Category: Nerd Babel
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Thank You for the tools…
There are a few servers that are too old. There is a need for a few more servers to get a room level redundancy. These things can be expensive. As I’m cheap, I’ve been using older servers that accept 3.5″ disk drives. Some except 2 drives, some 6, some could accept more, but the case…
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Tick Tock, The Clock is Done
The amount of grief I’ve put up with to get this working buggers imagination. To have a NTP stratum 1 server, you need to have a certain set of capabilities. First, you need a stratum 0 device. This is an atomic clock or a GPS receiver. You need a method to communicate with the GPS…
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One Step Forward n Steps Back (geek)
I’ve known about “System On a Chip” and “System On a Board” for many years. I have one of the early embedded software development kits, including some TI chipset. The most common style of these today is likely the Arduino class of SoC. These things are incredible. An idea I pitched years ago, for potential…
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A Little Shake of Pepper (what is a nanosecond)
Correction(s): I made the mistake of trusting Google’s AI answer. Speed of light: Time Distance 1s 299,792,458m 0.001s(1ms) 299,792.458m 0.000001s(1us) 299.792m 0.000000001s(1ns) 0.2997m (299.7mm) 0.000000000001s(1ps) 0.0002997m (0.2997mm) Sorry for that. A pepper grain is the size of a picosecond. A nanosecond is around 11.7 inches, which makes much more sense. My mentor, Mike, had so…
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Tick Tock, More Clock Stuff
There are two network time protocols in use today. One is the NTP protocol, the other is PTP. I have no idea what the PTP looks like, I know that it requires hardware support. The goal of NTP is to create a local clock that is accurate to less than 1ms from sources that have…
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It’s Late, Nerd Babble/status
We are in the process of moving from the image above to the image below. At least in terms of what the infrastructure looks like. Today I decommissioned an EdgeRouter 4 which features a “fanless router with a four-core, 1 GHz MIPS64 processor, 3 1Gbit RJ45 ports, and 1G SFP port.” When they say “MIPS64”…
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What time is it?
I have hundreds of dollars worth of GPS equipment. Not counting the cell phones we all carry with us. I wanted to try to create a Stratum 0 NTP clock. The last time I attempted this, I used a Garmin handheld GPS. Time to sync was in minutes and while the power draw as trivial,…
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The Guessing Game. Guessing Passwords
My wife read my article on passwords and “got it”. Which is nice. I was attempting to explain how password crackers use rule sets to modify input dictionaries to create more guesses from a single word list. I decided to see how much things have advanced. To say I was shocked would be an understatement.…
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Two Factor Authentication
What we are talking about is “authentication.” Authentication is the method of confirming that you are who you say you are. There are three methods to determine authentication: Something only you know Something only you have Something unique about you In the old days, when people carried checkbooks with them and wrote checks for things,…
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Password Security/Password Managers
Password Security There are four ways of cracking a password. Guess the password Brute Force the password Go around the password authentication Trick the password from the owner If your password is easy to guess, then it is a weak password. Examples of weak passwords are: password, 1234, YOUR_NAME, BIRTHDAYS. Many things use a four…