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MystikIncarnate

@[email protected]

Some IT guy, IDK.

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MystikIncarnate ,

I don’t think either answer is wrong.

MystikIncarnate ,

You kids. Got off my lawn. Leave me in peace with my scour.net.

MystikIncarnate ,

I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.

I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.

There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.

I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.

I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.

I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.

MystikIncarnate ,

I prefer linkin_park_numb.mp3.com

It just hit different

MystikIncarnate ,

I have three suggestions for you.

Easy mode: find a triple radio mesh wifi system and get at least two nodes. Generally the LAN Jack on the satellite nodes will bridge to the LAN over WiFi. Just add a switch and use it normally. This will harm your overall speeds when connecting to the NAS from other wired LAN systems that are not on the same switch. I’m not sure if that’s important. As long as your internet speed is less than half of your WiFi speed, you shouldn’t really notice a difference.

Medium mode: buy MoCA adapters and use coax. Just be sure to get relatively new ones. They’re generally all 1G minimum, but usually half duplex, so there’s still sacrifice there, but MoCA is generally better than WiFi. The pinch is making sure you stop the MoCA signal from exiting your premise. You don’t want to tap into someone else’s MoCA network, nor have them tap into yours. There are cable filters that will accomplish this, or you can air gap the coax. I’m not sure how much control you have for the ingress/egress of your coax lines. You can yolo it and just hope for the best, but I can’t recommend that.

Hard mode: do ethernet anyways. Usually in rentals, nobody can complain with holes in the walls the size you would get from nails to hand pictures, not much larger than a picture hanging nail, is a cup hook. What I did at my old place, which was a rental, was to buy large cup hooks, and put them every ~18" down the hallway, and load it with ethernet cables. I used adhesive cable runners to go down walls near doors and ran the cables under doors to get from room to room. I got lucky that two adjacent rooms shared a phone jack and I replaced the faceplate with a quad port Keystone faceplate on each side. One Keystone was wired to the phone line to keep existing functionality, the rest were connected to eachother though the wall as ethernet, and I just patched one side to the other (on one side was the core switch for my network). That was my experience, obviously your experience will be different. I used white ethernet to try to blend it in with the ceiling/walls which were off-white. In my situation, I was on DSL and used the phone jack in one of the bedrooms for my internet connection, that bedroom was used as an office and it neighbored my bedroom where I used the jack to jack connections through the wall to feed my TV and other stuff in the bedroom. The ethernet on the cup hooks went from the office to the living room where I put a second access point (first ap was on the office) and TV and other stuff. Inbetween the bedrooms and the living room was the kitchen and the wet wall was basically RF blocking, so I needed an access point on either side, so one in the office near the bedroom and bathroom, and one in the living room, provided plenty of coverage for the ~900sqft apartment we were renting. Most everything was on wired ethernet, and the WiFi was used mainly by laptops and cellphones.

I live by the philosophy of wired when you can, wireless when you have to. Mainly to save WiFi channels and bandwidth for devices that don’t have an easy alternative option like mobile phones and portable computers.

I don’t think you’re in a bad spot OP, and any of these choices should be adequate for your needs, but that will vary depending on what speed internet you have, and how much speed you need for the LAN (to the NAS and between systems).

Good luck.

MystikIncarnate ,

IMO, powerline is going to depend on a lot of factors including what kind of power you use, which varies from country to country. Where I am in North America, we use 240v split phase, and the powerline adapters are 120v (half phase), so if one unit ends up on one side of the phase, and one ends up on the other side of the phase, you’re going to have a bad time, if it links at all… So knowing which “side” of the split phase your powerline is on becomes critical, which is not something most people know about their power situation. As a result, it’s basically a crap shoot whether it will work well or not.

MystikIncarnate ,

Depending on where you live and what your power circuits look like (not the outlets, the circuits that power them), you may have a great, or very poor experience.

