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it was not built for US military. it wasn’t even built to enable survivability of US military infrastructure after nuclear war. there’s a myth in the “internet circles”, that i’m fighting for couple of years already. recently, i was reading great book - Dream Machine. it’s as good as (at least) Dealers of Lightning or 747 - but maybe even better. you probably heard the story already - US gov ordered RAND to check if they could built survivable comms system. that system could have survived almost total annihilation - including nuclear war. RAND asked one of his consultants - of Polish origin - Paul Baran to do the job. and he basically prototyped with his team network capable of packet switching, not circuit switching. it is said and repeated, that Paul work was in effect ARPANET. almost everything here is true, apart from last sentence - ARPANET was neither inspired or created thanks to Paul work. ...

140 characters at most, 5 minutes, sandwich you catch up while on the run… and then silence at around 2am and wake up call at 6am… this is how life of most of us looks like. daily. I had a chance to get back to book I’ve read too long ago - Rays Bradbury 451* Fahrenheita'. just take a look at following dialogue: ...

if you build motto for your company vision, and it’s blunt like, for example, ‘don’t be evil’… people may notice when you decide to remove it. ‘do the right thing’ doesn’t sound so convincing and blunt. while the ‘don’t be evil’ is left in the last sentence of ‘Code of Business Conduct’ that employees need to accept, it’s softer and flattened. sign of new times?

ARPA, established in 1958, was first and only space agency at that time in United States. to this day it drives fantasies and is unequivocally identified with the emergence of the Internet, but did you know that ARPA (before it became DARPA in 1972) was responsible for underground nuclear testing (as seismology allowed to determine whether other countries somewhere on Earth were conducting their nuclear tests), guerilla warfare (ARPA reps travelled to and stayed in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos long before US under falsifed “proofs” attacked North Vietnam), or development of machine rifle that became what is today known as M-16? ...

as you can easily guess, i’m networking geek. my home network was thus built with hacking, not with ‘smallest footprint possible’ in mind. it’s great if you can test your “great” ideas before recommending them to anyone, and of course getting feel of new features is also a plus in this case. so, my first assumption was it has to be fast - fiber. both floors are connected with fiber network, that’s aggregated near front door, in the cloakroom. the room itself is however small, and won’t let me put whole 19" rack there… so we need to haul traffic back to my dedicated server room downstairs (yes, my desk along with server room is located below the ground level, which has its own benefits). ...

we are herd creatures, naturally social. we have created many tools for remote communication and although the echoes of the electromagnetic wave of our radio transmissions travel fainter and farther into space, today one of the most used tools is the good old e-mail. it was born in around 1971 so already 47 years ago. contrary to the bigots shouting radical slogans louder and louder, i believe that humanity is created for an open exchange of ideas. without borders and difficulties. instead of building physical and digital walls, archaic and testifying only to a narrow mind and limited imagination, as societes we should focus on solving much simpler problems. ...

plnog, plnog and… it’s gone. twentieth edition - how the time flies… from the beginning we knew it may be hard, but we can make it. ’let’s target 60 people!’ was the second decision after we agreed to ‘do this’ and create PLNOG. 124 of you showed up. i don’t really remember all of the things that happened that day. and that was only 10 years ago! i remember only the fact, that we couldn’t fit you in one of the Cracows Wawel room that Andrzejs team was able to secure for this experiment. i remember i was worried that ‘people won’t come back’ after this, and Andrew was calming me down - as he usually does. ...

it should be. it’s kind of tricky to get right and may feel a bit like an abstract concept. random values should be random (unless you’re talking about Debian randomness). so, let’s try that - take a cube in hand and throw it three times. what’s the probability that you’ll get three times the same number? small, but there is one. similar experiment - your friend throws coin ten times, and eight times there’s eagle. is the coin ‘prepared’? no, it just follows very complex process of spinning number of times (yeah, and i know about ‘if you’d like enough time and throw coin so many times…’ - that’s not about it). ...

my 256GB SSD drive in MacPro 2013 started to fill up recently. i went on short googling to see how to extend it without relying on NAS of course. and i get nice offer. it seems that good people in the internet found a way to interface typical NVMe disk drives with the socket Apple uses. and so i became user of 1TB Samsung SSD drive. that upgrade gave me also speed bump - on encrypted drive transfers shoot up from 500MBbs (reading) and 380MBbs (writing) to 1.3GBps for both reading and writing (disk itself can do 2.5Gbps but PCIe bus in MacPro is limiting factor here). ...

…if everyone is trying to make your life harder. couple weeks ago I refreshed my private email server on FreeBSD. for some time spam levels were raising and I had to do something about it. old spamassassin was not handling it accurately enough anymore. enter spamd from OpenBSD. current postfix has built in greylisting server that’s working quite well. for my installation I tuned it a bit, by extending period of time that has to pass from last delivery attempt (to 1200 seconds, which is 20 minutes): ...