A road sign with packet loss

Man I forgot how much magic I did in 2022 for EMF-IX, and then didnt write any of it down.

Finally got the EMF-IX machines booted and they are:

A) Home made cloud init metadata server
B) PXE boot
C) the rootfs is on ATAoverEthernet, and to be fair that's very cool but also looks totally insane on lsblk

If you ever see this outside of EMF-IX, run

# lsblk
NAME                  MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
etherd/e0.0           152:0    0    5G  0 disk 
├─etherd/e0.0p1       152:1    0  512M  0 part 
├─etherd/e0.0p2       152:2    0  488M  0 part 
└─etherd/e0.0p3       152:3    0    4G  0 part 
  ├─debian--vg-root   254:0    0  3.1G  0 lvm  /
  └─debian--vg-swap_1 254:1    0  976M  0 lvm  [SWAP]

Really hate how JunOS CLI suppresses ^C and space when there is nothing to cancel or add a space to (like a empty prompt).

Both of those things are my go to quick tests for if the device still works, so if I've not been on one for a while I end up the deeper stages of panic ("oh SHIT did I just blow up the device") before I realise I can just press "a" and see the CLI echo it back...

Goofy contraption

   I love           
 conntrack!  ◄────┐ 
    │             │ 
    │             │ 
    ▼             │ 
 conntrack        │ 
 ruined my  ──────┘ 
 life again         

Why the SVG fox be so smug / 🥴

Hah, the UK government is mulling over killing off terrestrial digital TV broadcasts by 2034, this would save them from having to fix at least one protocol level timebomb in DVB/DVB2 that triggers in 2038: https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/ZWhvQxPRzdhVzz9p3V

Pub air-conditioning my beloved

🫠

Sometimes the spam box is amusing

Enterprise outreach idea for dnsfs

Yes, Enterprise DNSFS ( https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-storage-dnsfs ) is clearly the next big thing, trillion dollar idea

(it's one of those clearly [github repo -> LLM -> Marketing Email] things)

Yooo new patch notes for time just dropped: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz-announce@iana.org/thread/NVHSX2PAQIT44U5FCCEVNJJYXQMMTJSA/

Alberta moved to permanent -06 on 2026-06-18.
Morocco moves to permanent +00 on 2026-09-20.

@benjojo A bit more research and I found the boots themselves: https://www.canford.co.uk/Products/50-0834_CANARE-FC-CV-M-RETROFIT-GAITER-For-Canare-and-Lemo-SMPTE-male-connector-yellow

I was at a gig on Sunday and noticed this interesting setup with one of the cameras that has this huge dark green isolator looking thing on the Power/SDI?

Does any of the broadcast nerds here know what this is and why they need it here?

hacker voice, dejected: im out

While doing some capacity shuffling today I wondered if bgp.tools had gotten to the point where there is no single motherboard that could run the whole operation.

The answer is... almost

You can buy 2S AMD 9005 machines (2x 128 C parts) that have 48 DIMM slots (48 * 128G DDR5 = 6TB~) that would fit what normally does the whole half cab into one machine..

The downside is that this one box costs roughly 280,000£, so I will take my setup thank you very much

I kind of love to wonder what the supply chain looks like that resulted in me being handed a Kurdish (according to Google translate I guess?) can of Coke at my local chippy

Fucking Around (Sailing last week)

👇️

Finding Out (Looking at the inbox today)

Regardless, have some nice photos from last week

Whoever decided where to put the Bluetooth management "PUK" code (to reset the PIN) on Victron inverters really needs to crawl into the depth of a boat to find it, to see the effects of their decisions

Can you guess where the code is here? on the outside label? no that would make too much sense, it's inside the device chassis (where the terminal blocks are) and if you can angle your body, hands, flashlight, and mobile phone camera just right, you may be able to see 50% of the code at a time between the air vent grill...

The DNS Resolver landscape is somewhat fascinating in that I think by the time you get to the point where you are close to wanting to build a DNS Resolver/Recursor you have already figured out it's hard to get right (in terms of spec compliance), and basically impossible to get right if you care (or need to care) about DNSSEC validation.

It was surprising to find that there are not really any stable/serious memory safe DNS resolvers, Hickory seems to be littered with bugs (Some not strictly it's fault and more the fact that some DNS Auths do not like QName Minimisation, but from what I can tell has a very spotty situation with DNSSEC

For what it is worth, my general views on DNSSEC's usefulness has not changed (I do not think DNSSEC is "juice worth the squeeze"), but there are compliance situations that force the existence of DNSSEC...

It's just frustrating that the closest to spec-compliance state of the art DNS resolver is Unbound

It's also shocking there is basically no DNS RFC "-bis" document that rolls up all of the (must at least 100) RFCs into a somewhat coherent document, I wonder if the rubicon has been crossed where no one will ever agree on what a RFC -bis would even look like.

Turning a z-buffer into a "how badly should something be JPEG compressed" mask, giving this interestingly "robotic myopia" view

(The effect is a lot better on landscape on mobile / big screen)

It's over at last

POV you are about to have an abysmal time

yup, that's the British election that I know

I wonder how many people have set GOAMD64=v4 in their builds and have not realised their CPU doesn't support AVX512 (since the compiler is not actually emitting AVX512 instructions yet)

That's going to be a fun upgrade path for whoever discovers has done that by mistake...