I’d need to know what country you live in to know more, since power wiring standards vary from country to country. In the USA and Canada (I’m in Canada and the USA is the same), we use split phase and crossing the split phase will severely hinder the ability for powerline to perform.

It’s a viable option, not my favorite option, I’d recommend MoCA (coax) over powerline, but it’s ultimately up to you.

MystikIncarnate ,

Hello friend.

You can get 2.5gbps MoCA now. You may want to consider upgrading.

Nice username btw

MystikIncarnate ,

It can be faster, it really depends on whether you have a clear-ish channel for the mesh, which is why I would recommend something on the higher end, hopefully with a dedicated radio for mesh, so it can be on a different channel with (hopefully) less interference.

If the mesh radio is shared with client access, or if it’s on a busy channel, it may be much, much slower than some options.

MystikIncarnate ,

It definitely sounds like you have some challenges ahead. I personally prefer MoCA over wireless, simply because you can control what devices are able to be a part of the network, and reduce the overall interference from external sources and connections.

With WiFi, being half duplex, only one station can transmit at a time (with come caveats). Whether that station is a part of your network, or it is simply operating on the same frequency/channel, doesn’t matter. So in high density environments, you can kind of get screwed by neighbors.

MoCA is also half duplex (at least it was the last time I checked) so having a 2.5G MoCA link, to a 1GbE connection (on the ethernet side) should provide similar, or the same experience as pure ethernet (1G full duplex)… The “extra” bandwidth on the MoCA will allow for each station to send and receive at approximately 1Gbps without stepping on eachother so much that you have degraded performance.

However, it really depends on your situation to say what should or shouldn’t be setup. I don’t know your bandwidth requirements, so I can’t really say. The nice thing about ethernet is that it on switched networks (which is what you’ll be using for gigabit), the. Ethernet kind of naturally defaults to the shortest path, unless you’re doing something foolish with it (like intentionally messing with STP to push traffic in a particular direction). The issue with that is that ethernet doesn’t really scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Not an issue for even a fairly large LAN, but that’s the reason we don’t use it for internet (wan side) traffic routing. But now I’m off topic.

Given the naturally shortest-path behavior of ethernet, of you have a switch in your office and you only really use your NAS from your office PC, you’ll have a full speed experience. If nothing else needs high-speed access to the NAS, you’ll be fine.

Apart from the NAS or any other LAN resources, the network should be sufficient to fully saturate your internet connection. So the average WiFi speeds should be targeted towards something faster than your internet link (again, half duplex factors in here). I don’t know your internet speed so I’m not going to even guess what the numbers should be, but I personally aim for double my internet speed for maximum throughput on my WiFi as much as I can. The closer you can get to doubling your internet speed here, the better. Anything more than that will likely be wasted.

There’s a ton to say about WiFi and performance optimization, but I’ll leave it alone unless you ask about it further.

Good luck.

MystikIncarnate ,

I’ve been doing IT work for more than a decade, I was a nerd/“computer guy” well before that. I’ve had a focus on networking in the past 15-20 years. You learn a few things.

I try to be humble and learn what I can where I can, I know that I definitely do not know everything about it, and at the same time I try to be generous and share what I’ve learned when I can.

So if you have questions, just ask. I either already know, or I can at least point you in the right direction.

MystikIncarnate ,

This is probably a big reason I don’t buy/play newer multiplayer games, especially ones that are mp only, and a big reason why I buy everything on steam and avoid other platforms.

I’ve heard of games being dropped by steam, but those that already own it, still own it and can access it on steam as normal. In the situations I’m aware of, those games eventually returned to steam later, but still.

I prefer games that are either peer to peer mp, or you can self host a server for mp. I’m not saying that I’ll always self host, but if the option is there, then I’ll never lose the ability to play the game with friends, since I only need to set up a server to play on. Since I have a homelab, setting something like that up is trivial for me, and I can shut down and delete the server afterwards when it’s no longer wanted or needed.

