keep up with the newer stuff, such as RTK.)

Re:Nsh, a unified router style CLI for OpenBSD on Saturday April 09, 2022 @04:42PM (#30971856)
> You can also git your /etc of course.

You can and you should, in my opinion.

However, you really want to use "etckeeper" [0] to do that (as opposed to "maintaining" /etc as a git repo, manually, yourself).

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ETA:

Seriously, look over etckeeper's README file [1] and/or man page [2]. Next, go read a couple articles or blog posts that describe "How-To store /etc in a git repository on debian linux" [3]. Then, if you're a sado-masochist, go ahead and actually try it that way for a while. Finally, install etckeeper, spend two minutes setting it up (if your packaging tool didn't do that for you automatically), and almost instantly regain your sanity!

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[0]: http://etckeeper.branchable.com

[1]: http://etckeeper.branchable.com/README/

[2]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/etckeeper.8

[3]: http://hyperprog.com/howto/etc-git.html

Re:Web3 'contains the seeds of a dystopian nightmare' on Saturday April 02, 2022 @09:31AM (#30888128)
You certainly don't miss an opportunity to make a meaningless, no substance comment just so that you can spam a link to some "project" of yours, do you?
> Sigh, I was just thinking of moving all my stuff, projects and even websites from cloud hosted solutions to my own home server ...

Good thing you didn't follow the other link to the changes in pricing for (egress) network traffic!

Re:Who's Attacking My Server? on Monday March 14, 2022 @10:48AM (#30673081)
Except for your one comment 55 days ago, every other comment you've ever posted to HN has been (within about hour of each other, about six hours ago, and is) just spamming this bullshit.

(And that one other comment is a little shady as well.)

Give it up already.

Goodbye!

Re:Ask HN: How to make older iPad/iPhone usable? on Wednesday March 09, 2022 @11:25PM (#30623212)
The iPad that I still use pretty much every single day -- for several hours a day, sometimes -- is an iPad Air 2 that I bought shortly after it was released (late 2014, I think?). It still performs quite well and I don't have any real complaints about it.

In my case, however, I stopped updating it -- a long time ago, in fact! I'm not sure when it was that I stopped but it's running version 10.0.1 so around whenever that came out.

I'm quite aware of the "risks", however, so I don't use it for anything important. It's the device I grab whenever I'm gonna sit and browse HN, catch up on the news, or read some technical documents / papers. I don't really use any apps besides other than Safari and iBooks (I was going to install Firefox for iOS a while back but couldn't as it required a newer version).

About a year or two ago, I did look into updating it to a newer version, but I didn't want to install the newest version as I was afraid I'd be unhappy with either it or its performance and be unable to downgrade / rollback. Upgrading to any version other than the latest simply isn't an option, apparently, even "manually" using iTunes with locally downloaded ".ipsw" files (which were downloaded when they were released and so had valid signatures, etc.). Apple wouldn't let me update it to the last version of iOS 13, for example, so I decided it'll be running 10.0.1 until either it dies or becomes unusable (due to being so far behind).

Similarly, I'm still using the iPhone 6S that I've had for several years -- it is kept up-to-date, though!

Ironically, I ordered both a new iPad and a new iPhone about 15 months ago (December 2020). I did finally open up the new iPhone recently, but I still haven't switched over to it; it's still sitting there at the initial "Hello" setup / welcome screen! The new iPad, however, has been sitting on a shelf, still in the unopened box, since it arrived.

> What I think happened is that they breached the control infrastructure which gives them access to an "internal" VLAN that the satellite terminals use to communicate with the mothership for ...

> ... whatever is the TR-069 equivalent for BGAN terminals ...

These VSAT terminals support TR-069 [0] and my first thought when I heard about this was a compromised ACS. It wouldn't be the first time.

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[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069

Re:NSA Network Infrastructure Security Guidance [pdf] on Saturday March 05, 2022 @11:03PM (#30574930)
> Instead of the attacker having to find a vulnerability in a single product, ...

... they must now find at least one vulnerability in each of the firewalls.

It's not "pwn firewall A OR B", it's "pwn firewall A AND B".

Re:Possible BGP hijack on Friday March 04, 2022 @11:27PM (#30564252)
> A /24 wouldn't propagate much farther than the nearest IX and immediate peers, as presumably peers have learned to aggregate and filter in the last 20 years.

... and yet the global BGP table is absolutely full of /24s.

Re:Possible BGP hijack on Friday March 04, 2022 @11:21PM (#30564223)
What's interesting (to me, at least) is that there's an (signed) ROA for 31.148.149/24 and AS212463 is listed (IRR) as a valid origin AS -- AS35004 isn't.

All things considered, though, I'd find an explanation of "yeah, didn't have time to update the route objects yet" to be completely acceptable.

Same situation with 95.47.59/24, by the way.

(I let my Cisco certs lapse a decade or so ago, although I've certainly originated a prefix or two over the years.)

Re:GPS on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @06:44PM (#29987823)
> ... quality time-source ...

Except they decided to "smear" leap seconds [0], instead of handling them appropriately.

For that reason, if you "require correct timestamps for legal purposes" [1], you may want to make sure that you aren't using Google's NTP servers.

(N.B.: Amazon (AWS) too, FWIW.)

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[0]: https://developers.google.com/time/smear

[1]: https://docs.ntpsec.org/latest/leapsmear.html

Re:PCI-Sig Releases 256GBps PCIe 6.0 X16 Spec on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @09:11PM (#29901425)
Maybe I'm missing something but how does a newer version of the PCI-e spec directly lead to enormous benefits for a database that's running entirely in RAM?

In fact, on the surface, I would think that "traditional" databases (i.e., those residing on actual storage devices) would be more likely to benefit enormously as a result of this "upgrade" -- because of the massive increase in available bandwidth for storage and networking, of course.

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(I'll certainly admit thatI don't follow or keep up with developments in new generations / iterations of Intel processors / hardware architectures, but I'm assuming that Intel's Xeon CPUs still access RAM via their own memory controller. Intel has definitely done (more than) their fair share of stupid shit over the years but I'm guessing they haven't recently decided that, now, the proper place for system memory is on the PCI-e bus!)

Re:How to find a domain's authoritative nameservers on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @01:56PM (#29895979)
> I always find its output baffling.

I'm gonna fathom a guess that this is likely because you aren't aware that tha output returned by dig is (by default) valid BIND zonefile format/syntax, and/or you aren't very familiar with the BIND zonefile format/syntax itself.

Regardless, though, dig has a number of query options you might like to use that will suppress much of the (redundant and/or unwanted) output that's shown by default, such as "+noadditional", "+noauthority", "+nocmd", "+nocomments", "+noquestion", "+norrcomments", or "+nostats". You can even put all of those those (on a single line) in a "$HOME/.digrc" file and they'll be used automatically everytime you run "dig". See dig(1) for details.

Alternatively, you might find it easier to simply get into the habit of using (only) the "+short" query option everytime you run "dig" (or put that in .digrc). Just at the output of these queries, for example:

  $ dig +short ns example.com

  $ dig +short a google.com
The output quite possibly contains exactly what you want to know and nothing more -- including, especially, all of the extraneous output that often just gets in the way and leaves you constantly baffled!

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