My primary, personal computing platform for over 20 years has almost always been Debian on a ThinkPad laptop. Getting Linux running on the latest laptop hardware is often an experience worth documenting, as I have done a few times. I last wrote about Debian on a P15 Gen2 laptop in 2022. That just might have been my last ThinkPad. I recently acquired a Framework 16 and while the ThinkPad has practically nothing in common with it, the cycle of buying a new ThinkPad every three to five years may finally be broken.Read more...
“Why doesn’t this just work?!” is something I’m apt to say about all kinds of devices or systems more complex than a mechanical lever. When problems arise, if it isn’t due to normal wear or obvious damage, the root cause usually just amounts to my ignorance of someone else’s engineering design decision. I’d argue this isn’t necessarily always my fault. It is not easy to truly understand all the nuances of a large system, especially one you didn’t construct.Read more...
The NANOG 87 meeting took place a few days ago. Excluding the hackathon, it was approximately five hours of content each day for three days. Slide decks for all the talks are on the meeting page and the videos have already been put into the TeamNANOG YouTube NANOG 87 play list. This is a very brief, likely imperfect summary of a few of talks from the meeting. I don’t review all talks, because I simply couldn’t attend them all for one reason or another.Read more...
On this date twenty years ago the Internet came as close to a total meltdown as we’ve ever seen since the commercialization of the Internet. A tiny UDP worm payload of just 376 bytes spread to all remotely accessible and vulnerable Microsoft SQL servers listening on port 1434 within a matter of minutes. This tiny payload ultimately infected roughly 75 thousand hosts worldwide and the disruption it caused made international news.Read more...