• In 2017, Mr. Wilson was arrested for trespass. When searched, it was discovered he had a firearm on him. He did not have a license to carry.

    His case was heard in the lower courts of Hawaii, later it was appealed to the Supreme Court of Hawaii.

    There, the court found that because he had not attempted to get a carry license, he could not claim a Second Amendment defense. They then took multiple nasty shots at the Supreme Court of the United States and in the Bruen opinion.

    Mr. Wilson then filed a petition for writ of certiorari. On the 9th of December, that petition was denied.

    Justice Thomas wrote respecting the denial of certiorari. Justice Alito joined him. Justice Gorsuch also wrote a statement.

    No justice wrote to say they would have granted cert. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all agreed that cert. should be denied.

    In New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. 1 (2022), we singled out Hawaii’s firearms-licensing regime as “analog[ous]” to the New York regime we held unconstitutional. Id., at 15. We explained that States cannot condition an individual’s exercise of his Second Amendment rights on a showing of “special need.” Id., at 70–71. Yet, the Hawaii Supreme Court ignored our holding in the decision below. See 154 Haw. 8, 543 P. 3d 440 (2024). It instead stated that petitioner Christopher Wilson could not invoke the Hawaii regime’s unconstitutionality as a defense in his criminal proceedings because he had never applied for a license. That conclusion contravenes the settled principle that Americans need not engage in empty formalities before they can invoke their constitutional rights, and it wrongly reduces the Second Amendment to a “second-class right.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 780 (2010) (plurality opinion). Although the interlocutory posture of the petition weighs against correcting this error now, I would grant certiorari in an appropriate case to reaffirm that the Second Amendment warrants the same respect as any other constitutional right.
    —Order List (2024)

    Oh my, the Hawaii Supreme Court was spanked, hard.

    The Second Amendment litigators were also chastised. Thomas et al. have stated clearly, “We are not going to grant certiorari on cases that are still in an interlocutory posture.”

    As a Second Amendment litigator, stop appealing during the interlocutory phase. If you win, great. You can find in the appeals. If you are going to lose, lose as quickly as possible, then appeal.

    Appealing TROs and preliminary injunctions just delays getting a win. I’m not even sure it is worth asking for TROs and preliminary injunctions. Again, it is just a delay.

    In the jurisdictions where these battles are being fought, the appeals courts are not on our side. If you request a TRO and it is not granted, the appeal to the circuit court will lose, but it will add months of time to the process, and it increases the costs as well.

    If you request a TRO, and it is granted, the state is going to appeal. Having appealed, the circuit court will stay the TRO, the case then will be scheduled for oral arguments months later.

    We are much better off moving to final judgement as quickly as possible.

            

  • For your Christmas pleasure:

    Originally from Neptune’s Daughter.

            

  • I adore sausage gravy and biscuits. They’re the ultimate comfort food. The biscuits are a wee bit sweet, and the sausage gravy is a bit spicy and savory and creamy, all at once. I always make mine with an egg, though you can do what you want with yours.

    Ingredients for the sausage gravy:

    • 1 lb ground sausage meat (Jones or Jimmy Dean work well)
    • 1 onion, diced
    • 1 to 2 cloves garlic, minced
    • 2 tbsp all purpose flour
    • 1 to 2 cups of milk (regular, cream, or non-dairy is fine)

    In a large pan, brown your ground sausage meat over a medium heat. You want it to be thoroughly cooked, but not crispy or burned. Drain off the fat, and reserve it (pro tip: add a lining of tin foil to a bowl and strain your fat into it… after, use what you want by spooning it out, then discard the rest, wrapped up in the foil). Remove the sausage and set aside.

    Add 2 tablespoons of the fat back into your pan and add in the onion. Saute over a medium heat until the onion until becomes soft and opaque. Add in the garlic and stir continuously for about 30 seconds to a minute. You want the garlic to be fragrant, but not brown or crisp. Add extra fat if necessary.

    Sprinkle the onion mixture with the flour, and stir with a wooden spoon until it’s incorporated and clumpy. If it’s very loose and saucy, you may need a bit more flour. If it’s all white and not mixing into the onion, you may need a bit more fat. The idea is to make a roux.

    Lower your heat to just below medium. Pour in your milk very slowly, about a quarter cup at a time, and stir gently and constantly with a wooden spoon. Work on getting rid of any lumps or bits of unincorporated flour to ensure your gravy comes out smooth. Continue to add your milk until the gravy is a good consistency for you. You want to end up with a smooth, fairly thick gravy that is easy to stir and has no lumps.

    If your gravy “breaks,” meaning it separates into lumpy bits and oily liquid, you can fix it. Add warm water a tablespoon at a time and whisk vigorously in between. This should allow your gravy to emulsify again, and get creamy. The water must be warm, not hot or cold, for this to work.

    Once your gravy is how you like it, add the sausage back in and stir to mix it well. Set aside until your biscuits are done!

    Now it’s time to make the biscuits!

    (more…)

            

  • 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 can get the switch up and running, but not enough to fully configure the L3 Switch.

    To accomplish that, you need to use the CLI. Not a problem, I like CLI’s.

    Of course, there is no documentation but for tab completion and very limited help screens.

    I get it mostly working.

    After playing with the Free Range Routing Suite (FRR) for a while and getting OSPF working on all of my hosts and the primary router, I was feeling pretty confident.

    It seems that FRR took their configuration model almost directly from Cisco’s CLI. The number of times I used a Cisco help page to determine how to configure an OSPF setting is remarkable.

    The new L3 switch turns out to have a Cisco like configuration language. And what isn’t Cisco like, is FRR like. Neither Cisco nor FRR, but close.

    Today I had a tremendous success, I moved a ceph host from the physical network to the OVN network.

    This included moving that segment of the network to a new subnet. And everything sort of worked.

    The issue turned out to be a routing issue.

    The correct answer is to turn on OSPF within the new physical router. It does support it, after all.

    Having played with the damn thing for a few hours, breaking my network multiple times, I was about to give up when I happened to notice a strange value for a setting.

    That setting? MTU, of course.

    Even though every interface shows an MTU of 9000. Even though jumbo frames are turned on and using a 9000 byte frame.

    Even though an MTU of 9000 is very much supported, the MTU of the “VLAN” was set to 1500.

    Now, Cisco VLANs are not the same as a tagged VLAN. A tagged VLAN acts like a separate physical network. They are where you place interface settings. These VLANs can then be assigned to a physical port.

    The physical port’s MTU overrides the VLAN MTU. This means my jumbo packets from host to host work.

    The problem is that the VLAN MTU is maxed out at 2000 bytes. This seems to only affect the OSPF traffic and not the physical interface. But I’m dead in the water or I need to figure out how to do this differently.

    Still, I didn’t pay an arm plus a leg for this physical router. I’ll get it to work.

            

  • In general, people are idiots. In groups, they have a combined IQ of less than 70 and the common sense of a three year old.

    Daniel Penny is a US Marine who stepped up and protected the people on the subway. He held a homeless, violent, man until the man could be arrested.

    He was then interrogated for hours without a lawyer because the police interrogating him established a relationship, by being an ex-marine.

    It is often said that there is no such thing as an ex-marine or a former marine. You are a marine for life. There are exceptions, the cop who interrogated Daniel Penny is an ex-marine.

    Having charged and arrested this hero, they are now trying to screw him over, yet again.

    Prosecutors have wide latitude in what they charge. One of the standard tricks is to bring multiple charges for the same crime, over charging at least one.

    Humans like to think they are being fair and reasonable. One of the oldest and most famous instances of this is when a man was taken before a Roman Governor to be “sentenced” for claiming to be a king above Caesar.

    The Governor refused to kill the man, instead sentencing him to be whipped. Even though I’ve found nothing wrong with him, he still had the man flogged. When the mob insisted he be put to death, the Governor replied, I told you — he’s not guilty! I find no reason to condemn him..

    The complete tale can be found in John 19:1-25.

    In other words, to appease people, an innocent man was flogged.

    Prosecutors overcharge in expectations that the jury will often find the accused not guilty of the most serious charge, but to appease the prosecutor, will find the accused guilty of the lesser charge.

    They can go home, secure in the knowledge that they didn’t sentence a man to 20-life but only 5 to 10. (made up numbers).

    Not really internalizing that 5 to 10 is still too much for an innocent person.

    The Jury deadlocked. Some members of the jury found that Daniel was not guilty of second-degree manslaughter, some insisting that he was. When they reported a deadlock, the judge charged them to work harder.

    The prosecutor then did Daniel a dirty. He requested that the second-degree manslaughter charge be dismissed.

    Why is this dirty pool?

    If the Judge accepts the motion to dismiss the second-degree manslaughter charge, then the deadlock goes away. If the deadlock goes away, then the jury will have to deliberate over the second charge of criminally negligent homicide.

    Human nature will make it easier for the jury to return a guilty verdict on the lessor charge.

    The judge should have declared a mistrial. Instead, he accepted the motion to dismiss. He released the jury until Monday.

    On Monday, they will start deliberation on the second charge.

    I hope that they deadlock on the second charge as well.

            

  • One of the ways the left “wins” arguments is by changing the meaning of the words they use.

    When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
    — Humpty Dumpty

    So, what is healthcare?

    Healthcare is anything that is caring for your health. That is the skills of a doctor or health professional. The medications you might take for high blood pressure or pain. It is setting a bone or removing a tumor.

    Healthcare is about your mental and physical health. Everything from a band-aid to a heart transplant, and everything in between, is health care.

    What is access to healthcare?

    This is about your ability to get healthcare.

    If you are in a vehicle accident, they pick you up, carry you to the hospital, and take care of your injuries. That is access to healthcare.

    You are having trouble breathing, walk into the emergency room, they put you on a nebulizer, admit you, and take care of you until you can walk out the door. That is access to healthcare.

    You cut your toenail too short, and it becomes an ingrown toenail, badly infected. You walk into the urgent care, and they take half your toenail off and write you a prescription for an anti-biotic. That is access to healthcare.

    You think you have a sinus infection, you call your doctor’s office. They schedule you to see your doctor or another later that day. That is access to health care.

    Your doctor thinks a skin growth might be cancerous. He refers you to the dermatologist, two weeks later, you are seen, and a biopsy is taken, tested, the results are back to you and your doctor 15 days after first being seen by your doctor.

    Being able to get a doctor is part of access to healthcare. So is the ability to get medical tests done in a timely fashion.

    In Montreal, CA in 2021, it took 862 days, on average, before you were assigned a family doctor.

    As of 2042, on Friday, most of the hospitals emergency rooms in Montreal are over capacity. Most of the over capacity hospitals have had patients on stretchers for over 24 hours, some for over 48 hours. They don’t even bother to give wait times.

    A different website gives wait times ranging from just over an hour to more than 6 hours.

    The website I found with wait times for US hospitals shows about the same for Boston hospitals. But, a data point that I have is that my local hospital has a listed wait time of 2.2 hours. My personal experience at that hospital is that wait times are generally much less than that. You are normally seen by a triage nurse within a few minutes of arriving.

    You can have good healthcare, good access to healthcare, or some mixture of the two.

    In the United States, no person can be turned away from an ER because of their ability to pay.

    Paying for Healthcare

    Paying for healthcare is where things start to get very complex. When a friend came down to visit from Canada, she was horrified with how medical payments were done, here in the states. On the other hand, when she got sick, she was seen by a doctor within 15 minutes of arriving at an urgent care facility. She left with antibiotics, in hand. She had paid in full for her medical service, around $100.

    She agreed that her access to healthcare, in the states, was better than it was in Canada. She felt that the quality of her healthcare was better in the states, and she was surprised at how little it cost.

    The first issue with healthcare, is that you have no ability to shop for services. Until recently, with the creation of boutique medial services, you didn’t know how much accessing your doctor was going to cost.

    I had a slow leak in the rim/wheel of the truck. Not an issue, every other week I gave it another shot of air.

    It finally decided to become a fast leak. I called my guy, asked how much to move the current tire to a new rim. He told me. I ordered a new wheel, took it and the truck to him.

    At the end of the morning, my truck had a new rim and the cost was within $5 of what he quoted me. The difference being a choice to replace the valve stem.

    I came out of my doctor’s office, asked what the cost was. Paid in full. Then three weeks later, gotten a bill for more because they hadn’t coded the office visit correctly. They ate that extra after I made complaints to the administration.

    If we agree I have paid, in full, then they don’t get to change the bill later.

    Regardless, there is no real way to find out the prices of different procedures, ahead of time.

    The next issue with healthcare costs is that the person paying for the procedures/visits is not the person who is getting the procedure. There is no reason for you to shop around when somebody else is going to pay. You will always choose the best quality you can find.

    So what about payments?

    You can pay at the point of service, or you can pre-pay.

    “Point of service” is paying when the service is performed. If you go in to have your car serviced, you are expected to pay for that service before you leave. That is payment at the point of service.

    The few times when some vendor or service person has said, “I know you, you’re good for it, come back tomorrow and pay.” has been so few and far between, it sticks in my mind.

    My barber only takes cash, no cards. I didn’t know that when I sat down. It got done, found out that I didn’t have enough cash, left my lady as collateral, went and got more cash. I got my lady out of hock and called it a day.

    Most healthcare is billed out after service, but is still considered payment at the point of service.

    Pre-payment for medical services is when you pay something now for services you might need later.

    In America, that is done with insurance. You purchase insurance to cover your healthcare costs.

    Originally, health insurance was designed to cover unusual health events. You broke your leg, insurance covered it. You required your appendix removed, insurance covered it. You require a hip replacement, insurance covered it.

    If you require an annual physical, insurance doesn’t cover it. Most of the maintenance costs of healthcare were paid out of pocket, not with insurance.

    The government broke this model.

    The benefits your employer gives you are part of your total compensation package. Only some of those benefits are taxable. One of the things that is not taxed, is your healthcare costs. Nor the amount your employer pays towards your healthcare insurance.

    Consider the following, you are offered $50,000/year. You pay $13,000 in health insurance per year. That leaves $37,000. The government takes 30% of that, leaving you $25,900.

    A different firm offers you $45,000 per year with matching insurance payments. This means that you will be paying $6,500 in insurance and the company will pay $6,500 for a total of $13,000. Your taxable income is $38,500. The government still takes 30%, leaving you with $26,950.

    By taking a lower salary $5000 less, you get to take home just over a $1000 more. Not bad.

    These tax games actually changed the face of medical insurance. For healthy, young people, this equation wasn’t as persuasive. So “insurance” started to cover healthcare maintenance. This drastically increased the cost of insurance.

    Whereas, before, the insurance company could play the odds, taking money from everybody, knowing they would only have to pay a few, the new model required them to collect money and pay money for everybody.

    A healthy 25-year-old didn’t cost the insurance company anything, on average. But now that maintenance is included, even the 25-year-old costs money. All of that had to be paid for.

    The other place where the government interferes with insurance pricing, is in boundary limits.

    There are places in this country where the side of the street you live on changes the cost of your medical insurance.

    While you might think you have “Blue Cross/Blue Shield” insurance, I can promise you that you do not.

    If you look at your insurance card, you will find that you have “Blue Cross/Blue Shield of STATE”. This is because medical insurance companies can only offer medical insurance in their state.

    This means that there are 50 different Blue Cross/Blue shield insurance companies. Are they inter related? Yes. It is a legal fiction that keeps them separate.

    In addition to the visible insurance costs, there are other hidden insurance costs. The federal government of the US takes a part of your income and uses it to fund Medicare and Medicaid.

    When people talk about “free healthcare” in the UK or Canada, they are lying. There is no free healthcare in any country.

    It is free at the point of service. The citizens of those countries pay for their healthcare via taxes.

    The NHS of the UK spent $231.6 Billion on health services in the 2022/2023 budget year. This is out of a budget of $1,551 Billion. The NHS budget was 15% of the total budget.

    This puts the price, per person, at about $3,400, or $13,600 per family of 4. Just about the same as the pre-Obamacare cost for family insurance in the United States.

    The point is that healthcare in the UK is NOT free.

    What they mean by “healthcare”

    The left conflates healthcare with paying for healthcare. In the process, we have created a situation where healthcare costs more for most people. Access to healthcare has gone down. And the quality of healthcare seems to be slipping.

    But, the left yells that more people have access to healthcare than ever before.

    They didn’t really get more access, they just changed how much they pay for healthcare and who pays for healthcare.

    I’m reminded of a show I watched a few years ago.

    In the show, the couple set out to find out if they could live as a couple at menial labor.

    He got a job, but I do not believe she did. His job did not have healthcare benefits. He was working at nearly minimum wage.

    She was prone to getting UTIs. About 6 months into this experiment, she came down with what she knew was a UTI.

    So they went to the ER to get treated. They ended up with a bill in the thousands.

    They held this up as a reason people can’t live on such low wages.

    They cheated for their story. First, she could have gotten a job. If they were as good as he said they were, they should have been able to work their way out of that starting wage/position. They didn’t.

    Second, the cost of an ER visit is pretty high. The cost of an urgent care visit is much lower. My last urgent care visit included minor surgery. My total cost, before insurance, was less than $200.

