My collection of vintage PC cards
Recently, I have been gathering some old hardware at my parents’ house, notably PC extension cards, as they don’t take much room and can be converted to a nice display item. Unfortunately, I was not very concerned about keeping stuff around. Compared to all the hardware I have acquired over the years, only a few pieces remain.
Tseng Labs ET4000AX (1989)
This SVGA graphics card was installed into a PC powered by a 386SX CPU running at 16 MHz. This was a good card at the time as it was pretty fast. It didn’t feature 2D acceleration, unlike the later ET4000/W32. This version only features 512 KB of RAM. It can display 1024×768 images with 16 colors or 800×600 with 256 colors. It was also compatible with CGA, EGA, VGA, MDA, and Hercules modes. No contemporary games were using the SVGA modes but the higher resolutions were useful with Windows 3.
This card was manufactured directly by Tseng Labs.
AdLib clone (1992)
My first sound card was an AdLib. My parents bought it in Canada during the summer holidays in 1992. It uses a Yamaha OPL2 chip to produce sound via FM synthesis. Continue reading
Network Break 308: AMD Gobbles Xilinx, Marvell Chops Inphi. Its SmartNIC DPU Week
This week Network Break is about silicon companies Marvel and AMD bulking up to fight competition. Cisco ships a SmartNIC, Catchpoint releases new features and Space Networking.Network Break 308: AMD Gobbles Xilinx, Marvell Chops Inphi. Its SmartNIC DPU Week
This week Network Break is about silicon companies Marvel and AMD bulking up to fight competition. Cisco ships a SmartNIC, Catchpoint releases new features and Space Networking.
The post Network Break 308: AMD Gobbles Xilinx, Marvell Chops Inphi. Its SmartNIC DPU Week appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Strong Reactions and Complexity
In the realm of network design—especially in the realm of security—we often react so strongly against a perceived threat, or so quickly to solve a perceived problem, that we fail to look for the tradeoffs. If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough—or, as Dr. Little says, you have to ask what is gained and what is lost, rather than just what is gained. This failure to look at both sides often results in untold amounts of technical debt and complexity being dumped into network designs (and application implementations), causing outages and failures long after these decisions are made.
A 2018 paper on DDoS attacks, A First Joint Look at DoS Attacks and BGP Blackholing in the Wild provides a good example of causing more damage to an attack than the attack itself. Most networks are configured to allow the operator to quickly configure a remote triggered black hole (RTBH) using BGP. Most often, a community is attached to a BGP route that points the next-hop to a local discard route on each eBGP speaker. If used on the route advertising the destination of the attack—the service under attack—the result is the DDoS attack traffic no longer Continue reading
Nominations Now Open for 2021 Internet Society Board of Trustees Elections
The Internet Society Nominations Committee is now inviting nominations for candidates to serve on the Board of Trustees, effective at the start of the Annual General Meeting which is currently scheduled to be held 31 July-1 August 2021.
In 2020-2021, Organization Members and the IETF will each select two Trustees, and Chapters will select one Trustee. Following an orientation program, all new Trustees chosen by the IETF and Chapters will begin three-year terms commencing with the board’s Annual General Meeting. With respect to the two Organizational Members to be chosen, the candidate with the highest weighted vote count will be seated for a three-year term, while the candidate with the second highest weighted vote count will serve the final year of a three-year term initially served by a Trustee who resigned from the board in mid-term.
The Board of Trustees provides strategic direction, inspiration, and oversight to advance the Internet Society’s mission of preserving the open, globally-connected, trustworthy and secure Internet for everyone. Trustees also currently serve as members of the Internet Society Foundation’s board.
I encourage you and all of your community members to identify appropriate candidates for these positions. Further information regarding the positions, as Continue reading
New Ansible for Networking Engineers Content
When restructuring our online courses we decided to make the video content that was previously part of Ansible online course available with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription.
If you haven’t enrolled into our automation online course (which always included the extra bits) you’ll find the following additional content in our Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar:
New Ansible for Networking Engineers Content
When restructuring our online courses we decided to make the video content that was previously part of Ansible online course available with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription.
If you haven’t enrolled into our automation online course (which always included the extra bits) you’ll find the following additional content in our Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar:
The Arista 750 Series
Today we are introducing the Arista 750 Series Modular Campus switch, a next generation modular platform based on merchant silicon that delivers more performance, more security, more visibility and more power capabilities than any other product in its class.
The Arista 750 Series
Today we are introducing the Arista 750 Series Modular Campus switch, a next generation modular platform based on merchant silicon that delivers more performance, more security, more visibility and more power capabilities than any other product in its class.
