Maybe the Kindle app icon was always telling us their true intentions? Fucking up the night sky with satellites

#kesslersyndrome #spacedebris #lightpollution

Please be careful with those illegal passwords everyone! Courtesy of a Supermicro IPMI interface.

#password #supermicro #bmc #ipmi #illegalpassword

@nuintari Maybe this is something that interests you, just taking a guess

A new article at the RIPE blog explains the current state of running IPv4 services over IPv6-only networks.

The three pieces are RFC 8950 (IPv6 next-hops for IPv4 prefixes), a draft about IPv6 next-hops for IPv4 routes, and a draft for solving the IPv4 gateway problem that systems running IPv4 services in these kind of networks typically have.

It’s cool to see this gateway thing in such an informed piece, I’ve been wondering about that bit for a while. You might have seen different service providers solving this in different ways, with a /32 on either a regular interface or a loopback, and a strange default route pointing to just an interface (with no destination IP), or a destination IP in a prefix that the given machine doesn’t know about.
Linux seems to support a couple of different ways to go about this (of course), and FreeBSD and OpenBSD each support a single, different solution AFAIK. I don’t believe illumos even has a way to solve this problem at the moment, but I might have that one wrong.

Anyway, do have a look at the article:
https://labs.ripe.net/author/remco-van-mook/a-farewell-to-arps-ipv4-service-on-ipv6-only-networks/

#IPv6 #IPv6mostly #fuckdualstack #networking

Could I use FreeBSD to provide small-scale VPS hosting in a multi-tenancy setup? It doesn't need to be fancy, power user skills could be assumed, but things would need to be properly isolated from each other. Minimal features would be providing console access and power on/power off/reboot features.
Nice to have is uploading and mounting your own ISO.

When I previously asked a similar question at illumos Cafe, the answer was Triton Datacenter. As far as I can tell, FreeBSD doesn't have anything close to that. I've looked for VPS hosting providers that run FreeBSD underneath but haven't found a lot. Even FreeBSD-focused companies usually turn out to use Xen underneath. The closest thing is probably OpenBSD Amsterdam, which is of course not FreeBSD.

#freebsd #hosting #vps #openbsd #cloud

The time-out on my authenticator app always stresses me out, even on a fresh minute. Time sucks.

#authenticator #timeout #otp #time

Really nice article about some ZFS basics, written by Klara Systems: https://klarasystems.com/articles/advanced-zfs-dataset-management/

#zfs #openzfs #klarasystems

ZFS webinar by Klara Systems coming up this Thursday (18th September 2025):
https://klarasystems.com/webinars/zfs-basecamp-launch-panel-people-behind-zfs/

#zfs #filesystem #klarasystems

"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" 😁

I'm guessing this quote is pretty famous. Here's a good presentation by Bryan Cantrill about the history of SunOS, Solaris and OpenSolaris, up to the point that Oracle tried to kill it and illumos happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

#illumos #sun #solaris #opensolaris #oracle #larryellison

A bunch of my public GitHub repo's have been moved to Codeberg. The GitHub sources have been archived. I'm just about done with migrating everything.

Have a look if you want, maybe you'll find something of interest to you: https://codeberg.org/jwdevos

My last remaining public repo at GitHub contains the source data for my Hugo static site. There will be a few bald yaks before that one is done.

#codeberg #github #githubtocodeberg #yakshaving

The last generation of workstations still sold under the Sun Microsystems brand is special. They moved from SPARC to Xeon, and everything in the chassis is compatible to regular ATX desktop parts.

This one was saved from the dump by me at a previous job. It's now my main desktop to work and occasionally game on.

I cut out the drive cages using a Proxxon tool, and had to fit some bolts to mount the fans. Other than that, it's just a regular PC. But in the dopest chassis.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

This quote about the bandwidth of physical transportation is roughly 10 years older than me. It came up in the Packet Pushers slack channel, and somebody wondered if it's still valid in 2025. Ouch! I got nerd sniped! Now I'm wondering too. Let's investigate.

To start, we'll need some numbers. This is gonna be pretty big on guesstimates, royally rounding things up or down, and ignoring some geometrical factors.

