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jamescunon Show HN: Nixar – New design of Linux command line

I agree. I could see this being, for lack of a better phrase, a gateway drug for some to the full power of the *NIX userland.

jamescunon Show HN: Nixar – New design of Linux command line

Maybe I'm just old hat, but all the examples given I immediately thought of their *NIX equivalent. This doesn't appear to do anything above and beyond what our current tooling gives us (except perhaps 30 years less development).

jamescunon IP traffic over ICMP tunneling

SoftEther is an amazing piece of software. As mentioned I was a little dubious of it back when it was closed source and touted so many features. After going open source I trialled it on a small network (~40 users) and it was rock solid.

My only gripe was user management. It lacks an LDAP or PAM integration, substituting RADIUS instead. No biggy, I can set up a SoftEther->RADIUS->LDAP bridge. The caveat is that SoftEther will only apply RADIUS authentication to accounts you manually define; so you must create a user in SoftEther and enable RADIUS for them. This may have been fixed by now, but was rather annoying back then!

jamescunon The Cyberthreat Under the Street

I used to cycle past Telehouse Docklands (in East London, part of LINX IXP) as part of my daily commute. I was always struck by the lack of physical security; all that was visible was a typical warehouse fence and a couple of cameras. However what was most troubling was the sheer density of unguarded under-pavement communication cabinets surrounding the site (of course I am only speculating that they are associated with Telehouse).

jamescunon Thank you, Y Combinator

Every office hours session we had with Garry we came away buzzing, the man has an amazing ability to inject raw enthusiasm when you are questioning yourself the most.

I wish him all the best in his future endeavors!

jamescunon Upthere, a cloud storage service, wants to make file syncing a thing of the past

The Verge, TechCrunch and their website, and I still have no idea what their product is. They have an impressive team, that has been put across. Other than that, just buzz words.

jamescunon What Experts Love and Hate About CDNs

My faith in Fastly was shaken after earlier this year, we experienced connections intermittently failed (HTTP 5xx) to any service behind Fastly (ours and third party) in our Amsterdam datacentre. We contacted their support but told us repeatedly it must be our fault (like a proxy). Long story short after investigation it was confirmed to be their fault and most likely a machine-gone-bad in their PoP and the intermittent nature was related to balancing across them. This was not resolved until their team woke up and we pinged their team on IRC. It shook my support from the obvious lack of monitoring or on-call system.

jamescunon How to know if where you live is “up and coming”: fried chicken vs. coffee shops

I'm not an American, but I believe they are referring to the racist meme that associates fried chicken to Americans of non-white ethnicities.

This differs from the UK where fried chicken is more associated with the lower classes than a particular race.

jamescunon IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards

Back in the late 90s I had a Toshiba Satellite Pro 420 with the green nipple mouse. It was by far better than any touchpad that came along until very recently.

(If anybody knows the actual term other than "nipple mouse" please let me know).

jamescunon [dead]

It isn't explained in the README; but why is this approach better than a tried, tested and secure LDAP setup with SSH Keys?

I understand LDAP can be quite obtuse to configure (particularly after OpenLDAP dropped config files), but once you get it working it is rock solid.

jamescunon [dead]

Wonderful use of IPv4 you've got there...

  traceroute to bad.horse (162.252.205.157), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
  [...]
  15  bad.horse (162.252.205.130)  103.311 ms  103.628 ms  102.827 ms
  16  bad.horse (162.252.205.131)  107.488 ms  104.828 ms  104.703 ms
  17  bad.horse (162.252.205.132)  112.190 ms  111.216 ms  111.989 ms
  18  bad.horse (162.252.205.133)  117.264 ms  118.055 ms  117.544 ms
  19  he.rides.across.the.nation (162.252.205.134)  119.456 ms  121.042 ms  122.334 ms
  20  the.thoroughbred.of.sin (162.252.205.135)  126.045 ms  127.904 ms  127.317 ms
  21  he.got.the.application (162.252.205.136)  129.997 ms  130.968 ms  131.858 ms
  22  that.you.just.sent.in (162.252.205.137)  139.854 ms  137.724 ms  137.116 ms
  23  it.needs.evaluation (162.252.205.138)  142.303 ms  143.272 ms  143.851 ms
  24  so.let.the.games.begin (162.252.205.139)  148.624 ms  146.938 ms  147.149 ms
  25  a.heinous.crime (162.252.205.140)  151.508 ms  152.716 ms  152.711 ms
  26  a.show.of.force (162.252.205.141)  157.842 ms  159.179 ms  157.245 ms
  27  a.murder.would.be.nice.of.course (162.252.205.142)  159.767 ms  162.660 ms  162.843 ms
  28  bad.horse (162.252.205.143)  167.594 ms  166.622 ms  166.355 ms
  29  bad.horse (162.252.205.144)  171.282 ms  170.400 ms  172.535 ms
  30  bad.horse (162.252.205.145)  174.793 ms  178.159 ms  175.421 ms
  31  he-s.bad (162.252.205.146)  180.099 ms  180.643 ms  183.375 ms
  32  the.evil.league.of.evil (162.252.205.147)  186.147 ms  187.997 ms  187.459 ms
  33  is.watching.so.beware (162.252.205.148)  194.779 ms  193.215 ms  192.146 ms
  34  the.grade.that.you.receive (162.252.205.149)  197.412 ms  195.618 ms  197.549 ms
  35  will.be.your.last.we.swear (162.252.205.150)  199.100 ms  200.027 ms  199.496 ms
  36  so.make.the.bad.horse.gleeful (162.252.205.151)  2192.878 ms  225.596 ms  206.608 ms
  37  or.he-ll.make.you.his.mare (162.252.205.152)  1525.507 ms  812.661 ms  211.153 ms
  38  o_o (162.252.205.153)  932.350 ms  492.911 ms  1455.687 ms
  39  you-re.saddled.up (162.252.205.154)  1946.147 ms  1964.092 ms  1945.679 ms
  40  there-s.no.recourse (162.252.205.155)  992.185 ms  1830.382 ms  2197.681 ms
  41  it-s.hi-ho.silver (162.252.205.156)  1945.557 ms  1846.352 ms  1253.045 ms
  42  signed.bad.horse (162.252.205.157)  501.400 ms  1432.041 ms  1747.911 ms