Everyone going crazy for the latest version of whatever battle Royale type game, laying down premium money to play on day one, and spending a lot to get buffs and cosmetics… It just seems stupid to me. No thanks.

Free to play multiplayer with the option to buy cosmetics is less bad, but still not great. You can play, enjoy some time with friends while playing the game and if it goes offline tomorrow, who cares? You didn’t pay anything for it and I’m certain there’s other options in the same vein. As long as you’re having fun, enjoy.

If I’m paying for a game, it’s probably because of the single player experience. Anything multiplayer is icing on the cake, but not motivation to buy it.

MystikIncarnate ,

Very yes. Thanks.

MystikIncarnate ,

I’ve seen busybox in a lot of software that’s not free. One notable example is VMware. It runs on top of esxi as a package to provide command line functions to VMware hosts.

I’m pretty sure (IDK, I don’t do development for vmw) that it’s running on top of VMware’s kernel, and they have binaries that you execute from busybox that interface with the vmkernel to accomplish things.

I don’t have all the details and I’m far from an operating system guru/developer/whatever. I think that’s permissible under copyleft, since they’re not running things that you paid for on top of busybox, but I have no idea. I’m also not a lawyer, but they’ve been doing it forever, as far as I know.

Does anyone know more about it? I’m just surprised that smaller fish have fried for infringement, but someone like VMware is shipping busybox without reprocussions.

Maybe it’s not busybox? Maybe it’s something that just looks and acts like busybox? Idk.

MystikIncarnate ,

I did this for a coworker not too long ago.

I think it was for Firefly…

They gave the USB drive back too. Win-win

MystikIncarnate ,

I would think that cyber ops would be more concerned with fraud, underage sexual content, sexual predators… That kind of stuff.

Usually the MPAA sues people for distributing video content, and in many places, they’re not super aggressive about it.

MystikIncarnate ,

Unless the recipient literally rats you out, I don’t think they’ll even try to…

MystikIncarnate ,

Can we call this out on terminal text editors too? Some just color lines based on their content, and frequently comments end up being blue on black and it’s impossible to read.

This comment describes the options for the next parameter in this config file, but I have no idea what it says, so I guess I’m fucked?

MystikIncarnate ,

I’m pretty sure I’ve done most of these at some point or another.

It really depends whether I like you or not.

Liking my users is entirely dependent on how much work you make me do, and how difficult that work becomes because of your personality.

I’ve gotten tickets that were literally “$thing is broken”, or “help! Call me!” With no information given, not even a callback number. I’ve also gotten a rambling voicemail, in which a user describes an issue with a piece of software and doesn’t identify themselves, not provide any callback information. The CID on the voicemail wasn’t available either, and since I work with several companies doing support, I couldn’t even identify the client, nevermind the specific user.

There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.

There’s also the unavailable users, they are not available ever, at any time, for any reason. I have literally gotten critical tickets which require me to access the users workstation to fix, while it is logged in as the user, and I could call less than 5 minutes after they create the ticket, and they’re busy. Email them and they have an out of the office message, or reply with something about them being in a meeting (with no information about when they will be free), or simply don’t reply at all. After a few weeks of trying to contact them to connect and resolve their very simple (but “critical”) issue and getting nowhere, close the ticket, only to be met with a flurry of emails from them about how the problem isn’t solved. Immediately call or reply and you get voicemail and silence.

Most of my users do fine, and it’s usually a minority that are troublemakers, and I want to make that clear… But the troublemakers are the driving force for me to find ways to fix pretty much every problem without ever opening their system though remote control. I can do all kinds of things from registry edits and hacks, to writing and scheduling PowerShell scripts to fix their shit every time they log in, and deploy that by a remote PowerShell command prompt, and nothing more.

Yeah William, you might be the c-whatever bullshit, but if the issue is sooo fucking critical, make five goddamned minutes for me to fix your shit or it’s not getting fixed. I don’t care if you own the goddamned planet, I can’t fix your shit without access.