    The cost of diagnosing a UTI and prescribing an antibiotic is around $100. There are telehealth options available today that are even cheaper.

    By making a shitty decision, they cost themselves over $1500 in medical bills, which could have been less than $125.

    Conclusion

    Make sure you hold them to using the right terms. Don’t let them redefine words to confuse and conflate the different issues at play.

            

  • In the shadowed depths of night, where silence reigns,
    A network, once vibrant, now fades in gloom,
    Its circuits, dead, like spectral, ghostly chains,
    No longer does it herald or consume.

    Oh, how the whispers of the web did cease,
    The humming ceased, the lights went dark, then cold,
    In digital demise, there found no peace,
    But tales of loss and legends yet untold.

    The servers, once alive with fervent quest,
    Now rest in mute, an eerie, silent crypt,
    Where bytes and bits, in deathly dirge, do rest,
    And all connection to the world is stripped.

    Thus, in this void, where once the data flowed,
    The network fails, and in its death, is silent.

    — Grok 2

            

  • There are skills that our grandparents and great-grandparents had, that we (as a society, at least) are sadly lacking in today. The art of “making do” is one of those skills. It’s something we MUST learn to do, and quickly. Whether we have some type of country-wide emergency, an apocalyptic event, or a recession, the ability to “make do” is crucial.

    So what is “making do,” you ask? It is actually an amalgamation of important skills. First and foremost, it is living within your means, no matter how uncomfortable. That means putting away the credit card and paying cash for things. If you can’t afford something, you don’t purchase it. Don’t live a filet mignon life when you have a hamburger budget.

    It’s so much more than that, though. How many of you have mended a pair of socks or your jeans because they got a hole in them but still had a lot of life to them? Likely very few of you. Until the last ten years or so, I hadn’t done much of that myself. Even as someone who had a very low income, I could afford our frankly very cheap clothing. Today, even though I have access to considerably more money, I tend to spend less.

    I do know how to darn a sock, mend a hole in a knitted sweater, and hem or patch clothing. I practice these skills on a regular basis. A good example of this is that I discovered my favorite holiday dress was eaten into (likely by a bunny, but we don’t know for sure). There are several jagged holes, and they’re near the hemline. I could patch the holes, but they would be very noticeable, and I don’t want that. I could darn them or put a decorative patch on them (which I’ve done with some of my jean skirts), but again, it wouldn’t look nice. It’s a nicer dress. Instead, I’ve decided to shorten the entire dress. I tend to wear it with tights or leggings anyhow, because it’s quite short and revealing, so taking off the 1.5 inches to remove the holes will not really be seen. As a bonus, it will give me a strip of the dress’s fabric that I can use for future patching, should it ever be necessary. My lovely holiday dress will live on, and I will enjoy wearing it despite a few mishaps.

    (more…)

            

  • Filler

    Depression has been making it difficult to focus. There are some Supreme Court cases I should look at. There are some other cases I need to check in on.

    Networking and computer stuff is a normal fall back for me. They are subjects that I can talk about without research. I just know this stuff.

    TDS

    X is full of TDS. People make claims as to what Trump said, then attack what they think he meant. Often when he didn’t say the things they claim he said.

    People make unfounded claims.

    Joe and Mika are butthurt by the backlash from them going to Mar-a-Lardo to slurp on trump’s tiny (mushroom). “We went there to get a read of the man.” (thoughtful face) What’s to read? We already know he’s a racist, fascist, criminal piece of shit. They can go fuck themselves.
    — Scary Larry on X

    People asking for explanations or reasons. Calmly saying they are going to ignore anything offensive. Then being offensive to anything that isn’t anti-Trump.

    It is draining.

    The hits keep coming

    In 1987, the Democrats set the tone for all forthcoming republican nominations to the Supreme Court. Ted Kennedy called Robert Bork, saying “Robert Bork’s America” [would be] a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

    It only got worse for Justice Thomas.

    Today, we are seeing the left wing rollout every standard accusation possible for every Trump nominee. It is disgusting.

    Question of the Week

    What government program or agency do you see as the most wasteful of taxpayer money?

            

  • 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:

    1. Physical layer
    2. Data link layer
    3. Network layer

    1 Physical Layer

    The physical layer defines the electrical, mechanical, and procedural interface to the transmission medium. WTF?

