Category: Nerd Babel
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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…
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Single Point of Failure?
Resiliency is a goal. I’m not sure if we ever actually reach it. In my configuration, I’ve decided that the loss of a single node should be tolerated. This means that any hardware failure that takes a node of line is considered to be within the redundancy tolerance of the data center. This means that…
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What Did I Buy?
In upgrading from copper to fiber, I’ve been exploring the different options and learning as I go. Some learning curves have been steep, others have been “relearning” what I already knew. One of the biggest things I needed to learn is that there are “switches” that are actually “routers”. That was mind-bending. The other is…
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What Time Is It?
I own a pocket watch. It is beautiful, but I don’t use it very often. I know that I own a couple of watches. One of them is a battery powered solar recharging thing. My standard “watch” today is my cell phone. When I was in high school, I was very interested in accurate time…