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Hope you never notice the outages I cause. Knows where the RFC2616 bodies are buried. recurse.com SP'2 18 / "The bgp.tools guy"

Follow me using: @benjojo@benjojo.co.uk in your client

benjojo posted 29 May 2025 14:14 +0000

Thanks Google AI Overview - UK Rail penalty fare speed-run

a google search for "contactless card cambridge north" that has a google ai overview of yes you can use contactless cards at cambridge north, the next image is a screenshot of a tweet three weeks ago from the rail operator claiming that you cannot. a google search for "contactless card cambridge north" that has a google ai overview of yes you can use contactless cards at cambridge north, the next image is a screenshot of a tweet three weeks ago from the rail operator claiming that you cannot.

benjojo posted 27 May 2025 18:28 +0000

The constant wide eyed look of a heron is always bemusing, though they are likely just eyeing up food in the water

Two photos of a heron, I personally always see herons as a very bemused creature, but really I think it's just staying very still to look for victims to eat Two photos of a heron, I personally always see herons as a very bemused creature, but really I think it's just staying very still to look for victims to eat

benjojo posted 27 May 2025 13:58 +0000

Reminder that being #1 or #2 on hacker news is about 1.5 page loads per second. If your side explodes when it hits HN, something has gone horribly wrong on your end

A graph showing a background noise of 0.3 or so, and it spikes to 1.5 to 1 requests per second

benjojo posted 26 May 2025 22:14 +0000

WTF happened here I wonder?

Why did a considerable amount of people see a random /17 from Yahoo in their google results for a few days

Google search console claiming that a page on bgp.tools had a 2.02 million percent increase in impressions, and the graph shows a 264k impressions with 16 clicks Google search console claiming that a page on bgp.tools had a 2.02 million percent increase in impressions, and the graph shows a 264k impressions with 16 clicks

benjojo posted 25 May 2025 20:38 +0000

Found some Bees! Love the difference between the 300mm on the camera body I like, vs the 300mm on the body I was pretty meh on

Also, all of these pics are miracles, amazed the bees could hold on in the wind, for getting photos of them was a challenge as they were swishing around

Honey Bee's on lavender Honey Bee's on lavender Honey Bee's on lavender

benjojo posted 25 May 2025 20:33 +0000

Normal internet infra/computer posting will resume soon btw, I'm just having a lot of fun with the new lens on my Fuji and I have good reasons to go to parks at the moment

benjojo posted 24 May 2025 11:53 +0000

Also enjoy some crows, who are a real pain to take good pictures of because my camera does not like metering on a black bird in bright sunlight

Various photos of crows (or other black birds, Idk I am not bird people) Various photos of crows (or other black birds, Idk I am not bird people) Various photos of crows (or other black birds, Idk I am not bird people) Various photos of crows (or other black birds, Idk I am not bird people)

benjojo posted 24 May 2025 11:37 +0000

Squirrel pics!

(the 300mm was a great call, lots of good photos without being in the danger zone of animals)

Various photos of grey squirrels on grass Various photos of grey squirrels on grass Various photos of grey squirrels on grass Various photos of grey squirrels on grass

benjojo posted 23 May 2025 16:13 +0000

I wish there was a easy way to write a fedi bot that posts all of the slightly deep fried AliExpress marketing copy

Various marketing copy mistakes, such as "Pecrod your life", "ultla compact!", "capacity 64GB, stores 16GB of documents", "Enjoy the expanson" Various marketing copy mistakes, such as "Pecrod your life", "ultla compact!", "capacity 64GB, stores 16GB of documents", "Enjoy the expanson" Various marketing copy mistakes, such as "Pecrod your life", "ultla compact!", "capacity 64GB, stores 16GB of documents", "Enjoy the expanson" Various marketing copy mistakes, such as "Pecrod your life", "ultla compact!", "capacity 64GB, stores 16GB of documents", "Enjoy the expanson"

benjojo posted 22 May 2025 13:59 +0000

Some lunch time bird pics on a very grey day

JDn1s322W11W44j88B.jpg 95f9bndG2NMNK35yFL.jpg CPmD8Xwt8J7npdV148.jpg ZfqK14n1sG3BT1qXq4.jpg

benjojo posted 19 May 2025 16:20 +0000

TIL there are PCIe Sound cards (such as the one pictured, a ASUS XONAR_AE) that are actually two devices glued together, a PCIe USB card, and a USB Sound card.

