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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Looking at the diagram, I don’t see any issue with the network topology. And the power arrangement also shouldn’t be a problem, unless you require the camera/DVR setup to persist during a power cut.

    In that scenario, you would have to provide UPS power to all of: the PoE switch, the L3 switch, and the NVR. But if you don’t have such a requirement, then I don’t see a problem here.

    Also, I hope you’re doing well now.





  • I’m not any type of lawyer, especially not a copyright lawyer, though I’ve been informed that the point of having the copyright date is to mark when the work (book, website, photo, etc) was produced and when last edited. Both aspects are important, since the original date is when the copyright clock starts counting, and having it further in the past is useful to prove infringement that occurs later.

    Likewise, each update to the work imbues a new copyright on just the updated parts, which starts its own clock, and is again useful to prosecute infringement.

    As a result, updating the copyright date is not an exercise of writing today’s year. But rather, it’s adding years to a list, compressing as needed, but never removing any years. For example, if a work was created in 2012 and updated in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2022, the copyright date could look like:

    © 2012, 2013, 2015-2017, 2022

    To be clear, I’m not terribly concerned with whether large, institutional copyright holders are able to effectively litigate their IP holdings. Rather, this is advice for small producers of works, like freelancers or folks hosting their own blog. In the age of AI, copyright abuse against small players is now rampant, and a copyright date that is always the current year is ammunition for an AI company’s lawyer to argue that they didn’t plagiarize your work, because your work has a date that came after when they trained their models.

    Not that the copyright date is wholly dispositive, but it makes clear from the get-go when a work came unto copyright protection.



  • The original reporting by 404media is excellent in that it covers the background context, links to the actual PDF of the lawsuit, and reaches out to an outside expert to verify information presented in the lawsuit and learned from their research. It’s a worthwhile read, although it’s behind a paywall; archive.ph may be effective though.

    For folks that just want to see the lawsuit and its probably-dodgy claims, the most recent First Amended Complaint is available through RECAP here, along with most of the other legal documents in the case. As for how RECAP can store copies of these documents, see this FAQ and consider donating to their cause.

    Basically, AXS complains about nine things, generally around: copyright infringement, DMCA violations (ie hacking/reverse engineering), trademark counterfeiting and infringement, various unfair competition statutes, civil conspiracy, and breach of contract (re: terms of service).

    I find the civil conspiracy claim to be a bit weird, since it would require proof that the various other ticket websites actually made contact with each other and agreed to do the other eight things that AXS is complaining about. Why would those other websites – who are mutual competitors – do that? Of course, this is just the complaint, so it’s whatever AXS wants to claim under “information and belief”, aka it’s what they think happened, not necessarily with proof yet.


  • Agreed. When I was fresh out of university, my first job had me debugging embedded firmware for a device which had both a PowerPC processor as well as an ARM coprocessor. I remember many evenings staring at disassembled instructions in objdump, as well as getting good at endian conversions. This PPC processor was in big-endian and the ARM was little-endian, which is typical for those processor families. We did briefly consider synthesizing one of them to match the other’s endianness, but this was deemed to be even more confusing haha



  • Your primary issue is going to be the power draw. If your electricity supplier has cheap rates, or if you have an abundance of solar power, then it could maybe find life as some sort of traffic analyzer or honeypot.

    But I think even finding a PCI NIC nowadays will be rather difficult. And that CPU probably doesn’t have any sort of virtualization extensions to make it competitive against, say, a Raspberry Pi 5.



  • To lay some foundation, a VLAN is akin to a separate network with separate Ethernet cables. That provides isolation between machines on different VLANs, but it also means each VLAN must be provisioned with routing, so as to reach destinations outside the VLAN.

    Routers like OpenWRT often treat VLANs as if they were distinct NICs, so you can specify routing rules such that traffic to/from a VLAN can only be routed to WAN and nowhere else.

    At a minimum, for an isolated VLAN that requires internet access, you would have to

    • define an IP subnet for your VLAN (ie /24 for IPv4 and /64 for IPv6)
    • advertise that subnet (DHCP for IPv4 and SLAAC for IPv6)
    • route the subnets to your WAN (NAT for IPv4; ideally no NAT66 for IPv6)
    • and finally enable firewalling

    As a reminder, NAT and NAT66 are not firewalls.