jamescunon Telepresence Robot Crosses Atlantic Seven Times Trying to Get Home

Screenshot in the event the listing gets removed:

https://i.imgur.com/Gz1ZI3X.jpg

jamescunon Is the Network the Limit? Dealing with Weave, CoreOS and Azure

Is the poor performance of Weave really surprising? Userland networking will always be lesser performing than that of native kernel networking (the show is somewhat better with technologies such netmap/PF_RING/DPDK). Weave itself would probably improve in performance if it utilised a TUN/TAP device + static routes as opposed to its current mangling of packets with pcap and BPF.

jamescunon Show HN: Minimalist Object Storage Project

What specifically separates this from Swift or Ceph, both of which have S3 compatible APIs and are considerably better documented/hardened/maintained + distributed?

jamescunon A Look inside Google’s Data Center Networks

For those curious about the erroneously mailed Pluto switch forum post referenced, from the archive with pictures:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140410024606/http://www.networ...

jamescunon Comcast Automatically Enabling IPv6 in San Francisco

Would have been earlier than that. I subscribed to Comcast in Mountain View in 2012 and received IPv6 addresses.

jamescunon Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” Network

Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

jamescunon Crossrail: The monster tunnelling under London streets

They are probably referring more to infrastructure projects being disproportionately focused on the south east, rather than only executing infrastructure project with macro economic effects.

jamescunon Socket Sharding in Nginx Release 1.9.1

I was under the impression the `SO_REUSEPORT` implementation on Linux was rather broken, as evidenced by HAProxy's graceful reload still dropping packets[1]. I'm curious as to why Nginx has implemented this when you can design your Nginx config around the problem while not encountering the broken implementation.

[1] http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/04/true-zero-downtime-h...

jamescunon Tollbooth: HTTP rate limiter middleware in Go

For general rate limiting, yes HAProxy or Nginx make more sense.

Having different rate limits for different endpoints becomes unmanageable in HAProxy/Nginx; and having different rate limits say across different plans or users is all but impossible.

jamescunon LXD crushes KVM in density and speed

This is an apples to oranges comparison.

I expect to see this type of comparison on a personal blog, but not from canonical itself.

jamescunon Show HN: MCServer – A FOSS Minecraft server in C++, with Lua plugins

One thing that Minecraft has been missing, and that servers such as Bukkit tried to implement is an API for plugins. Looking through the docs, the LUA API[1] makes it seem as easily extendable as Garry's Mod.

[1] http://mc-server.xoft.cz/LuaAPI/

jamescunon System call conversion for year 2038

It is worrying. A possible work around for the remaining 32-bit systems would be a patch to switch to using an unsigned 32-bit integer for time storage, however this will only work for systems that don't need to deal with dates before 1970, but pushes the problem back to 2106.

jamescunon Creating honeypots using Docker

This is a bad idea. Concerns about Docker's security (or lack thereof) aside, containers provide "good enough" separation of concerns to apps. They are not security hardened and designed to be exposed to vulnerabilities, particularly when by design a honeypot is to tempt attacks (automated or otherwise).

A virtual machine (or better) is better suited to this task.

jamescunon Flywheel: Google's Data Compression Proxy for the Mobile Web

Interesting they felt the need to add:

> The majority of Flywheel code is written in Go, a fact we mention only to dispel any remaining notion that Go is not a robust, production-ready language and runtime environment.

jamescunon YC Interview Prep Tool

Very reminiscent of https://jamescun.github.io/iPG/

jamescunon Linuxbrew – A fork of Homebrew for Linux

Homebrew was created to add the package manager experience of Linux to Mac OS X, so what gap does this fill?

Mac users already experience issues relating to having multiple non-default package managers (i.e. Homebrew and MacPorts) - what conflicts will having a default and non-default package manager arise?

The problem it is trying to solve would be better approached hosting Debian, RHEL etc repositories which mirror each other in their structure.

jamescunon GitHub under ongoing DDoS attack

In brief, you have more bandwidth than your attacker.

jamescunon New hubiC offers

I signed up for hubiC a while back with the intention of using their touted OpenStack compatibility with Duplicity for encrypted backups (using the Swift backend) - only to discover they have placed their own authentication mechanism on top of OpenStack, breaking compatibility with all OpenStack clients. The only solutions available seem to be running a proxy between your client and hubiC.

jamescunon Show HN: SSL Decoder – An open-source alternative for the SSL Labs server test

I started to build a similar thing, for the command line, last year but did not get as far.

https://github.com/jamescun/ssltest