I cannot tell if this is incredibly stupid (this is obviously sub-optimal), or incredibly smart (this will not have any driver issues)

A PCIe sound card

benjojo posted 19 May 2025 14:43 +0000

Thinking about that time the robot called google "smart reply/compose" was trying to tell other people that it was not a robot

A screenshot of google chat, with the message from someone being "are you human?" and the AI response options being "I am indeed", "I guess?", and "yes!"

benjojo posted 19 May 2025 11:38 +0000

This RIPE Atlas probe is soon going to be old enough to have mailing list arguments with, and boasts a industry leading "one nine" uptime over those years

(I'm pretty sure a lot of the time it spent down was when it ate a USB disk and I didn't notice for a few weeks)

It's your probe's birthday !  Dear Ben,    To celebrate your probe's birthday, we are giving you 10463854 credits to use for scheduling your own measurements.  In the last 11 years, your probe was connected for 95.130000% of the time.  Happy measuring and thank you on behalf of everyone at the RIPE NCC and the other RIPE Atlas users.     The RIPE Atlas Team

benjojo posted 18 May 2025 17:56 +0000

DZ: Ben being upset at the state of windows

DZ: Ben being upset at the state of windows

I boot windows 10 in a VM like once every week for basically just microsoft word (for contract review stuff / blog post edits) and excel (Excel still does better in some areas than gdocs)

but holy fuck, the situation just keeps getting worse. I rebooted this time to get:

A) A new splash screen full of crap I don't want like news tickers etc
B) A intro "Welcome to Microsoft 365 with Copilot" that would not go away

How on earth does the rest of the world deal with this, I'm not trying to get on the desktop linux user superiority complex or whatever, but it's such a user hostile environment that is just constantly trying to test my patience with the amount of crap it's going to throw directly into my face every time i'm just trying to use my goddamn computer to do something

Cant believe I even paid for this bloody license

We have to do something about the product managers

(do not reply with, "[Google|Open|Libre]Office can replace MS office", because I assure you it does not, especially in spreadsheets)

vR5PdXL2sZP1mM73LT.png

benjojo posted 18 May 2025 15:17 +0000

A special good afternoon to this crow who seems to be dead set on getting into this apartment

benjojo posted 18 May 2025 15:04 +0000

The faces of someone who now has to host the next Euro Vision, vs the faces of someone who does not

the bbc news interface showing to videos side by side one of them is from austria and people looking like they are crying (probably of joy, but it's hard to know), the other video thumbnail is of the uk who have generally very happy having learned that they have not got any points

benjojo posted 17 May 2025 23:38 +0000

I would like to congratulate AS49450 for having the longest RIPE org-name, causing bgp.tools wanting to display it's name as:

Federal State Budget Institution NATIONAL MEDICAL RESEARCH CENTER FOR OBSTETRICS, GYNECOLOGY AND PERINATOLOGY named after academician V. I. Kulakov of the Ministry of Healthcare of the Russian Federation

(But it gets crushed down to just 56 chars to prevent a CSS explosion)

Rolls right off the tongue right?

benjojo posted 17 May 2025 19:32 +0000

fun fact, it is impossible to locate hard disk screws when you need them

benjojo posted 17 May 2025 18:41 +0000

Signs you have been AFK for a week doing conference stuff

The mastodon "Preparing your home feed... Please stand by"

benjojo posted 17 May 2025 18:31 +0000

good god Lisbon airport is very active on GitHub

The wall of one of the stairwells of Lisbon airport, the wall has tiles on it that look like the green "commits per day" tiles you would see on github, with various shades of green and white

benjojo posted 09 May 2025 18:07 +0000

Introducing the "Tuscolo" Certificate Transparency logs, a new thing that @filippo and I am operating:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/ct-policy/c/KCzYEIIZSxg

