Raspberry Pi bluetooth console

Sometimes you want to connect to a bluetooth on the console. Likely because you screwed something up with the network or filewall settings.

You could plug in a screen and keyboard, but that’s a hassle. And maybe you didn’t prepare the Pi to force the monitor to be on even if it’s not connected at boot. Then it just doesn’t work.

Even more of a hassle is to plug in a serial console cable into the GPIO pins.

But modern Raspberry Pi’s have bluetooth. So let’s use that!

Setting up the service on the raspberry pi

Create /etc/systemd/system/bluetooth-console.service with this content:

[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth console
After=bluetooth.service
Requires=bluetooth.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rfcomm watch hci0 1 getty rfcomm0 115200 vt100
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This sets up a console on bluetooth channel 1 with a login prompt. But it doesn’t work yet. Apparently setting After, Required, and even Requisite doesn’t prevent systemd from running this before setting up bluetooth (timestamps in the logs don’t lie). Hence the restart stuff.

I also tried setting ExecStartPre / ExecStartPost there to enable Bluetooth discoverability, since something else in the boot process seems to turn it back off if I set it Continue reading

How to inventory server storage with PowerShell

Making inventories of computer storage, particularly on severs, is complex due to the number of factors involved. There might be multiple physical media devices each of which contains multiple logical volumes. Volumes could span multiple disks with hardware or software-based RAID configurations. Each volume could be configured with its own drive letter, and folders throughout the file system could be shared on the network.Those inventories are important because gathering data on physical storage media can identify what type of storage is available and what physical storage capacity servers have. PowerShell can help with those inventories, particularly the Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet, which uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) under the covers. Get-PhysicalDisk uses WMI to query the MSFT_PhysicalDisk class, with the WMI class providing numeric values for things like MediaType and BusType, while Get-PhysicalDisk returns descriptive text values.To read this article in full, please click here

How to inventory server storage with PowerShell

Making inventories of computer storage, particularly on severs, is complex due to the number of factors involved. There might be multiple physical media devices each of which contains multiple logical volumes. Volumes could span multiple disks with hardware or software-based RAID configurations. Each volume could be configured with its own drive letter, and folders throughout the file system could be shared on the network.Those inventories are important because gathering data on physical storage media can identify what type of storage is available and what physical storage capacity servers have. PowerShell can help with those inventories, particularly the Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet, which uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) under the covers. Get-PhysicalDisk uses WMI to query the MSFT_PhysicalDisk class, with the WMI class providing numeric values for things like MediaType and BusType, while Get-PhysicalDisk returns descriptive text values.To read this article in full, please click here

About that ‘alarming’ chip shortage — don’t count on new fab plants to help quickly

A US Commerce Department report says the computer chip shortage is even worse than thought; at one point in 2021 there was just a five-day supply worldwide, and there's no sign the situation will improve anytime soon.

Can A Leaner IBM Be Mean Enough To Grow In The Datacenter?

The company was named International Business Machines for a reason, and over the several decades that IBM concentrated on peddling managed services and consulting services to the largest corporations on Earth, with its Global Services behemoth representing two-thirds of its revenues, the company lost touch with, and took for granted, the machine part of its rich and long heritage. …

Can A Leaner IBM Be Mean Enough To Grow In The Datacenter? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Enterprise Wi-Fi 6E Investments: Timing Is Everything

Incorrect proxying of 24 hostnames on January 24, 2022

On January 24, 2022, as a result of an internal Cloudflare product migration, 24 hostnames (including www.cloudflare.com) that were actively proxied through the Cloudflare global network were mistakenly redirected to the wrong origin. During this incident, traffic destined for these hostnames was passed through to the clickfunnels.com origin and may have resulted in a clickfunnels.com page being displayed instead of the intended website. This was our doing and clickfunnels.com was unaware of our error until traffic started to reach their origin.

API calls or other expected responses to and from these hostnames may not have responded properly, or may have failed completely. For example, if you were making an API call to api.example.com, and api.example.com was an impacted hostname, you likely would not have received the response you would have expected.

Here is what happened:

At 2022-01-24 22:24 UTC we started a migration of hundreds of thousands of custom hostnames to the Cloudflare for SaaS product. Cloudflare for SaaS allows SaaS providers to manage their customers’ websites and SSL certificates at scale - more information is available here. This migration was intended to be completely seamless, with the outcome being enhanced Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Singtel And The Cloud-Ready Network (Sponsored)

Tech Bytes: Singtel And The Cloud-Ready Network (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk with sponsor Singtel, a global provider of network services. We dive into the services Singtel provides, including Internet, MPLS, IP transit 4G/5G, and why you might want to consider Singtel for cloud connectivity. Our guest is Mark Seabrook, Global Solutions Manager at Singtel.

The post Tech Bytes: Singtel And The Cloud-Ready Network (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 131: Monitoring The Cloud From The Cloud

Day Two Cloud 131: Monitoring The Cloud From The Cloud

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast delves into issues about monitoring all the things, including the notion of monitoring the cloud...from the cloud. Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks discuss the pros and cons of DIY vs. using a service, differences between monitoring infrastructure stacks and applications, what to monitor and why, how to deal with all that data, the necessity of alerting, constructing meaningful dashboards, and more.

The post Day Two Cloud 131: Monitoring The Cloud From The Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

NSX-T 3.2 Introduces Migration Coordinator’s User Defined Topology Mode

VMware NSX-T 3.2 is one of our largest releases — and it’s packed full of innovative features that address multi-cloud security, scale-out networking, and simplified operations. Check out the release blog for an overview of the new features introduced with this release.

