* Posts by Niek Jongerius

9 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Niek Jongerius

*sigh* - Another one of those sad people who don't have the balls to own up when they make a mistake.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Niek Jongerius

Re: Similar but different...

Eerily similar to a test I did. We had to network a building across a road, and got a set of directional dishes. Set them up inside, on dish at my desk, the other one through an open hallway into another office, about 40 feet away. The connection was crappy at best. After many aligning attempts and teeth gnashing, it was time to call tech support. I explained the setup, the guy asked if I throttled the gain on both ends. Turned out they were at full blast, and basically completely blinding each other. Turning it down to the lowest setting made it all sing and dance.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Niek Jongerius

Zap!

The people picking and packing orders and doing inventory at a previous employer used a barcode scanner to track inventory. The application however required an "enter" to finish the scan. They regularly received pallets full of products, which meant "scan" - "key click" - "scan" - "key click" etc. They had to do this as a two-person job - one scanning and yelling "yup", the other clicking. We created a small barcode simulating the "enter" click, so that became "scan barcode" - "scan enter" etc. The warehouse chief eventually taped the barcode to his forehead, so he could "shoot product" - "shoot himself".

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Niek Jongerius
Mushroom

Who, me?

Time for a new installment on Monday!

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Niek Jongerius

"the server she had just restarted was not in the test environment"

Been there, done that. Trying to restart the SCO Unix box I was working on, and after the "reboot" command was greeted with "connection closed by foreign host".

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

Niek Jongerius

Sigh

Lately there seems to be an influx of these "ooh-I-messed-up-better-lie-about-it" stories. It is sad to see people trying to save their butts instead of owning up to their mistakes. The only thing I am left with here is a sense of disgust.

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Niek Jongerius

NFT art

Some excellent examples of "NFT art" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7-aoQDvWg

Hacker breaks into Pentagon email system

Niek Jongerius

RE: Some People

"Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature, and favouring consensus over credentials in its editorial process, makes it unauthoritative, and that a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable."

Hm. So if anything on Wikipedia can be unreliable, is this quote also unreliable?

Experts scramble to quash IPv6 flaw

Niek Jongerius

Re: Where is the flaw?

The problem is the source routing - you effectively specify which path packets should take, so you can overload intermediate sites as well when doing the nasty. IPv6 has adopted this feature from IPv4, and in the process made room to specify more hops.

Relying on IP addresses to solve "a real accessibility problem for mobile users" is never going to work. The problem for mobile users is how to recognize and authenticate legit users, and there are other, more reliable ways to do that already, even in IPv6. IPSec, which is an integral part of the full IPv6 standard, provides ways of doing just that. Several IPSec implementations give a mobile user a semi-static IP on the target network, eliminating the wandering IP issue.

Using loose source routing just to recognize mobile users makes no sense.