For a while the certificate transparency ecosystem has been struggling to keep up with correctness (basically never roll back) and reliability (99% uptime) requirements, to address this there is a updated standard that @filippo worked on, Since he also worked on the first serious implementation of this new standard "sunlight", Port 179 LTD (me) and Geomys (Filippo and friends) are now running a log running this, ensuring there is "skin in the game" for this spec.

This log will be different from the traditional set up of CT logs that involve large MySQL or Cassandra clusters, and instead we just have a single reasonably low cost "bare metal" AMD machine. We expect this log to be around 50 times cheaper to operate than the established CT logs based in the "hyperscalers" (AWS/GCP/Azure/etc).

Tuscolo is currently receiving all Lets Encrypt certificates (as they are issued), hopefully there will be more CA's to come once we have full acceptance in the web browsers (we will likely be the first for a sunlight/new spec log to be accepted)

The "Guess we are doing cirles" meme, but instead the triangles are bgp.tools logos and the circle is the Sunlight CT Log logo, the guy is saying "I guess we doin CT Logs now"

benjojo posted 09 May 2025 16:35 +0000

Today's fun debug adventure, on one of the bgp.tools remote IX collector boxes in Iraq, all DNS packets appear to be ACL'd now. See the difference in mtr's for port 53 vs 54

Not too much of a problem, as just flipping the switch on systemd-resolved to use DNS Over TLS "fixed" the problem. I guess systemd-resolved is good for something then!

Outputs of mtr side by side, the side using UDP port 54 is getting deeper into the network

benjojo posted 07 May 2025 13:09 +0000

Since I've been using my Nikon 300mm zoom leans for more than just reading the model numbers of cell sites recently, I've bought a Tamron 18-300mm F/3.5-6.3 Di III-A VC VXD for the camera body I actually like to use!

Walked around today after getting lunch for some first attempts, the AF is so much faster (to be fair I think my Nikon 300mm is slightly broken anyway)

Various photos of flowers and pidgions Various photos of flowers and pidgions Various photos of flowers and pidgions Various photos of flowers and pidgions

benjojo posted 05 May 2025 12:12 +0000

CW: Ben stares directly at you jump-scare

CW: Ben stares directly at you jump-scare

Why when I launch the front facing camera on my phone does my face slowly distort for the first few seconds? what cursed things are going on in this device?

benjojo posted 02 May 2025 11:13 +0000

Oh cool, Victron's WebUI thing now has a mode that does not involve Websockets+VNC, but instead a WASM thing that talks MQTT... written in C++ & QT with WebGL?

Cool I guess, slightly cursed, but it works beautifully, no obvious jank that I would have expected from such a setup.

Much love to the embedded software engineer that tried out wasm I guess!

Firefox screenshots of a Solar info panel, the debug menus so QT log errors, and websockets view shows MQTT messages flying around Firefox screenshots of a Solar info panel, the debug menus so QT log errors, and websockets view shows MQTT messages flying around Firefox screenshots of a Solar info panel, the debug menus so QT log errors, and websockets view shows MQTT messages flying around

benjojo posted 28 Apr 2025 16:45 +0000

I think another Digital Realty (data center) Madrid site went dark at 14:00 UTC, based on DE-CIX Madrid Route Server prefix graphs

A bgp.tools graph that crashes downwards at 15:00 to 15:15 (UTC+1) time

benjojo posted 28 Apr 2025 15:52 +0000

The uninterruptible power supply, a fine type of machine, apart from when they interrupt themselves by exploding

benjojo posted 28 Apr 2025 14:54 +0000

The internet routing table has lost about 5,000 IPv4+IPv6 prefixes after grid power Spain/Portugal was lost, and the number is still slowly going down as I assume batteries/generators run out.