Among those new features, let’s look at one of the highlights. With this release, Migration Coordinator now supports a groundbreaking feature addressing user-defined topology and enabling flexibility around supported topologies. In this blog post, we’ll look at the workflow for this new feature — starting with a high-level overview and then digging into the details of User Defined Topology. For more information on Migration Coordinator, check out the resource links at the end of this blog.

Migration Coordinator

Migration Coordinator is a tool that was introduced about 3 years ago with NSX-T 2.4. It enabled customers to migrate from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center. It’s a free and fully supported tool built into NSX-T Data Center. Migration Coordinator is flexible, with multiple options enabling multiple ways to migrate based on customer requirements.

Prior to NSX-T 3.2, Migration Coordinator offered two primary options:

1. Migrate Everything: Migrate from edges to compute, to workloads in an automated fashion and with a workflow that resembles an in-place upgrade on existing Continue reading

The Normalization of Hybrid Work

DPU-Based Smart Interfaces And The Future Of Network Functions And Security At The Edge

This article was originally posted on Packet Pushers Ignition on April 26, 2021. Data center virtualization exacerbated problems for network security designs that relied on a handful of appliance-based (whether physical or virtual) control points, which typically focused on external threats. With advanced persistent threats (APTs) that focus on compromising internal systems, security strategies must […]

The post DPU-Based Smart Interfaces And The Future Of Network Functions And Security At The Edge appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Landscape of API Traffic

In recent years we have witnessed an explosion of Internet-connected applications. Whether it is a new mobile app to find your soulmate, the latest wearable to monitor your vitals, or an industrial solution to detect corrosion, our life is becoming packed with connected systems.

How is the Internet changing because of this shift? This blog provides an overview of how Internet traffic is evolving as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have taken the centre stage among the communication technologies. With help from the Cloudflare Radar team, we have harnessed the data from our global network to provide this snapshot of global APIs in 2021.

The huge growth in API traffic comes at a time when Cloudflare has been introducing new technologies that protect applications from nascent threats and vulnerabilities. The release of API Shield with API Discovery, Schema Validation, mTLS and API Abuse Detection has provided customers with a set of tools designed to protect their applications and data based on how APIs work and their challenges.

We are also witnessing increased adoption of new protocols. Among encryption protocols, for example, TLS v1.3 has become the most used protocol for APIs on Cloudflare while, for transport protocols, we Continue reading

Hashing out the hash command on Linux

When you type “hash” on a Linux system, you could get one of two very different responses depending on the shell you are using.If you are using bash or a related shell such as ksh, you should see a list of the commands that you have used since your terminal session began, sometimes with a count of how many times each command was used. This can be more useful than using the history command if you just want to see your very recent command activity, but the hash command is not a single executable. Instead, it relies on your shell.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux hash in bash Here’s an example of the hash command run in bash:To read this article in full, please click here

Hashing out the hash command on Linux

When you type “hash” on a Linux system, you could get one of two very different responses depending on the shell you are using.If you are using bash or a related shell such as ksh, you should see a list of the commands that you have used since your terminal session began, sometimes with a count of how many times each command was used. This can be more useful than using the history command if you just want to see your very recent command activity, but the hash command is not a single executable. Instead, it relies on your shell.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux hash in bash Here’s an example of the hash command run in bash:To read this article in full, please click here

Three Dimensions of BGP Address Family Nerd Knobs

Got into an interesting BGP discussion a few days ago, resulting in a wild chase through recent SRv6 and BGP drafts and RFCs. You might find the results mildly interesting ;)

BGP has three dimensions of address family configurability:

• Transport sessions. Most vendors implement BGP over TCP over IPv4 and IPv6. I’m sure there’s someone out there running BGP over CLNS¹, and there are already drafts proposing running BGP over QUIC².
• Address families enabled on individual transport sessions, more precisely a combination of Address Family Identifier (AFI) and Subsequent Address Family Identifier.
• Next hops address family for enabled address families.

Three Dimensions of BGP Address Family Nerd Knobs

Got into an interesting BGP discussion a few days ago, resulting in a wild chase through recent SRv6 and BGP drafts and RFCs. You might find the results mildly interesting ;)

BGP has three dimensions of address family configurability:

• Transport sessions. Most vendors implement BGP over TCP over IPv4 and IPv6. I’m sure there’s someone out there running BGP over CLNS¹, and there are already drafts proposing running BGP over QUIC².
• Address families enabled on individual transport sessions, more precisely a combination of Address Family Identifier (AFI) and Subsequent Address Family Identifier.
• Next hops address family for enabled address families.

Meta plans the world’s fastest supercomputer for AI

Facebook’s parent company Meta said it is building the world's largest AI supercomputer to power machine-learning and natural language processing for building its metaverse project.The new machine, called the Research Super Computer (RSC), will contain 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 4,000 AMD Epyc Rome 7742 processors. It has 2,000 Nvidia DGX-A100 nodes, with eight GPU chips and two Epyc microprocessors per node. Meta expects to complete construction this year.World's fastest supercomputer is 3x faster than No. 2 RSC is already partially built, with 760 of the DGX-A100 systems deployed. Meta researchers have already started using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research with the goal of eventually training models with trillions of parameters, according to Meta.To read this article in full, please click here