Category: Nerd Babel
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How to you get there from here?
The Internet is a fantastic creature. I’m not speaking of the information you can find on the internet. Nor am I speaking of the entertainment that is available on the Internet. The mere fact that you can ask for information at your desk or on your phone and somehow that request gets there, and the…
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You Get What You Pay For
My first fiber switch turned out to be a L3 managed “switch”. Way cool. But I purchased a cheap switch and found that it completely undocumented. It has taken me a while to figure things out. The configuration GUI is an What You See Is All You Get type. There is enough there that you…
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Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)
In 1983, CCITT and ISO merged their network definition to create The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection. This is the “famous” seven layer model. Which works for ISO standards but is a poor match for the Internet. The three layers we are interested in are: Physical layer Data link layer Network layer 1…
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There is a reason…
The problem that people have been attempting to solve, for years, is the lack of space in the IPv4 addresses space. There are currently more devices attached to the Internet or “the network” than there are addresses in the IPv4 space. This requires address overlap. The smallest section of a network is the “subnet”. A…
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Are Those Level 4 Plates? (I wish, Nerd Bable)
Sunday was supposed to be the day I migrated a couple of machines. I have a new physical device which is described as a Level 2 switch with SFP+ ports. The idea is to replace my small mixed routers, 2 SFP+ ports plus some RJ45 ports with either a L2 SFP+ only switch or an…
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Why Is It So Slow? Or How Many Bottlenecks?
My mentor, Mike, use to say “There is always a bottleneck.” What he meant by this, was that for any system, there will be a place which limits the throughput. If you can find, and eliminate, that bottleneck, then you can improve the performance of the system. Which will then slam into the next bottleneck.…
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One Step Forward, ??? Steps Back
Networking used to be simple. It is unclear to me why I think that. Maybe because when I started all of this, it was simple. Networks are broken down into two major classes, Point-to-Point (P2P) or broadcast. When you transmit on a P2P port, the data goes to a dedicated port on the other side…
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Bad Hardware Design
I have had good luck with picking up discarded computers, upgrading them, and making them functional members of the computer or services farm. A computer consists of persistent storage (disk drives and SSD), dynamic storage (memory), a processor (CPU), and I/O devices. Data is read from disk into memory, the processor then either executes it…
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Two Factor Authentication
There are two parts to access control, the first is authentication, the second is authorization. Authentication is the process of proving you are who you claim to be. There are three ways to prove you are who you say you are, something you know, something you have, or something about you. When you hand your…
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Data Security
Data security is the protection of your data throughout its lifecycle. Let’s pretend you have a naughty image of yourself that you don’t want anybody else to see. The most secure way of protecting that image is to have never taken that image in the first place. It is too late now. If you put…