I can't ascertain the quote's origin, but I'm certain it originated in the USA. A 1975 American station wagon could have been a Ford LTD Wagon. Let's pick that one, it looks like a sweet ride. According to the brochure, it features a cargo volume of "over 100 cu. ft. counting lockable below-deck stowage". That's over 2,800,000 cubic centimers.

Let's choose a distance outside of the USA, UK, Liberia and Myanmar. That way we can stick with the International System of Units (SI), avoid dealing with miles, and avoid deteriorating our sanity any further.
One of my longer road trips featured a drive from Rome, IT to Dordrecht, NL: around 1600 kilometers. Assuming two alternating drivers, some bad traffic and some stops, let's say the drive takes us 25 hours.

The bandwidth could be 800 Gbit/s today, ignoring bandwidth-delay product. If you get creative with source and destination storage arrays and the network inbetween, you could conceivably multiplex and achieve some multiple, but 800 Gbit/s seems like a fair number so we'll stick with that.

Pushing 800 Gbit/s for 25 hours straight, we're are able to transfer a total of 9,000,000 gigabytes (9,000 terabytes or 9 petabytes). At this point I'm already intuiting the final answer, but let's move along.

According to a quick Google search, the highest capacity SSD for the last few years (HDD's don't come close anymore) has been the ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100 at 100TB. The ExaDrive is a 3.5" SSD. However, Solidigm is currently releasing a 122.88TB version of the D5-P5336 SSD. The D5-P5336 is a tall 2.5" SSD with a volume of 105 cubic centimeters. The weight is guesstimated at 300 grams.

A possible alternative are microSD cards. The highest capacity ones are 1.5 TB today. A microSD card weighs about 0.5 grams. The volume of a single card is about 0.165 cubic centimeters. So a microSD fits in the tall 2.5" SSD model roughly 636 times. Rounding up, the microSD's give us a nice single petabyte in the volume of a single tall 2.5" SSD, or almost a factor 10 difference. Interestingly, the weight of a single tall 2.5" SSD's volume is roughly equal to the weight of that same volume in microSD cards. So microSD cards it will be!

To keep things simple, let's work with the rounded numbers we have so far. 105 cubic centimeters worth of microSD cards will fit into the Ford LTD Wagon more than 25.000 times. However, that would be almost 10 million microSD cards, or almost 5000 kilograms of them. I can't find all the numbers for the Ford LTD Wagon, but the towing capacity I found was close to 1000 kg. I'm taking the towing capacity as an indication of the weight capacity of the car itself, even though there are different factors involved. Assuming a couple of humans and a bunch of stuff actually in the car during that towing, I'm picking a maximum of 1500 kg worth of microSD's. With two drivers, let's hope that the axles will hold and sacrifice a goat for zero speed bumps. 1500 kg would allow for 3 million microSD cards or 4500 petabytes.

One final note: we're ignoring the time it might take to transfer some data set from some storage array to 3 million microSD's (and to load them into the station wagon) before departing. We're also unsure about and ignoring any transfer time after arriving at the destination. I suspect these same assumptions were also in place about the tapes when the original quote was made.

The suggested drive will take 25 hours, and in that time the 800 Gbit/s connection will "only" transfer 9 petabytes. So with 4500 petabytes, the station wagon will transfer about 500 times more data than the 800 Gbit/s connection. Wow! You'd need a lot of multiplexing to offset the difference.

It's clear that the limiting factor is the weight capacity of the station wagon. A small truck or sturdy van would have been a more sensible choice. In any case, the station wagon wins hands down. Unless that old thing breaks down.

#bandwidth #storage #networking #stationwagon

#introduction

Time to figure out this Mastodon thing. Hi Fediverse, I'm Jaap.

I enjoy connecting to like-minded individuals to discuss technology and any other interesting subject.

Since 2012, people have called me system administrator, network administrator, system engineer, network engineer, network designer and network architect.
Somehow, I've always drifted towards places that operate their own machines, including OT and critical infrastructure.

Tech is not just work but also hobby. Besides tech I'm into more tech, audio, sports, books, meeting cool people and everything else.

Currently unable to work and function at all, due to long COVID. The prognosis seems impossible to determine.

Also, meet Kara: