#Canadians on Mastodon, please sign and boost NDP MP Jenny Kwan's official parliamentary e-petition against the Carney government's all spying Bill C-22.
#Canada #cdnpoli #CanadianPolitics #C22 #privacy
https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7416
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@whitequark/116280582432591103
No consumer routers for Americans, I guess. No consumer internet to follow?
@hugo Good things come to those that wait? https://github.com/opnsense/core/pull/9923
I've been banging on this general "allowing strong technical locks which lock out the ostensible owner are a serious problem" drum for a long time now. As usual @pluralistic offers a poignant analysis.
Been binge watching #39c3 talks (https://media.ccc.de) the last couple days. This con is amazing, it's got it all. I hope to go some day. Thank you for generously providing the high quality online versions.
Anyone aware of an affordable 5-12 port switch with proper management & PTP transparent and/or boundary clock support? Primary or secondary market is fine. < $300 CAD, GigE+, PoE would be nice.
My survey so far:
There's the Switchberry project by @geerlingguy and friends, but it doesn't seem baked yet.
Anything else out there?
Not a great start to #adventofcode this year, I completely forgot how my build setup was working last year, and the boilerplate I copied to start from did not work at all.
Then, I could not quite work out the edge cases for the modular arithmetic after 90 minutes of adding and removing random conditions and +1s. I don't know why this was wrinkling my brain so much, but I couldn't quite nail it and had no way to be confident in my result without writing a bunch of tests.
Ended up solving it by incrementing/decrementing by one at a time. Ugly.
So that sucks, I upgraded my storage server to Debian Trixie. Sloppily, apparently, since I seem to have lost all my docker containers and volumes somehow. I guess some interaction between the Debian Docker package and the Docker CE package during the upgrade.
Without backups since I never got around to revisiting that after moving to Portainer and starting to use Docker volumes more than bind mounts.
Ugh.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Time testing platform #2 - BananaPi F3. This one is intriguing for a few reasons. It's one of the few modern SBCs with miniPCIe, it's a desktop-tier RISC-V (8 cores! they're pretty slow, though) which I don't yet have in my stable, and it's considerably cheaper than a full MiniPC - even the anemic N4000 one.
Some teething pains getting it up and running. I guess Armbian doesn't build the full suite of kernel modules for embedded devices, so a side quest was required to figure out how to cleanly build a reconfigured kernel with the igc module. It's also easy to 'brick' by messing up the eMMC which holds the bootloader...oops. But also easily fixed.
Power consumption is about 4W, about half the N4000's 7.5W.
Still no PCIe PTM, unfortunately.
Assembled a second timing-nic PCB, this time with a timing-grade NEO-M8T salvaged from a previous project. Will be able to compare the (much more expensive) timing GPS with the NEO-M9N on the other board, though I doubt there will be a difference in this application.
Today on adventures in precision time:
eeupdate64e tool immediately worked to write both the flash image and the eeprom settings (mostly MAC address). nvmupdate64e didn't, and I tried that first, but never mind.Aside from the bodges, it looks like everything is working.
I wasn't sure if I'd regret attempting 0402 assembly at home. These parts are truly tiny. But with a paste stencil and a steady hand I think I got away with it. The 3D printed jig was a new idea to aid alignment between the stencil and PCB, and it helped a lot to make the process less fiddly.
One resistor had to be reworked, I placed the GPS module backwards (doh), and some solder bridges on the QFN had to be fixed.
Still waiting on the two miniPCIe platforms I bought to arrive, so just bench tests for now, but at least there aren't any catastrophic problems. No obvious shorts, current draw is normal, I can talk to the GPS over serial, and it occasionally picks up a PRN with no sky view from the bench!
Swapped the 1.27mm headers for Molex PicoBlade connectors instead. Nicer user experience, and surprisingly it's easier to find pigtails for those than bare 1.27mm headers (even singles don't really exist). Required some minor routing changes but that's about it.
PCB and parts orders are in 🤞
1/n on time server implementations
First #electronics work in a long while. Started on this one back in May, finally bringing it to the next step.
About to send off to PCB fab, this is a miniPCIe card with an Intel I226V NIC, u-blox GPS, and TCXO onboard, intended for precision time acquisition and serving PTP on mini PCs.
I'd intended on paying for assembly too, but the price is a bit steep for a prototype I might need to iterate on, so I'm going to try to stencil + paste it myself. First 0402 at home...
MiniPCIe seems like a weird choice, but M.2 E-key is the only other common form factor with USB and PCIe, and it's only 30x30mm. Most other form factors are only USB or only PCIe. Could work around it with a USB (or UART) jumper on a B+M key design but we'll see how this goes. 30mm is preeetty narrow.
The theory of operation is that the I226V is capable of capturing the PPS edge directly, with the same timers that are used for hardware timestamping of network packets. This allows for extremely good network time synchronization with GPS using PTP & NTP.
Putting the GPS onboard is a convenience more than anything else, there usually isn't anywhere to mount auxiliary boards in a mini PC.
A TCXO to clock the I226V further improves holdover and phase noise at low τ.
The Ethernet connector is on a breakaway board, so it could be somehow mounted where it can be reached outside the case, and to allow the design to be possible within the miniPCIe physical constraints.
Design files: https://git.gotroot.ca/ktims/timing-nic
#time-nuts
Corporate: You must use AI in your work!
Also Corporate: No AI technology relevant to your role is approved for use!
💡 *while wasting hours fixing memory and disk pressured dead k3s*
Maybe k8s+longhorn+minio and replicas of everything is a bit too much just to run Mastodon?
Migrating "prod" services to k8s from an airport waiting lounge. Nice to have a *hard* deadline. ✈️ #whatcouldgowrong
Though I guess you can just buy wifi on the plane these days... 🤔
#homelab / #homeautomation updates:
💁 Asking can sometimes yield results. IPv6 is in beta at Novus and gives a PD /56 👍
🤦 Now to renumber k8s and update all the IPAM stuff I did before. Use ULAs or statically configure the PD prefix? 🤔
🏠 Zigbee + ZWave stuff is all up and running and working well
🤖 Starting to work on useful automations
Hmm Amazon starts charging ~$3.50/mo for IPv4 addresses in #AWS. A bit more scale than Vultr giving a discount for IPv6-only instances. What does this do for #ipv6 adoption?
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/
Also experimented with the OpenJ9 #java VM to try and get memory utilization of the WiFi controller to something reasonable.
~1.5GB RSS :decreasing_graph: ~550MB RSS, which is impressive - but still don't have room for it.