    Ok, let’s look at this in terms of some real examples. If you have a computer that is more than a few years old, it will have a network connection in it or a port that a network connection can be attached to.

    The most common mechanical connection, the socket and connector, is the RJ-45. This is the thing that looks like a big telephone connector. Oh yeah, many of the youngsters don’t remember every plugging a phone into the wall.

    This connector consists of 8 connectors. The location and form of these connectors defines part of the mechanical system.

    The other part is that those 8 connectors are attached to four pairs of wires. The pairs of wire are twisted and bundled into a single cable. Each of the 8 wires are numbered, and the mechanical definition of the RJ-45 defines which wires are attached to which connector, at both ends.

    When I say “numbered”, the physical reality is that the wires are color coded.

    The electrical definition defines which wires are used for transmitting and which are used for receiving. It defines if the signals are ground referenced or differences between two wires.

    Everything about how to connect the physical devices and how to transmit a signal are specified at Layer 1, the physical layer.

    2 Data Link Layer

    This layer defines how data is transmitted over the L1 physical network. It defines what how to use the physical layer.

    For example, Frame Relay is a data link protocol for connecting distant devices. Each Protocol Data Unit (PDU), consists of a flag field, an address field, an information field, and a frame check sequence, or checksum field.

    The information field contains the actual data (information) that is being transmitted.

    The Frame Relay standard states that the information field must be at least 262 octets (bytes) and recommends that it support at least 1600 octets.

    It is important to note that a length of 262 cannot be (easily) expressed in a single byte. This means that the length field must be at least 2 bytes wide.

    While Frame Relay is still in use, today, it is not as common as it used to be. There are better options.

    A much more common L2 protocol is Ethernet. This is called a Frame. The Frame consists of a preamble, start frame delimiter, destination address, src address, tag (or zeros), type or length, payload, CRC and a gap.

    As originally defined, an Ethernet packet had a maximum length of 1500 octets.

    Packet Size

    In networking, we talk about sending a packet. A packet is a more generic term for “frame”. We have packets at the data link layer and at the network layer.

    Every packet contains enough information to identify the source and destination of the packet, the length of the packet, and the payload. There will often be a header to identify more about the type of the packet.

    As a packet moves through a network, it might be “fragmented” as it passes through a network segment which has an MTU smaller than the packet size.

    There must be enough information to reconstruct the packet, even when the packet has become fragmented.

    Fragmenting is something we want to avoid, if possible.

    To that end, a part of the connection process is to discover the MTU for each device.

    Consider a simple network segment. A network segment is a piece of the network that is connected at L2.

    We have devices A and B. Device A is using a fiber physical layer and device B is using a copper physical layer. B is attached to switch 2, switch 2 is connected to switch 1, and switch 1 is connected to device A.

    If all four devices are using old style Ethernet frames, then the MTU will default to 1500. A simple database backup is 3.3 GB. This means we will have to transmit at least 2,305,845 packets.

    This requires each device to handle 2.3 million interrupts.

    On the other hand, if we were to use jumbo packets, then we reduce this to around 384,307 packets. This is a huge savings in load on the network segment.

    The two switches, as L2 devices, are going to either be store and forward switches, or simple hubs. Nobody uses hubs anymore. So they must be switches.

    Each switch receives the packet, storing it, then transmits that packet on a different port.

    The switch must be able to store the complete packet/frame. If it can not, it will drop the packet.

    When designing your network, you want to make sure that all the switches on the network support the largest MTU you might be using.

    Devices A and B will discover what their MTUs are. The smaller will rule. The switches, on the other hand, are transparent. They do not get a say in the MTU discovery.

    What this means, is that you can have devices on the network that respond to simple testing, such as sending pings, but which fail for larger packets.

    Conclusion of Rant

    I accidentally purchased a switch (L2) when I was intending to purchase a router (L3).

    This should not have been an issue. I intended to use some switches, regardless.

    The specifications look good. MTU is documented as 12000.

    I plug everything together and start testing. My first network test is always “ping”. If ping isn’t working, nothing else will work well enough.

    That worked perfectly.

    Then I attempted to login to the remote site using SSH. This silently failed, before timing out with destination unreachable.

    Ping works, SSH doesn’t?

    This makes no sense.

    Until I found it. SSH does a key exchange with my RSA public key. The key size is 1679 bytes. This is larger than the supported MTU of switch 2 at 1500.

    The network fails, silently.

    So I have email out to the manufacturer, hoping for a positive response.