The Week in Internet News: Tech Giants Face Hostile Lawmakers
Getting hit from both sides: Executives from Google, Twitter, and Facebook faced criticism from all sides when testifying in the U.S. Senate recently, the Washington Post reports. Democratic senators told the companies they should do a better job with moderating their sites for fake news and conspiracy theories, while Republicans called on the companies to take a more hands-off role with political speech.
Your money, or else: A wave of ransomware attacks have hit nearly two dozen hospitals and healthcare organizations in recent weeks, Wired.com reports. Even after those attacks, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Health and Human Services warned that more may be coming, with an “increased and imminent cybercrime threat” to hospitals and healthcare providers.
Safer Zooming: Videoconferencing provider Zoom has added encryption to free accounts, although the new protections come with a catch, TechCrunch says. With end-to-end encryption enabled for every user joining the call, some other features won’t be available. Users on encrypted calls won’t be able to use features like cloud recording and live transcription, and they won’t be able to chat one on one. Also, the encryption feature will only work with the Continue reading
What are the Elements of Effective Communication?
On a good day, there are different people around. The way we converse with them and communicate is completely different. There are ways we talk to those we are older than us, those younger than we are, those we respect, those who lose our respect with time, and it goes on and on. This article aims to talk about the elements of effective communication.
Elements of Effective Communication
Elements of Effective Communication includes the following:
1. Listen
Whenever we converse with people and we say something, we are simply speaking knowledge we already possess. But whenever we listen to others, most times we get the chance to absorb and learn something new.
Speaking and listening work together. As you communicate with other people, these roles are completely fluid. The speaker might not be talking the entire time. One of these important elements of communication is for each of us as speakers to listen with attention.
2. Try to Be Clear
These elements of Simplicity and Clarity are also two beans in a pod. But these aspects cannot be used synonymously. What one means by clarity is that you shouldn’t have any doubt about what you’re talking about. Speaking with confidence Continue reading
Kubernetes Container Runtimes
I had a recent discussion with my colleagues about Container runtimes supported by Kubernetes, I realized that this topic is pretty complicated with many different technologies and layers of abstractions. As a Kubernetes user, we don’t need to worry about the container runtime used below Kubernetes for most practical purposes but as an engineer, its … Continue reading Kubernetes Container RuntimesRunning Isso on NixOS in a Docker container
This short article documents how I run Isso, the commenting system used by this blog, inside a Docker container on NixOS, a Linux distribution built on top of Nix. Nix is a declarative package manager for Linux and other Unix systems.
While NixOS 20.09 includes a derivation for Isso, it is unfortunately broken and relies on Python 2. As I am also using a fork of Isso, I have built my own derivation, heavily inspired by the one in master:1
issoPackage = with pkgs.python3Packages; buildPythonPackage rec { pname = "isso"; version = "custom"; src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub { # Use my fork owner = "vincentbernat"; repo = pname; rev = "vbe/master"; sha256 = "0vkkvjcvcjcdzdj73qig32hqgjly8n3ln2djzmhshc04i6g9z07j"; }; propagatedBuildInputs = [ itsdangerous jinja2 misaka html5lib werkzeug bleach flask-caching ]; buildInputs = [ cffi ]; checkInputs = [ nose ]; checkPhase = '' ${python.interpreter} setup.py nosetests ''; };
I want to run Isso through Gunicorn. To this effect, I build an
environment combining Isso and Gunicorn. Then, I can invoke the latter
with "${issoEnv}/bin/gunicorn".
issoEnv = pkgs.python3.buildEnv.override { extraLibs = [ issoPackage pkgs.python3Packages. Continue reading
Zero Trust Access Policies for IoT Must be Granular
As IoT devices become more diverse, with varying access requirements, EMA believes granular IoT access policies tailored to the role and function of individual devices will grow more important over time.Python Pieces: Decorators
As some of you know – Im a big believer that we all learn differently. You may read something the first time and immediately grasp the topic whereas I may read it and miss the point entirely. For me, decorators have been one of those things that I felt like I was always close to understanding but still not quite getting it. Sure – some of the examples I read made sense but then I’d find another one that didn’t. In my quest to understand them, I spent a lot of time reviewing a lot of examples and asking a lot of very patient friends for help. At this point, I feel like I know enough to try and explain the topic in a manner that might hopefully help someone else who was having a hard time with the concept. With my learning philosophy out of the way, let’s jump right in….
I want to jump right into a real (albeit not super useful) example of decorators using the full decorator (or shorthand) syntax. Let’s start with this…
def a_decorator(a_function):
print("You've been decorated!")
return a_function
@a_decorator
def print_name_string(your_name):
name_string = "Your name is: " + your_name
return name_string
print(print_your_name("Jon"))