birds

Cat

"if you have been on a video call in the past year or so, you have probably been on a call that a AI assistant has joined"

(cite, a CF demo/ad)

-

At this moment, I realised I am clearly in a entirely different orbit of existence to most of the tech companies

You certainly wont regret having a emergency ipset of 3.5M entries:

[8690887.043966] SLUB: Unable to allocate memory on node -1 (gfp=0x8020)
[8690887.043969]   cache: kmalloc-64, object size: 64, buffer size: 64, default order: 0, min order: 0
[8690887.043974]   node 0: slabs: 32738, objs: 2095232, free: 0
[8691714.855952] ipset: page allocation failure: order:0, mode:0x200020
[8691714.855965] CPU: 0 PID: 11215 Comm: ipset Not tainted 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1
[8691714.855967] Hardware name: Bochs Bochs, BIOS Bochs 01/01/2011

I'm sure that every packet that needs to this ipset is like when something drives into a concrete wall

aww yeah, it's that week again

adding /* Ansible managed */ to the top of my my config files I don't want anyone to touch as a psyop.

It's not like I use Ansible, but that same thing did just trick me on another system into searching for a Ansible that didnt exist, so well done past operator

Is anyone keeping a high score board for sizes of GDPR polycules of various sites?

this morning I've made the choice to close 300 forum sites that have about 275k monthly active users, nearly all from the UK.

I've run forums for over 28 years, and did so to build families for those without families, to try and create a cure for social isolation and loneliness, to combat suicide, to create joy and love out of nothing but connections between people.

and it worked. it still works.

but on the 16th March 2025 I will delete the virtual servers running it all... that date is important, it's the last day before the UK Online Safety Act goes into enforcement.

I run these communities philanthropically, giving my time and money to do so, I ask nothing back, I just help build a nicer World.

but the scope of the Act is too broad, and my forums come under it... it does not matter that it's run by an individual and not a company, that it loses money every month... merely by being linked to the UK and allowing users to speak to users... it's within scope.

the penalties of non-compliance would be so devastatingly ruinous to me, that I don't see I have a choice... I must now perform a social harm to protect myself.

this is devastating.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/

I cannot even express what these forums have achieved... the marriages, births, support for those with cancer, the love, the communities they have created.

Happy Xmas lights testing the RCD/GFCI season

I was annoyed that the bank my biz uses is increasing prices by 80%, and then I looked at NatWest and see that they charge at least £0.35 to do anything (receiving money, cash, paying something on card, really, the whole lot!) and now I am somewhat less upset

Y'all know what... this #X11 -> #Wayland switch is a great parallel on why we haven't ditched and rewritten #FRRouting yet:

Yes, it's >25 year old code, some of it truly toxic and radioactive, and some really poor design too.

But writing a new one is yrs of pain to get it to 90% (that also need to be funded = 404 here), and then a decade to fix half the edge case hellbugs.

It's written in the blood of previous users&bugs. (h/t @benjojo for that idiom, I had no wording for that concept before)

One for the Brits at the moment

@benjojo HDMI to two cigarettes adapter vibes.

Double ~~barrelled~~ RJ45 QSFP+ module anyone? This monstrosity gets you 2x10G BASE-T in a single QSFP+ port (you are still throwing away 50% of port capacity here though)

It bends around tight spots by the looks of it as well!

HPE Synergy Dual 10GBASE-T QSFP+ 30m RJ45 Transceiver 838327-B21

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196729269081

ooh, Kernel space OpenVPN dataplane on net-dev

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20241209-b4-ovpn-v14-0-ea243cf16417@openvpn.net/T/

The KEX/Auth,etc stuff is still user space with this, vs wg being entirely kernel space

Unsure what to think about this, seems like a "well if wg can do it, why can't we"

Keep having to slap my wrist whenever I nearly use sudo in VSCode terminals, like no! A chrome window does not get to elevate to root in any way!

@benjojo https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/coldwar-us-nasa-m113-armored-rescuer/

Thinking about that NASA branded tank I saw at NASA Ames a few months ago

Why did/does NASA need a tank

mmm, the average internet background noise per /24 is about 92 pps at the moment

I mean sure, You can spend all of this time evading advanced memory corruption detection, ASLR, W^X, etc. But have you considered just shoving funny bash strings into every possible hole and seeing if stuff is so busted that it will just run it anyway?

(This compromised a non zero amount of people)

Wow, when did 28TB 3.5" CMR drives show up on the casual market?!

Though looking at ST28000NM000C, the transfer speeds are still not really getting any better. You are still looking at less than 300MiB/s on a 28T spinner...

(You can get 32T SMR from Seagate)

I love the idea of the DoD using Matrix during what may turn out to be pretty eventful next few years.

Coast Guard: We are seeing unknown boats on the western sea board
Air Force: [Unable to decrypt message]
Army: [Unable to decrypt message]
NATO: [Unable to decrypt message]

New blog post!

Ever wondered about the process that grants RFC numbers for documents? Well, worry no more, introducing:

--

The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/rfc-in-38-simple-steps

Ah yes, the .va (Holy See/Vatican) TLD had a .com NXDOMAIN=NOERROR moment it seems, just without the site finder and more weird fingerprinted CNAMEs

https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2024-December/022734.html

Maybe I just have a aversion to calling myself a director/ceo/whatever, But I can't think of a good and non eww thing to put into a "Position" box for a single guy company

$ javaws Downloads/launch\(1\).jnlp 
...
Unrecognized VM option 'PermSize=32M'
Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.

Why must javaws be like this (every major version breaks most workarounds to make BMC console applets work)

TIL (complete with a moment of "oh shit, what now?") that bellingcat mentions AS206924 (my ASN), but actually it's so much cooler, they have what is partly a "how to use bgp.tools for journalism investigations": https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2024/03/01/using-open-source-internet-routing-tools-to-monitor-a-sanctioned-russian-bank/

Signs that your SEO game was is so good that everyone* hates you for it

(source)

* "everyone", being the 34,696 who seemingly pay for a search engine

My brand new (and expensive) 1G DWDM optic doesn't work so I will likely have to go back to slough >:C

So there is the term "COTS" for Commercial-Off-The-Shelf, however we could just rearrange all of the main L3 router vendors at the moment to form:

"JANC" (Juniper Arista Nokia Cisco)

Much better

Wondering if I should rig up a LiveSpit for my ccc talk... Not to make me speed through the slides, but to keep me at a predictable pace as I tend to go way too fast otherwise. Seems like a "fun"/easy to grasp way to gauge if I am over/under pace

@benjojo Supernatural Ingredients

Proud of myself that if I type "tw" into the browser bar it no longer suggests twitter, simply because I dont go there enough anymore to have it weigh in as the ranking (also I assume because the x . com domain move has stolen all of the thunder)

Packaging on my box of green tea claims it has "all natural ingredients"

Which needs me to wonder what a "all unnatural ingredients" tea would be like, like how far can science go? What would it even taste like?

Taking a glance at the orange news website's "Whos Hiring" thread and I get the following impressions:

A) Everything is US healthcare tech now?

B) Some YC companies names are so far detached from meaning (What do you think "goblins", "bloop", "Peanut" do?)

C) I see why friends are staying in their semi-grim situation jobs right now

(It should be made clear, I'm not looking)

I went back into my "stupid blog post ideas" and one of them was "can you boot from FUSE filesystems?", well I'm happy to report that @ersei beat me to it!

(Though my plan was to have a FUSE FS backed by MySQL, so you only needed one place for state (!) when netbooting a box)

Booting Linux off of Google Drive

https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

Stacking the "please be dim/quiet" bits for testing

It so wimndy that over 69% of all power (20.54GW) in the UK is currently generated via wind farms according to https://grid.iamkate.com/

Ever wanted to see what every(?) Lenovo BIOS is like for the last 10 years? Useful+Strangely Lenovo have you covered with a simulator for a shockingly huge amount of models: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html#/textsimulator/ThinkPad%20T430%20(2347,2342,2344,2345,2349,2350,2351)

Useful I guess if you want to use it blind?

A true chaos thread where only people named Ben can participate

sigh I see, I mean, at least I know what is coming when I fill this out

Grafana stop randomly logging me out challenge (impossible)

Doing a bit of aliexpress safari again, and while this motherboard looks incredibly silly if you added a load of PLX PCIe switch/failover chips you would basically have a motherboard+CPU that is functionally the same as most big carrier routers

Mildly interesting, got a alert of a box going mental on the load avg

 Tasks: 155, 243 thr; 2 running
 Load average: 5922.82 4616.68 2131.84
 Uptime: 151 days(!), 22:30:04

dmesg said

[12507760.522357] INFO: task kcompactd0:32 blocked for more than 1208 seconds.
[12507760.522411]       Not tainted 5.10.[redacted]
[12507760.522446] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
[12507760.522491] task:kcompactd0      state:D stack:    0 pid:   32 ppid:     2 flags:0x00004000

It turned out that one sshfs PID had decided to become a slow moving fork bomb..? Sure I guess, that's a new one

LMAO, does OkCupid run on Excel now???

This just happened recently. I bet this was a botched database migration. Maybe that explains why chat messages are showing out of order too.

LOL, what a dumpster fire.

When stuff says "doing x 100% of the time", like surely that's not very efficient doing something for only 1 amount of time per thread/time

Over in bgptools land, im doing BGP and BGP related processing approximately 24000% of the time

Did you bgp.tools sessions go down ~1 hour ago? Here is the RFO:

It turns out the locking mechanism on one of the uplink ports on a satellite PoP doesn't work, and the RJ45 can move about ~5mm, enough to drop a link when you are fiddling doing something else

Google Earth now has a good web client! And the historical imagery feature is now easily hyperlinkable, I have already wasted a unreasonable amount of time playing with this.

And look! One of the days sat/aerial photos were taken was during Bristol Pride!

Link: https://earth.google.com/web/search/52%c2%b013%2747.4%22N+0%c2%b028%2715.4%22W/@51.45072737,-2.59511422,10.26995062a,367.21371602d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=Cj4iJgokCYZBTcAdKUpAEVCfPOB9zklAGSzxY6OX8eU_IYzngvU-6fi_KhAIARIKMjAxMy0wNy0xMxgBQgIIAToDCgEwQgIIAEoNCP___________wEQAA

Super weird that for the past year+ you just can't transit TCP connections for port 646 (IE: ldp) towards AS6939/Hurricane Electric

Are they patching over some horrible bug in their stack? I mean I don't think anyone is doing multihop LDP, but it's still _weird_ for a carrier to ACL off a TCP/UDP port

Reminds me of the days (maybe still) of Virgin Media dropping all SMB connections at the edge

Even after the bombs hit and there are no humans left, there will be two things that live on:

1) Some perl scripts on running crontab

2) Updates to the Google Cloud Third-Party Subprocessors list