Knoxville Utility Board Considers Offering Broadband

Chattanooga's EPB has done a great job with providing municipal broadband. I'd love for KUB to follow suit.

They own all the poles and I'm sure there are lots of SmartGrid advantages, too.

Darwin

I've been working from home and I have a new friend... a robin that insists on attacking our kitchen windows. He/she may be building a nest somewhere around the house, but he spends a lot of time flying into the windows. I've named him Darwin.

A Series of Tubes

Summit is the most powerful #supercomputer in the world.

Here's a very non-scientific look at what's behind the cabinet doors. #UnscienceASupercomputer #justforfun #HPC pic.twitter.com/ecfgVJKNHp

— Oak Ridge Lab (@ORNL) February 6, 2019

The Updated OSI Model

Scarily true...

Learning

The modern impediment to learning is attention, not access.

— The Stoic Emperor (@TheStoicEmperor) August 4, 2018

Mb2.r5oHf-0t

IT experts name Mb2.r5oHf-0t as world’s safest password. 

Compromised Passwords

Troy's updated his site, Pwned Passwords. Read the details here to see if you want to trust it with testing your password.

I couldn't easily find it, but I thought I had shared his other service: Have I Been Pwned? You provide your e-mail address and it will let you know if it is found in any of several data breach databases dumps. You can also get alerts if your e-mail address shows up in a future breach.

Home Network - Part 2

So that change didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped... turns out the latest firmware for the ASUS RT-AC3200 has a 2.4 GHz bug. It took me a long time to figure out that was the problem.

I noticed the issue on some of my IoT devices and my wife's hand-me-down laptop. I assumed it was a problem with the devices. Basically, I kept getting a bad password error. I ended up trying a lot of different things - laptop driver update, deleting all the network settings, resetting the IoT devices to their default config, changing the SSID, etc.

It wasn't until I realized I was having the problem on my laptop and my iPhone 8 that I started thinking the router was the issue. Originally I had those devices configured to use 5 GHz only, so they never experienced the problem. After a short search, I found this thread: 2.4GHz band issues with RT-AC3200 firmware 3.0.0.4.382_50010. Bingo! That was exactly my problem. I rolled back to an older firmware version and everything has been working like a champ.

On a happier note, I returned my Comcast cable modem, since I had purchased the NETGEAR CM500-1AZNAS. I walked in the retail store, they scanned the label on the modem, and printed a receipt. It took less than 30 seconds. Perfect!

For an upcoming post, I may list all the devices I have connected and note which ones were easy to migrate to the new SSID. (Spoiler Alert - the inexpensive Smart Plugs I bought have some horribly written instructions.)

Home Network

I mentioned I was changing my network at home - getting my own cable modem (NETGEAR CM500-1AZNAS) and trying to decide what to do for wireless. I ended up ordering the ASUS RT-AC3200.

The specs look great and I'm optimistic that I can move it to a slightly more central location. The combination of the two changes should get me great coverage throughout the house. (And, if that's not perfect, I could look at the ASUS mesh networking - AiMesh.)

Also, I'm a fan the WRT software and like the ASUSWRT version as well. You can play around with an on-line demo of the software here.

Hopefully I can get everything moved to the new setup over the week-end. I already announced a scheduled network maintenance/outage for Sunday. Guess folks may have to read a book or something for a few minutes.

WB4GBI 145.470 Repeater on Broadcastify

I can listen to one of my favorite local repeaters on Broadcastify without a radio.

Zero, One, or Infinity

An interesting tidbit from a NANOG/DNS post:

"But needing “multiple” DNS Root Zone Servers and coming up with the number 13 appears to be somewhat curious. It seems such an odd limitation in the number of root servers given that a common rule of thumb in computer software design is Willem van der Poel’s Zero, One or Infinity Rule, which states a principle that either an action or resource should not be permitted (zero), should happen uniquely (one) or have no arbitrary limit at all (infinity). For root servers, it appears that we would like more than one root server. But why set that number to 13?"

Leading to:

"The desire in the design of the DNS priming query and response was to provide the longest possible list of root name servers and addresses in the priming response, but at the same time ensure that the response was capable of being passed in the DNS using UDP. The largest possible set of names that could be packed in a 512 octet DNS response in this manner was 13 such names and their IPv4 addresses - so there are at most 13 distinct root name servers to comply with this limit." 

Needs Another Stamp

Not me personally, but have you heard the 500-mile email problem? https://t.co/dHHPqjQffR https://t.co/qkfkKu7Djo

— Andrei Badea (@0xabadea) January 20, 2017

Posting

Sorry about the lack of posting last month... sometimes there is just too much going on. Plus my computer was busy downloading stuff...

Sounds About Right

Instagram: My life is a party.

Snapchat: My life is a quirky tv show

Facebook: My life turned out great!

Twitter: We're all going to die.

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) January 8, 2017

Hurry Up Future!

I signed on with Comcast for a couple of years to save some money, but when that agreement is up, I'm sure I will be cutting the cord... DirectTV and Sling streaming options.

The article mentions a cloud DVR service that's got me excited, too. Having all my videos in the cloud and being dependent on the network would bother me - except that's basically what my X1 is today.

28 Websites

The North Korea internet only as 28 sites, so maybe you could really surf to the end of the internet there.

409shop-two-way-radio.com

Nate sent me a link to www.409shop-two-way-radio.com. Not sure if they are testing a new look or if this is really anything, but we all know their current page isn't the prettiest e-commerce site.

SSID Ideas

Need a new SSID? Here is a small list a friend shared on FaceBook. I think from @nixcraft pic.twitter.com/8AcVDvZnLa

— Darrell DeRosia (@Darrell_DeRosia) June 30, 2016

Via @amyengineer

Ping "emoji"

I'm so short-sighted... I never thought about emojis for server names.

NMAP totally chokes on scanning machines when the hostname is just emojis. 💩💩 pic.twitter.com/IITtxse462

— Jerry Gamblin (@JGamblin) June 18, 2016

Netflix's Speedtest

Fast.com