Planning the Next Extended Coffee Break

Long story short: ipSpace.net is going on an extended coffee break on June 24th 2021 reducing the scope of activities on July 1st 2021. You can stop reading; the rest of the blog post is full of details you probably don’t care about.

What exactly does that mean? Since this blog post was published in January 2021, we pretty much figured out a way forward, and I’m glad we let engineers considering our subscriptions know months in advance what might happen.

Anyway, after investing two lifetimes into this project, and a few planned changes coming just before our regular summer hiatus (see below) it’s time for a longer break an adjustment. ipSpace.net will revert back to Ivan working on some interesting stuff.

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Planning the Next Extended Coffee Break (Part 1)

Long story short: ipSpace.net is going on an extended coffee break on June 24th 2021. You can stop reading; the rest of the blog post is full of details you probably don’t care about.

What exactly does that mean? Honestly, we don’t know yet… but we felt that it’s only fair to let engineers considering our subscriptions know months in advance what might happen.

Also, after investing two lifetimes into this project, and a few planned changes coming just before our regular summer hiatus (see below) it’s time for a longer break. ipSpace.net might be back to business-as-usual after a few months (unlikely), or it could be Ivan working on some interesting stuff (most likely) or ipSpace.net slowly disappearing into the sunset (not impossible).

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Add Friendly ID to a Rails 6 App

Friendly ID, is a ruby gem that makes adding slugs to your Rails records painless giving you nice human readible URI's. Instead of accessing URI's by their database ID: /site/23 they are accessed via /site/hogwarts instead. Much better. In this post I will show you how to add...

Details on the New Desk Layout

Over the holiday break I made some time to work on my desk layout, something I’d been wanting to do for quite a while. I’d been wanting to “up my game,” so to speak, with regard to producing more content, including some video content. Inspired by—and heavily borrowing from—this YouTube video, I decided I wanted to create a similar arrangement for my desk. In this post, I’ll share more details on my setup.

I’ll start with the parts list, which contains links to everything I’m using in this new arrangement.

Parts List

When I shared a picture of the desk layout on Twitter, a number of folks expressed interest in the various components that I used. To make it easier for others who may be interested in replicating their own variation of this setup, here are Amazon links for all the parts I used to build this setup (these are not affiliate links):

  1. WALI Extra Tall Single LCD Monitor Fully Adjustable Desk Mount (qty 2)
  2. WALI Single Fully Adjustable Arm (qty 2)
  3. Pergear TH5 Camera Swivel Mini Tripod Ball Head (qty 2)
  4. Pergear TH3 Pro DSLR Camera Tripod Ball Head
  5. PULUZ Metal Handheld Adjustable 3/8” Tripod/Monopod Extension
  6. Continue reading

The OSI Model: STOP IT!

The OSI model is perhaps the best-known—and perhaps the most-loved—model in the networking world. It’s taught in every basic networking course, and just about every blog (other than this one) has some article explaining the model someplace or another (for instance, here is one of the better examples).

The reality is, however, that I’ve been in the networking business for 30’ish years and I’ve never once used the OSI model for anything practical. I’ve used the model when writing books because just about every book on networking has to have a section on the OSI model. I’ve used the model when writing a paper comparing two different protocols, back in the multiprotocol days (VIP versus IPX versus IP), but we don’t have those kinds of arguments very often any longer.

So, we all learn the OSI model, and yet I don’t know of anyone who actually uses the OSI model in understanding how protocols work, or how to troubleshoot a network. There’s the “it’s a layer two problem” statement, and that’s about the end its useful life, it seems.

Let me make a suggestion—learn, use, and teach the RINA model instead. Okay, so what is the RINA model? It is Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: U.S. Stimulus Bill Pumps Up Broadband

Broadband to the people: A new COVID-19 stimulus bill passed by the U.S. Congress includes $7 billion to help residents connect to broadband and pay their monthly bills, the Washington Post reports. The legislation is one of the largest one-time investments in broadband ever in U.S. history. “Nearly half the money is slated to fund a new monthly benefit for low-income families, aiming to ensure that those who have lost their jobs can stay online at a time when the pandemic has forced millions of people to work, learn and communicate on their devices from home.”

RIP Flash: Adobe has finally killed off the controversial Flash video and animation tool that was a formative technology for the Internet, the Independent says. While Flash was widely used on websites for many years, critics complained about security problems and a poor user experience. In 2009, 99 percent of all PCs with an Internet connection had Flash installed, Adobe has said.

Alexa, what taxes do I owe? The Indian government is working on Alexa-like chatbots to deliver public services, India Today reports. The government has invited bids for a voice assistant similar to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. Using artificial Continue reading

IoT adds smarts to IT asset monitoring

The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to play a key role in monitoring and maintaining internal IT systems and environments. With many IT pros working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic, IT teams are leveraging networked sensors to gauge the performance and condition of servers, storage systems, network devices, and other technology components.IoT can help organizations not only evaluate how well equipment in data centers is performing and when systems need to be updated or repaired, but also monitor environmental conditions and events such as air temperature, humidity, and water leaks. IoT systems can also help organizations detect intrusions that could result in downtime or data breaches.To read this article in full, please click here

Reviving Old Content, Part 3

We had the usual gloomy December weather during the end-of-year holidays, and together with the partial lockdown (with confusing ever-changing rules only someone in Balkans could dream up) it managed to put me in OCD mood… and so I decided to remove broken links from the old blog posts.

While doing that I figured out how fragile our industry is – I encountered a graveyard of ideas and products that would make Google proud. Some of those blog posts were removed, I left others intact because they still have some technical merits, and I made sure to write sarcastic update notices on product-focused ones. Consider those comments Easter eggs… now go and find them ;))

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Reviving Old Content, Part 3

We had the usual gloomy December weather during the end-of-year holidays, and together with the partial lockdown (with confusing ever-changing rules only someone in Balkans could dream up) it managed to put me in OCD mood… and so I decided to remove broken links from the old blog posts.

While doing that I figured out how fragile our industry is – I encountered a graveyard of ideas and products that would make Google proud. Some of those blog posts were removed, I left others intact because they still have some technical merits, and I made sure to write sarcastic update notices on product-focused ones. Consider those comments Easter eggs… now go and find them ;))

Anyway, I also salvaged some of the old content I was stupid enough to publish somewhere else from archive.org. Here it is:

BGP in 2020 – BGP Update Churn

The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol also is related to the rate of dynamic routing updates. If the update rate of BGP is growing faster than we can deploy processing capability to match, then the routing system will lose coherence, and at that point the network will head into periods of instability. This second part of the BGP report looks at the profile of BGP updates across 2020

Suzieq has a GUI

We haven’t blogged for three months. We’ve been busy working on Suzieq, adding features and figuring out where we want it to go. We haven’t blogged about Suzieq for even longer. Since we last blogged about Suzieq, we’ve added tons of new features and platforms. In no specific order, we’ve...

How I Installed Tasmota Firmware on a Treatlife Switch

For years now I've had a light switch that can be programmed to turn itself on/off on a schedule. The switch is programmed with the date, time, time zone, and lat/long and then you can create a schedule such as, "turn the lights on at sun set". It works pretty well except when 1/ daylight savings time starts or stops (the schedule doesn't adjust itself) or 2/ the power goes out (bye, bye all programming).

This slight annoyance coupled with my desire for a project I could geek out on lead me to look into software-controllable light switches.

In this post I'll explain how I flashed the open source Tasmota firmware onto the Treatlife 3-way wall switch which in the end allowed me to control the lights via a home automation controller.

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