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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • In a previous role at an Internet provider, I was the network engineer in charge of the Anycast DNS cache servers. The company made it some sort of point of pride to buy the cheapest hardware possible. I guess that is the beauty of anycast, failure recovery is pretty much automatic.

    Anyways, the servers were dead cheap, single power supply, single SSD. They ran BSD, but my system engineer and I wanted to convert them to Linux, so we ran a proof of concept for switching. We ran performance tests against the same server hardware with BSD and with Ubuntu, I think we saw loss on the BSD server at 325k QPS and Ubuntu made it closer to 500k QPS. Oh, we had like 16 of these caches and our peak load network wide across all of them was something like 36k QPS.

    It was a pretty cool setup. If I am remembering correctly we used unbound, ExaBGP, IPTables, and a health check script that would trigger the advertisements to our core network. Although we really wanted to switch to Linux (or rather away from BSD), we were primarily driven by the fact that Cisco IOS-XR does not support DNS query IP SLA tests, which we used previously to trigger the route advertisements.


  • I live in New Hampshire and Maine was so terrible with their amber/safety alerts that I shut them off entirely on my phone. I remember getting woken up at 2 or 3am for an abducted child, they knew it was a parent. Later they sent out an ‘extreme’ (whatever the highest level is) threat to human life after a road rage incident where 1 guy shot another guy at an intersection. I was 150 miles away. That is a heck of a radius to set for one guy with a pistol. They ought to save extreme for when a meteor is headed for us or something.















  • I am nearing the end of my rope with Android, I might suggest hanging on with your iPhone for another cycle. My P9 Pro is feeling more and more like just an advertisement data collection machine, and core features like speech to text and notifications have never been worse.

    I don’t own an iPhone, but got an iPad in 2024, and most of what I do on my iPad feels more refined. I was floored this morning when speaking out a comment on the iPad that the text to speech didn’t add a bunch of random periods/caps alongside half a dozen incorrect words. iOS also has basic things like consistent first party podcast, payment, and chat apps that they don’t continually switch out every few years like what Google just did (looking at you Google Podcasts, GPay in USA, and Hangouts). We’re also losing the ability to install apps from outside the walled garden that is then play store at some point soon. I’m not looking forward to learning what that means for my Retroid/Android gaming handhelds.

    If you do jump to Android, consider the Pixel 9 Pro. I hate it the least of anything I’ve tried in then Android universe. Battery life is very respectable, I can actually get 2 full days from a charge. The cameras have somehow fallen in their standard shooting mode, but the pro/high res mode is crispy AF, just a bummer that the file sizes are bigger than they are on my Sony mirrorless. Samsung makes nice hardware but the skin they put on Android is truly terrible. If you use Microsoft work apps on your phone, you’ll appreciate being able to shut them off with one button, and your employer’s limited visibility into your phone will be further reduced to what’s installed in the work container.