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Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 255 posts.

2021
181

Uganda's internet Shutdown

Two days ago, through its communications regulator, Uganda's government ordered the "Suspension Of The Operation Of Internet Gateways" hours before the country's general election. This action was confirmed by several users and journalists who got access to the letter sent to Internet providers.

185

Summary of June 8 outage

We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. Here's a rundown of what happened, why, and what we're doing about it.

187

Tianwen-1 attitude in Mars orbit

It has been a while since the last time I wrote an update about Tianwen-1’s attitude . In that post I showed that Tianwen-1 had changed to a sun angle of 0 degrees with respect to the spacecraft’s X axis on 2020-10-22. Since then, nothing changed, even after the spacecraft arrived to Mars orbit on February 2021, so I…

190

ANSI escape codes (2019)

My team writes a lot of command line tools, and we like to assume that people aren’t using a literal VT100 (meaning: we liberally use colours, italics, and basically every other terminal feature available to us). This tends to result in strings in our code that look a little like this:

193

Building a Space-Based ISP

There are requirements that make software engineers sweat. Massive distribution to thousands of nodes. High reliability and availability. Multiple distinct platforms. Rapid network growth. This is the world SpaceX’s Starlink program, which has set a goal to provide high-speed broadband internet to locations where…

195

“We're Shutting Down Our 3G Network”

This is a tale of first world problems, culminating in me being pissed off about getting a free phone--so I'll say up front: Yes, I know this is petty and silly, but also, I'm furious with how AT&T has handled their transition off 3G and I'm here to complain about it.

198

gRPC Is Easy to Misconfigure

Google's gRPC is an RPC system that supports many languages, and is relatively widely used. I think its popularity is due to being used for parts of Docker and Kubernetes. I think gRPC is mostly fine, but it is surprisingly easy to screw up by misconfiguring it. Part of that is because RPC systems are challenging to…

207

Curl those funny IPv4 addresses

Everyone knows that on most systems you can specify IPv4 addresses just 4 decimal numbers separated with periods (dots). Example: 192.168.0.1 Useful when you for example want to ping your local wifi router and similar. "ping 192.168.0.1" Other bases The IPv4 string is usually parsed by the inet_addr() function or at…