MystikIncarnate ,

Only if we like you.

MystikIncarnate ,

I fucking hate this.

Most days I spend more time accounting for my work than I do actually working.

MystikIncarnate ,

I find that when a user continually makes a stink to get their ticket dealt with first, I gently try to correct them, and when that inevitably doesn’t sink in, and they call during a critical issue, I tell them quite firmly that things are down and nobody at x site can work, so your printer will have to wait. Log a ticket and I’ll address it when I’m done Brenda.

… They usually back off when you make it clear to them that they’re not the most important thing you’re dealing with at any given moment.

MystikIncarnate ,

I dunno about OP, but I am, and I have definitely prioritized tickets based on how interesting they sound.

User setup for a new hire that is already here and waiting? Meh. Weird network problem with no apparent solution which will likely require days of investigation? Sounds good.

MystikIncarnate ,

Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. People hit the most minor roadblock and just stop working until someone else fixes their shit.

It’s an attitude of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas!”

I don’t like those people either.

MystikIncarnate ,

I’m a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing but 3D.

MystikIncarnate ,

Foundry is on my radar. I might wait for satisfactory to hit 1.0, play that for a few months, then switch over to foundry.

It looks good though. IIRC it’s early access and what I’ve seen of it, I kinda want to give it a bit to get closer to complete before I jump in.

MystikIncarnate ,

That’s a fair assessment IMO. They’re all related games.

I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.

A few friends of mine are getting into Palworld and getting away from satisfactory. IDK, it seems a bit too different to me.

MystikIncarnate ,

Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.

There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I’ll give you an example. Screws are an early item that’s usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It’s a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it’s a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.

There’s a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.

To take that example further, there’s an alternate for ingots, which is a “pure” ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.

So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).

There’s Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.

You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.

You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.

Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)… Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don’t like to destroy more than I have to.

With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.

Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.

There’s caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There’s even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too… Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.

I could keep going, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don’t have the story about (they’ve had placeholders in the game that won’t be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I’m certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.

If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.

For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.

MystikIncarnate ,

So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.

I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I’m not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I’m not totally sure if I fully understood the question.

Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.

When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.

With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.

With progression, there’s two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there’s some linearity with the progression.

The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.

It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that’s fine, if not, no worries.

MystikIncarnate ,

For grids, there is a “world grid” which players were given access to some time ago, if you build properly on the world grid, then when you meet up one section from a factory to another section from another factory, they’ll meet properly.

I always use the world grid to get a starting point before laying anything down. I don’t want to struggle later on trying to make things fit, and doing it this way it’s a no brainer.

For rail lines, they’re completely dynamic, if you want to build it into a pretzel, you can do that. I’m not sure the trains would love it, but you can easily do that. There’s actually a problem most new players have that after going around a corner, their rail line goes all wavy because the rail curves a little bit depending on where you place it, and what it’s attached to. The solution is, at the end of the curve, when you have your ending point, remove the last section of rail at the curve, then build a perfectly straight section of rail where it will continue, then rebuild the last bit of the curve. This ensures the next section will start perfectly straight and any curve in the rail will be isolated to where the rail is meant to be curved. Then continue building as normal and the rest of the line will be straight.

Of course the rail lines can go up/down as much as you want (within the bounds of the world), so it’s not uncommon to see sky bridges with long rail lines that span most of the map. In that configuration, either very tall conveyor lifts being materials up/down from stations on the line, or there’s long, looped spirals of track to bring trains down to stations. I’ve seen both, and both methods are valid.

There will be train and truck stations frequently above or below factories for transit. I’ve also seen long bridges of conveyor belts bringing materials from one place to another. The main benefits to conveyors over trains/trucks/drones is that they’re very consistent and don’t require any additional power or fuel to run (trucks need fuel, trains use power), but a lot of people think they’re ugly, so trains or trucks are common. I’m more of a fan of consistency so I tend to do conveyors, but I don’t fault anyone for making different choices. