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Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other…
Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having context in regards to what is actually being run by the CPU.
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.
I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher speed (10G and above) ethernet switches is that they are quite expensive new and if you buy the used then they rarely have many years left ( or none at all ) of software patches.
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and this post (EvE) as a crash course on how BGP works).
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), your disk array controller, or volume manager. However there always seems to be some critical machine in my life that does not fall into these…
Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. It’s simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the few things that is shipped with all network stacks.
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.
At the end of March 2019 I did a talk at the INEX’s (Ireland’s biggest internet exchange point) Annual General Meeting. I was supposed to record it, however in a brief panic due to HDMI not working on my laptop I forgot to start a recording of it. Since people found it interesting I figured I would turn it into a blog…