  • Re: 2.5 Gbps PCIe card

    In some ways, I kinda despise the 802.3bz specification for 2.5 and 5 Gbps on twisted pair. It came into existence after 10 Gbps twisted-pair was standardized, and IMO exists only as a reaction to the stubbornly high price of 10 Gbps ports and the lack of adoption – 1000 Mbps has been a mainstay and is often more than sufficient.

    802.3bz is only defined for twisted pair and not fibre. So there aren’t too many xcvrs that support it, and even fewer SFP+ ports will accept such xcvrs. As a result, the cheap route of buying an SFP+ card and a compatible xcvr is essentially off-the-table.

    The only 802.3bz compatible PCIe card I’ve ever personally used is an Aquantia AQN-107 that I bought on sale in 2017. It has excellent support in Linux, and did do 10 Gbps line rate by my testing.

    That said, I can’t imagine that cards that do only 2.5 Gbps would somehow be less performant. 2.5 Gbps hardware is finding its way into gaming motherboards, so I would think the chips are mature enough that you can just buy any NIC and expect it to work, just like buying a 1000 Mbps NIC.

    BTW, some of these 802.3bz NICs will eschew 10/100 Mbps support, because of the complexity of retaining that backwards compatibility. This is almost inconsequential in 2024, but I thought I’d mention it.


  • I’ve only looked briefly into APC/UPC adapters, although my intention was to do the opposite of your scenario. In my case, I already had LC/UPC terminated duplex fibre through the house, and I want to use it to move my ISP’s ONT closer to my networking closet. That requires me to convert the ISP’s SC/APC to LC/UPC at the current terminus, then convert it back in my wiring closet. I hadn’t gotten past the planning stage for that move, though.

    Although your ISP was kind enough to run this fibre for you, the price of 30 meters LC/UPC terminated fibre isn’t terribly excessive (at least here in USA), so would it be possible to use their fibre as a pull-string to run new fibre instead? That would avoid all the adapters, although you’d have to be handy and careful with the pull forces allowed on a fibre.

    But I digress. On the xcvr choice, I don’t have any recommendations, as I’m on mobile. But one avenue is to look at a reputable switch manufacturer and find their xcvr list. The big manufacturers (Cisco, HPE/Aruba, etc) will have detailed spec sheets, so you can find the branded one that works for you. And then you can cross-reference that to cheaper, generic, compatible xcvrs.


  • In my first draft of an answer, I thought about mentioning GPON but then forgot. But now that you mention it, can you describe if the fibres they installed are terminated individually, or are paired up?

    GPON uses just a single fibre for an entire neighborhood, whereas connectivity between servers uses two fibres, which are paired together as a single cable. The exception is for “bidirectional” xcvrs, which like GPON use just one fibre, but these are more of a stopgap than something voluntarily chosen.

    Fortunately, two separate fibres can be paired together to operate as if they were part of the same cable; this is exactly why the LC and SC connectors come in a duplex (aka side-by-side) format.

    But if the ISP does GPON, they may have terminated your internal fibre run using SC, which is very common in that industry. But there’s a thing with GPON specifically, where the industry has moved to polishing the fiber connector ends with an angle, known as Angled Physical Contact (APC) and marked with green connectors, versus the older Ultra Physical Contact (UPC) that has no angle. The benefit of APC is to reduce losses in the ISP’s fibre plant, which helps improve services.

    Whereas in data center and networking, I have never seen anything but UPC, and that’s what xcvrs will expect, with tiny exceptions or if they’re GPON xcvrs.

    So I need to correct my previous statement: to be fully functional as designed, the fiber and xcvr must match all of: wavelength, mode, connector, and the connector’s polish.

    The good news is that this should mostly be moot for your 30 meter run, since the extra losses from mismatched polish should still link up.

    As for that xcvr, please note that it’s an LRM, or Long Range Multimode xcvr. Would it probably work at 30 meters? Probably. But an LR xcvr that is single mode 1310 nm would be ideal.


