@kwf@social.afront.org
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

kwf

@kwf@social.afront.org

Engineer who converts solder, Ethernet cables, and firmware into entertainment.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

One thing I own which is cool as hell is a vibrating reed based tachometer.

Lots and lots of tiny reeds, each tuned for a specific frequency. Place it on a piece of equipment, and the reeds start to vibrate if they're the same frequency as the equipment.

Placing the tachometer on an Air Conditioner condenser

kwf, to RedHat
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Just to recap the latest in the RHEL vs downstreams not offering them any value drama:

Redhat publically states that downstream rebuilders offer them no value, and the RHEL community should all be working in the Centos-stream sandbox, because that's where the community is, because it has community right there in the name, and that's where the code fixes can land, and community is only about lines of code in the repo.

@almalinux goes "alright, no value in us being a 1:1 rebuild of RHEL, then we're cutting our own path while being based on Centos-stream, staying ABI compatible with RHEL, but we'll fix our own bugs when we find them"

Alma Linux then finds a CVE in the iperf3 server impacting everyone in the Enterprise Linux 9 ecosystem, so they release the fix for AlmaLinux, and then immediately open pull requests for Fedora and Centos-stream to land the fix upstream. Which would seem to be exactly what Redhat was asking for this whole time.

Redhat's response to the centos-stream pull request? "There is no current customer demand for this fix in RHEL, so we're not interested in this fix"

The astute will notice that the pull request is feeding into centos-stream, and not RHEL. But they're making merge decisions here based on immediate customer demand in RHEL.

So maybe this whole "Centos-stream is the community distro" line was bullshit and it really is just the beta testing ground for RHEL, just like all of us kind of thought it was while getting shouted down by the centos-stream advocates this whole time.

So Redhat is still doing great.

https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/iperf3/-/merge_requests/5

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

The project is a little side project @warthog9 and I have been working on for the last two years where we're building very simple, minimalistic Linux download mirrors, and using our contacts in the ISP/service provider industry to scatter shot these tiny Linux mirrors literally everywhere.

After 20 months, we're up to 32 live POPs serving Linux and other free software, and in 2023 our total egress network traffic across the entire fleet was 24.7PB.

24.7 Petabytes. With a P. Thank you again to all the cash donors and hosting site sponsors willing to support this project and make the user experience for free software so much better.

image/jpeg
image/jpeg

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

One of my nice friends at Hurricane Electric gave me a dead 100G-LR4 optic to tear apart for your entertainment, so for the sake of your entertainment, lets dig into it! 🧵

image/png

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

In case anyone was wondering, the top three metros on my wish list for the project currently are Atlanta, GA, Phoenix, AZ, and Las Vegas, NV.

So if you know of an ISP or DC in those areas who have plenty of egress bandwidth and would be willing to plug in a managed appliance to support free software/linux, let us know: mirror@fcix.net

kwf, to linux
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

One of the fun parts of being a mirror operator is that you get to deal with China Mobile using ISO download mirrors to fix their traffic ratios with other ISPs at peering points.

Looks like they've moved to using Slackware now...

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

In case you were wondering, the fleet is handling the @almalinux 8.10 release like the fleet of champs that they are.

Not that I was worried, since AlmaLinux has been actively working on having the most overkill mirror community in the industry and always being way ahead of the curve on capacity.

kwf, to RedHat
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

has determined that they see no value in a downstream rebuilder of https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

Given that, as the team @warthog9 and I have concerns in supporting RHEL's upstream development branch in a community manner. We have removed Centos-stream from the eight Micro Mirror nodes as well as our main mirror.fcix.net mirror which were hosting that project, explicitly over these concerns.

The MicroMirror project is run, literally, as a hobby and a public benefit. No one on the team is paid for this effort, and in fact costs us money (though we actively appreciate and love the support we get, we still throw our own skin into this game too!). It's hard to be a part of Redhat's community when they seemingly take umbrage with our support, so from our perspective Redhat needs to either embrace the community as we have always wanted and expected from them, or until such time as they do they should consider getting into the Linux mirror business for their development branch of RHEL.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Has anyone started a pool yet for how many Starlink birds Space Karen is going to lose tomorrow?

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Product reviews on electric space heaters where they're speaking my language.

I don't care how cozy this heater makes the house. I want to know the thermostat hysteresis.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Sitting on a conference call today, someone was reading off a serial number and they used Xerox as the phonetic for X.

I still have not recovered.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

I never configure 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as my two DNS resolvers. I'm not worried about temporary outages of quad8 that wouldn't also be affecting their other address.

I configure 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1, because I'm worried about the damn thing just getting turned off at some point.

kwf, to linux
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

New Blog Post: The backstory to the project and why you might have started noticing lots of *.mm.fcix.net mirrors when downloading updates.

https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2023/05/building-micro-mirror-free-software-cdn.html

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

I would love to get the backstory on exactly why the wholesale price for electricity in California went to $680 and then back down to $38 again this week. It was hot, but this seems like something else also went wrong.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

You can't even really claim that you built a vintage computer kit until you install a bodge wire or two.

image/jpeg

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Finally doing my taxes. In the year 2022, between mirror.fcix.net and the project, I spent $9469 on equipment. Another $600 on shipping and we're over $10k for this little mirroring project I've been working on.

Thanks for your support everyone who's chipped in. I appreciate all the cash people have been tossing in the hat to take the edge off of that bill.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

It's still wild to me that modern switch ASICs don't even have a specific defined core voltage for the ASIC.

Each piece of silicon is binned off the line and fused to indicate whether to bump the core voltage up or down a little bit for this specific chip.

With the core voltage down around 0.8V, this also means that the power supply for the ASIC logic core usually needs to provide something on the order of 150 AMPS to the ASIC.

kwf, to fedora
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

40 is fully staged on the MicroMirrors and just waiting for the permission bitflip and release tomorrow!

🍿 Now we wait

kwf, to animals
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Millie sees San Francisco.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

You ever wonder if toothpaste is more of a lapping compound or is it more of a soap?

kwf, to threads
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Everyone losing their minds over implementing an open standard is just so delicious.

It's a single domain name folks. The block domain button is right there.

kwf, to fedora
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

I think 40 shipped at 6:30 AM Pacific this morning.

kwf,
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

The ask4 is making a significant difference for the update experience in the United Kingdom.

A year ago, there was only a single 1Gbps Fedora mirror in the UK. We deployed the first 1G MicroMirror there before the Fedora 39 release, and that node was flatline 100% NIC for four days, so we made a point of finding a 10G host to be able to deploy more bandwidth.

So we now have 3x 1G MMs and this 10G mirror in the UK, so this should be making a significant difference for people trying to download the new release in the UK.

The wild part? This 10G mirror is still only an HP T620plus with a Mellanox 10G NIC and a 2TB SSD in it. $250 of hardware added an order of magnitude of mirror bandwidth capacity in a country.

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Just shipped out another . This one is headed to New Jersey as a Dell R220 with a 2x10G port channel and a 4TB SATA SSD. Those bits are going to go brrrrr

kwf, to random
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Corporate IT security are having some difficulty understanding why I would be spending company time and resources supporting a free Linux distro.

Just, you know, not like our flagship product is built on top of AlmaLinux or anything.

kwf, to linux
@kwf@social.afront.org avatar

Manjaro shipped Plasma 6 today, so the fleet is seeing a BIT of an uptick in Manjaro update traffic.

This is why we want to keep deploying Micro Mirrors until they're all only doing 10% capacity on a normal day. update mirror traffic tends to be really spiky, and with rolling distros like Manjaro the spikes are not on a regular release cadence.

If you're in the United States and have spare egress capacity laying around in a DC... we have both 1G and 10G appliances ready to ship.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • modclub
  • DreamBathrooms
  • mdbf
  • Durango
  • ngwrru68w68
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • cisconetworking
  • JUstTest
  • ethstaker
  • tacticalgear
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • khanakhh
  • rosin
  • Leos
  • normalnudes
  • anitta
  • cubers
  • tester
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •