I’ve been working in the lab again, and I attempted to log in to one of my switches (IP addresses have been changed to protect the innocent): $ ssh admin@10.10.18.73 Warning: Permanently added ‘10.10.18.73’ (RSA) to the list of known hosts. admin@10.10.18.73’s password: Permission denied, please try again. Huh? I checked caps lock, and even […]
Dial-up Blues
I haven’t posted in a long time, partly because work has had me busy, partly because I haven’t been sure what to write. I have multiple drafts sitting unfinished for various reasons. The best way to get unstuck is to tell some old stories, as I like to do, and I was thinking this morning […]
Blog themes, again and again
My ongoing saga to locate a WordPress theme I like is killing me. I used a hosted version of WordPress (not worpress.com), which gives me a lot more control, but at the end of the day, I really hate WordPress. I just want a simple theme that’s easy to read. So, I’m iterating through a […]
Netstalgia: Y2K
Gather around while I tell the story of the great Y2K bug, how close we came to societal collapse until we were saved by Deloitte consultants who selflessly worked night and day to stave off this peril! In fact, the Y2K episode should serve as a reminder of the peril of “viral” thinking, panic and […]
Layer 1 Friday: Flattened Pins
How about a little layer 1 Friday combined with Netstalgia? Back in the 1990’s I was doing desktop and light network support for a variety of very small clients in San Francisco, mostly advertising agencies. Ad agencies were experiencing a boom because of the dotcom era. VCs funneled money into dotcoms who funneled the money […]
What’s with the cosmic rays?
I was reading a Reddit thread bashing Cisco today. It’s a few months old. Some of the commentary is fair enough. Some of it might be a bit unfair. But I do think all vendor execs should spend time reading customer Reddit threads to understand how they’re perceived and what they can do better. […]
Topological Qubits
I’ve been very unconvinced on the reality and benefits of quantum computing. Sure, a lot of people with fancy degrees from fancy places say it will work miracles. Sure, they make really impressive machines with cooling units that look like they’ll beam you into the movie Tron. Sure, Microsoft just released a new chip with […]
Agentic AI for networking
As I’ve pointed out in several posts, and as you’ve certainly noticed, there is a teeny bit of hype surrounding AI these days. We’re told network engineers will be obsolete as our AI buddies take over our jobs. Want to roll out a network? No problem, your receptionist will do it for you while sipping […]
Lab Notes: Proxmox
Note: I’m playing with themes right now. I don’t particularly like the one I’m on today, except code blocks look better and it reads nicer on phones. We’ll see if I can tweak the CSS to get it where I want it, or will need to switch themes again. The nice thing about being an […]
Legacy language
The spambots who regularly read my blog know that I have a fascination with language, and have a background in linguistics. So, I’m always fascinated by language and how we use it. This post is a bit pointless, but amusing (perhaps only to me). In my last post I mentioned I might file a bug […]