  • Regarding future proofing, I would say that anyone laying single pairs of fibres is already going to constrain themselves when looking to the future. Take 100 Gbps xcvrs as an example: some use just the single pair (2 fibres total) to do 100 Gbps, but others use four pairs (8 fibres total) driving each at just 25 Gbps.

    The latter are invariably cheaper to build, because 25 Gbps has been around for a while now; they’re just shoving four optical paths into one xcvr module. But 100 Gbps on a single fiber pair? That’s going to need something like DWDM which is both expensive and runs into fibre bandwidth limitations, since a single mode fibre is only single-mode for a given wavelength range.

    So unless the single pair of fibre is the highest class that money can buy, cost and technical considerations may still make multiple multimode fibre cables a justifiable future-looking option. Multiplying fibres in a cable is likely to remain cheaper than advancing the state of laser optics in severely constrained form factors.

    Naturally, a multiple single-mode cable would be even more future proofed, but at that point, just install conduit and be forever-proofed.


  • Starting with brass tacks, the way I’m reading the background info, your ISP was running fibre to your property, and while they were there, you asked them to run an additional, customer-owned fibre segment from your router (where the ISP’s fibre has landed) to your server further inside the property. Both the ISP segment and this interior segment of fibre are identical single-mode fibres. The interior fibre segment is 30 meters.

    Do I have that right? If so, my advice would be to identify the wavelength of that fibre, which can be found printed on the outer jacket. Do not rely on just the color of the jacket, and do not rely on whatever connector is terminating the fibre. The printed label is the final authority.

    With the fibre’s wavelength, you can then search online for transceivers (xcvrs) that match that wavelength and the connector type. Common connectors in a data center include LC duplex (very common), SC duplex (older), and MPO (newer). 1310 and 1550 nm are common single mode wavelengths, and 850 and 1300 nm are common multimode wavelengths. But other numbers are used; again, do not rely solely on jacket color. Any connector can terminate any mode of fibre, so you can’t draw any conclusions there.

    For the xcvr to operate reliably and within its design specs, you must match the mode, wavelength, and connector (and its polish). However, in a homelab, you can sometimes still establish link with mismatching fibres, but YMMV. And that practice would be totally unacceptable in a commercial or professional environment.

    Ultimately, it boils down to link losses, which are high if there’s a mismatch. But for really short distances, the xcvrs may still have enough power budget to make it work. Still, this is not using the device as intended, so you can’t blame them if it one day stops working. As an aside, some xcvrs prescribe a minimum fibre distance, to prevent blowing up the receiver on the other end. But this really only shows up on extended distance, single mode xcvrs, on the order of 40 km or more.

    Finally, multimode is not dead. Sure, many people believe it should be deprecated for greenfield applications. I agree. But I have also purchased multimode fibre for my homelab, precisely because I have an obscene number of SFP+ multimode, LC transceivers. The equivalent single mode xcvrs would cost more than $free so I just don’t. Even better, these older xcvrs that I have are all genuine name-brand, pulled from actual service. Trying to debug fibre issues is a pain, so having a known quantity is a relief, even if it means my fibre is “outdated” but serviceable.


  • In agreement with the other comments, this is indeed a very dense diagram, specifically the right-side. Focusing on that some more, my chief concern is that this novel triangle representation is very easy to misread.

    Let’s take the dot in the middle which has the arrow with “10M”. What would you say the car percentage for that dot is? The axis along the bottom of the triangle is labeled 0 to 100%, and the dot is just to the right of the 50% demarcation. So maybe 52% or 55% seems reasonable, yeah?

    But the axis is deceiving: notice how the demarcation are all slanted at the bottom. The dot is actually representing about 42%, since although the axis is marked horizontally, the line which is 50% slopes north-east rather than straight up. You can see the 50% number itself is actually rotated 60 degrees counter-clockwise.

    The public transit axis on the left of the triangle has its demarcations tilted clockwise by 60 degrees as well. Only the active transport axis matches the conventional Y axis.

    For that UI/UX reason alone, I wouldn’t endorse this as a “great” depiction of statistical data. If a diagram can – intentionally or not – be used to mislead a casual reader, it’s not one we should put up on a pedestal.

    I also had a gripe about the successive colors not being consistent for each mode of transport, but that’s minor and easily corrected. The tilted axes may require some reworking though.