I assume most prefixes are still announced while their final destinations are unreachable

(Graph is from a one of the sessions bgp.tools has with a T1)

Graph going down from 177511 to 173615

benjojo posted 28 Apr 2025 14:49 +0000

Various Iberian Internet Exchanges have either seen at least 1/2 of traffic (the remaining traffic will be machine to machine, or international), or in some cases 1/4, GigaPix seems to have entirely gone (or the monitoring infra has died)

Lots of traffic graphs, going downwards Lots of traffic graphs, going downwards Lots of traffic graphs, going downwards

benjojo posted 28 Apr 2025 14:35 +0000

📉📈

I guess "spot the fault and then clearing" today, Spain and Portugal being the primary loser

A freqency grid reading in the EU, showing a huge rapid drop at 11:30 AM, followed by a quick recovery

benjojo posted 28 Apr 2025 14:24 +0000

One of the most "benidorm brit" possible things to complain about when a area of 60M people had their grid desync and collapse

BBC news "Power cut chaos in Spain and Portugal" --- Live Reporting  By Owen Amos, Sam Hancock, and Emily McGarvey      European Commission in touch with local authorities to establish cause of outagepublished at 15:20     15:20      The European Commission says it is "in contact" with Spanish and Portuguese authorities "to understand the underlying cause" of today's blackout.      "The commission will keep monitoring the situation and make sure that there is smooth information exchange," a spokesperson for the EU's executive arm says.      Antonio Costa, a former Portuguese premier who heads the European Council of EU member states, is also in contact with the Spanish and Portuguese leaders, EU officials add.     Dark metro tunnel in LisbonImage source, Getty Images     Image caption,      Images of metro stations in darkness are circulating online  Restoring power across Portugal 'could take up to a week'published at 15:12 15:12Breaking  Some final remarks from Portugal's power firm REN, which goes on on to say that, "due to the complexity of the phenomenon and the need to rebalance electricity flows internationally, it is estimated that full normalisation of the network could take up to a week".  Earlier, the head of Spain's electricity network said that restoring power could take between six and 10 hours. 'Extreme temperature variations in Spain' contributed to outage - Portuguese grid officialspublished at 15:10 15:10  We have a bit more for you now from the Portuguese energy company REN (Rede Eletrica Nacional).  It says that "due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'".  As we said in our last post, Spain is yet to respond to these claims. Portugal blames outage on 'fault in Spain's electricity grid'published at 15:07 15:07Breaking  We're now hearing from Portugal's grid operator, REN, which says interruptions to the country's power supply were the result of a "fault in the Spanish electricity grid.  They say this was related to a "rare atmospheric phenomenon", but don't clarify what that means.  Spain is yet to respond to the claim.  We'll bring you more on this in our next few posts. Customers had to leave mid-haircut, says Lisbon residentpublished at 15:04 15:04  Holly Wallis Live reporter  Will David, 40, a Briton living in Lisbon, says he was having a haircut and beard trim in the basement of a barbers in Lisbon when the power went down.  "Customers needing electric razors had to leave in various states of haircut and shave completion," says Will.  Rita, the barber, kindly found him a spot by the window upstairs to finish the cut with scissors and left Will looking "halfway presentable".  "The walk home felt very strange, both with the lack of traffic lights meaning a complete free-for-all for vehicles and pedestrians on the roads - as well as so many people milling around outside their places of work with nothing to do." People queuing for a bus in Lisbon earlier - trains and trams went down in the power cutsImage source, Getty Images Image caption,  People queuing for a bus in Lisbon earlier - trains and trams went down in the power cuts Some phone signal returns - but other problems remainpublished at 14:57 14:57  Josh Parry LGBT and identity reporter  Curtis Gladden, 29, is originally from Liverpool but recently moved to in La Vall D’Uixo, about 30 miles from Valencia.  He tells BBC News his phone signal hadn’t worked for around two hours, which he says was "scary" as he struggled to get updates about what was happening.  Now the signal has returned, he and other locals are using the time without electricity to get outside and enjoy a drink in the town’s pavement cafes.  It’s a local holiday in some parts of Spain, known as Saint Vincent Ferrer’s day.  Curtis and his partner Miguel were hoping to join in the festivities but say they are "uncertain" whether they’ll take place.  He says: "Nothing is working; we came to get some food and a drink but they can’t cook without electricity. There’s supposed to be a festival today but we’re not sure if it will happen now." Tables in La Vall D’Uixo Image caption,  Residents in La Vall D’Uixo are taking the chance to have a drink outside during the power outage In London, Gatwick reports delayed flights to affected areaspublished at 14:57 14:57  Molly Stazicker Transport reporter A shot from outside Gatwick departuresImage source, Reuters  In our last post, we brought you an update from some of the affected airports across Spain and Portugal.  Now Gatwick, in London, has also reported issues - telling the BBC it's experiencing short delays on flights to Spain and Portugal.  The airport says there have so far been no cancellations and it's waiting for the issues to be resolved.  Meanwhile, airline Ryanair says it's monitoring potential disruptions to flights operating to and from all airports in mainland Spain and Portugal. Delays at Spanish and Portuguese airportspublished at 14:53 14:53  Let's have a quick look now at the situation at airports.  Madrid's international airport - Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas - and Barcelona's Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Pratairport currently have notices saying "some incidents are occurring" as a result of the outage. The airports add that contingency generators are active, but warn anyone travelling to check with airlines as disruptions may affect access and ground transportation.  Lisbon and Porto airports similarly warn that "operation constraints" may occur.  Portuguese news agency Lusa is reporting that airport operator Ana has activated emergency generators - enabling essential operations to continue in Porto and Faro, but Lisbon is seeing further limitations.  Looking at departure boards, airports including Madrid, Barcelona and Porto are seeing delays. I'm teaching in the dark, says Lisbon-based teacherpublished at 14:49 14:49  Bernadette McCague BBC News  Emily Thorowgood, who's from Bristol but who works as a teacher in an international school in Lisbon, has told the BBC she is currently "teaching in the dark" after the power went off at around noon local time.  "Lots of parents are taking their children out due to the power cuts," she says.  "It was flashing on and off for a long while but seems to have finally given up." A queue at a cash machine in Lisbon earlier - card payments are down across the cityImage source, Getty Images Image caption,  A queue at a cash machine in Lisbon earlier - card payments are down across the city 'My husband is driving around, trying to find an open petrol station'published at 14:45 14:45  Bernadette McCague BBC News A closed pump in Castellon, north-east SpainImage source, EPA Image caption,  A closed pump in Castellon, north-east Spain  Lesley has lived in Spain for 11 years with her husband. The couple are currently based in Murcia, Spain.  "There's very little news about what's happened," she tells the BBC.  "We are worried about food, water, cash and petrol in case this goes on for a couple of days."  She says there's "more to worry about" than the Madrid Open tennis tournament being suspended.  "My husband is driving around now trying to find a petrol station that's open to get petrol for the generator so that we can plug in the fridge." Spanish PM hosting national security meetingpublished at 14:39 14:39Breaking Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wears an earpiece and a suitImage source, EPA  Pedro Sanchez is currently hosting an "extraordinary" meeting of Spain's national security council, the prime minister's press office says in a statement on social media, external.  We're yet to hear an update from the meeting, but when we do we'll let you know. The view from Benidorm: 'If you haven't got a drink, you're out of luck'published at 14:32 14:32  James Kelly BBC News  In the Spanish resort of Benidorm, Mark England tells us how the lack of power has disrupted his holiday.  He says he and his partner Jonnie had gone for lunch when the lights in the dining room started to go off.