[edit, it turns out the outputted binary does actually check for v4 support, so everyone is fine]

How do these cloud SDKs get so huge (from my go mod cache)

$ du -h --max-depth=1 |& grep G
1.6G	./huaweicloud
1.5G	./oracle
3.8G	.

huaweicloud-sdk-go-v3@v0.1.187 is 239MB of _text_, text, This module is 50,000+ tiny (less than 8KB go files) that look like this: https://github.com/huaweicloud/huaweicloud-sdk-go-v3/blob/5b4358369ac2cc3cc8985b52bd2d7930d654a8b2/services/gaussdbforopengauss/v3/model/model_list_enhance_full_sql_statistics_request_body.go#L4

That's a staggering amount of (I assume/hope) automatically generated code. A true horror case of the compiler

Bond villain has developed a device that will destroy the planet. The British government sends James Bond to offer him tax incentives to build the device on brownfield land in the East Midlands.

I am in Berlin today -> tomorrow, with not much to do, Who do I know in Berlin at the moment and/or what do people recommend for things to do/see?

I need a pair of words that people wont obviously pick one over the other, a good (but non serious example) is "kiki" vs "boba", a bad example are "a" vs "b"

Thoughts on things that are not "kiki" vs "boba"

🏆 Anti-Achievement unlocked

Spend more time in a EES passport queue than in the air itself

Second attempt at sputter coating an organic sample (human hair, mildly damaged) for SEM imaging.

This was 100W DC (~400V), Cr, 3 minutes.

Blobs are Cr crystals from too aggressive deposition rate or poor sample prep... we think?

Why hello there small business owner! Are you one of those business certified gays?

Does anybody want a free official Google pixel 7A case? I accidentally bought one (I have a 7, not 7a, ooops)

Edit: Claimed! Thank you for playing

I do love Wikipedia for it's sometimes "at a glance" or "simplified" sections and then proceeds to show some maths or diagram that looks like it requires at least one degree to fully understand

Throwback to when I printed out business cards for the IDA Pro 6.8 'community edition' license owner. Still not sure if that was a real person.

Wonder if there's still a few around floating around in CTF/hacker circles? I remember distributing a bunch of them.. but this was almost a decade ago.

The megaport dashboard on my side giving me a "intercontinental ballistic ethernet layer 2" vibe

The bgp.tools megaport/megaix setup is a wonderful horror, to the point where a ARP packet in New Zealand is (eventually) heard all the way in the Netherlands where it lands on my "party" port

Seemingly the most American network RFO I just saw:

Sorry the IX was partitioned last night because of a tornado

Got lost in a rabbit hole, and ended up adding MBR (aka "BIOS") booting support to the headless IPMI resetter, So I could wipe a HPE Gen 8 machine without faffing with a screen and OS

Man there are about 1000 different ways to make a ISO and about 3 of them actually result in a bootable image on all BIOS + UEFI + HP

https://github.com/benjojo/headless-ipmi-reset

FWIW, It seems like one of the old Twitter ASNs AS63179 seems to be now doing heavy web scraping (presumably for grok), you can probs get away with dropping the whole thing

No thank you, I would rather do some incredibly unpleasant things than that

Soliciting advice for email newsletter sending services (for opt-in bgp.tools changelog updates etc)

Looking for:

A) Ones you have used first hand
B) Ones that are hosted in Europe (EU/UK/CH)

I do my own transactional email but I am not brave enough to do newsletters

Put a block of ice on my passively (via a large block of metal) cooled router since it's hot today, and yup, impressive how the cool-ness stuck around after removing it

I am really looking forward to tomorrow when I'm not boiling alive, a simple debugging session for a big fix took way too long just now

*inhales* HONK!!

A classic situation

Cor, RIPE just had a Brexit referendum moment

51.12% to a 48.88% vote

On a incredibly contentious topic that has been squabbled for years

Or 68 votes

This will surely not have any long running consequences to the mailing list arguments...

CSI_6919-Kopie
Flyby of a Wagtail (Motacilla alba)
Surpsiringly hard as they fly really fast and the wings are often then not closed while its in a bomb-bird mode as they are not really gliding. 

1/4000s, F5.6, ISO2500

#bird #photography #nature #birdphotography #wagtail

The puzzling habit of networking social events having counterproductively super loud live music

It seems relatively clear at this point that we (the wider industry) now have an extremely good C/C++ linters, with the only downside that they are expensive (relative to previous tools) to run.

Much like the "if your company depends on running other people's x86 code, then Spectre/Meltdown/etc are devastating", I think if your company is/was depending on the user separation boundaries in the OS to work, then you are in a lot of trouble.

[Unauth'd file read/Local Priv Esc]'s have always kind of been low(er) hanging fruit, but they are nowhere near as cool/good at RCEs.

Now that we have machines to find these at reasonable competence and speed, it is probably a good time to look at anything that you run that [processes user supplied data, or speaks over the network] that is written in C/C++ and find memory safe alternatives. It's not those memory safe alternatives are going to be bug free, but they are far less likely to cause you to need to upgrade your kernel every few days to urgently catch up with local LPE's

Even if you are not going to use the new auditing systems for whatever reason, the "enemy" (whether that is your intelligence agencies, ransom gangs, etc) will have no problem trading a few 100$ for what used to cost $10,000's to do.

The Debian Bookworm -> Trixie upgrade path is by far the [worst/most explosive] I have in recent memory, on the same level of tricky as the sysvinit -> systemd migration

The sysctls location change being the #1 killer, but there are so many paper cuts in that particular upgrade to keep an eye out for