benjojo posted 24 Apr 2025 15:45 +0000

switch:~# ethtool -m swp12
	Identifier                                : 0x03 (SFP)
	Extended identifier                       : 0x04 (GBIC/SFP defined by 2-wire interface ID)
	Connector                                 : 0x07 (LC)
[...]
	Length (SMF,km)                           : 0km
	Length (SMF)                              : 0m
	Length (50um)                             : 0m
	Length (62.5um)                           : 0m
	Length (Copper)                           : 10m
	Length (OM3)                              : 70m
	Laser wavelength                          : 850nm

Hmm, a the 850nm optic can do 10 meters over copper I see... Sure I guess

benjojo posted 23 Apr 2025 15:38 +0000

Trying to bring up a box without any BaseT ports, went into the spare optics box, picked something that looks vaguely 10G SFP+ stuck it in the workstation and uh, dmesg was not happy

System basically said

this optic is ass, interface terminated

no seriously, even reloading the driver wont bring that port back >:(

ixgbe 0000:c1:00.0: failed to initialize because an unsupported SFP+ module type was detected  / removed PHC on enp193s0f0 ixgbe 0000:c1:00.0: failed to initialize because an unsupported SFP+ module type was detected  / removed PHC on enp193s0f0

benjojo posted 23 Apr 2025 14:12 +0000

A Lot of Questions Already Answered By the Company Name

UK companies house screenshot Previous company names: NOT MONEY LAUNDERING LTD

benjojo posted 21 Apr 2025 09:06 +0000

So, I'm not saying there's a coincidence here but... there is a little bit of one right?

A screenshot of Liz trust meeting the Queen for which she died one day after, a screenshot of a guardian article as the Pope met JD Vance, the Pope then died one day after this A screenshot of Liz trust meeting the Queen for which she died one day after, a screenshot of a guardian article as the Pope met JD Vance, the Pope then died one day after this

benjojo posted 19 Apr 2025 15:02 +0000

root@blah:~# sensors
...

power_meter-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
power1:        4.29 MW (interval = 300.00 s)

Hmm yeah, Thanks HP, I am sure that the thing under my desk is 0.015% of the total grid consumption in the UK...

benjojo posted 18 Apr 2025 20:03 +0000

I mean weird place to put the databases, but sure I guess

A pciture of a train platform, and a small techical building between the two platforms, there are three white boxs attached to the wall, both outside ones are named "AWS DB"

benjojo posted 16 Apr 2025 11:29 +0000

Flying panda trying to get the last bit out of this lavender plant

A bumble bee on a lavender plant

benjojo posted 15 Apr 2025 16:01 +0000

Hmm, Last night (Euro time) there was a huge flood of BGP updates into the internet, looking deeper it appears that CERNET3 went down and up for a moment.

This would normally be a non issue, the BGP table sees a steady stream of updates per second of people mostly doing the same thing (your average full routing table has about 10 changes per second). Except CERNET3 is a bit weird. It has 4096 IPv6 /32's, and ASNs... CERNET3 calls this "slicing", and I've never really figured out what benifit this gives them to export 4096 prefixes, let alone 4096 ASNs.

Anyway, whatever happened hit all of the "slices". Causing a huge flood of updates to flood around the internet.

Not necessarily fatal (though this did cause a noticeable CPU spike, the only reason I noticed it), it does feel like poor behavior here to design a network where this impact is this visible from the outside!

A graph showing a huge spike in updates

benjojo posted 11 Apr 2025 22:47 +0000

I suppose I am glad that stripe has me covered so when I start making sixteen figures ( quadrillion? ) worth of revenue in a month

a stripe tax invoice, that says Exchange Rates (derived from average rate for period) GBP / EUR 1.1952456206817272 EUR / GBP 0.8366481187604219

benjojo posted 11 Apr 2025 17:32 +0000

I bought this cheap ESP32 Dev board for something and IT'S SO TINY!!

tiny oled!!

A photo of my hand with a tiny development board on it the development board is no bigger than a USB a plug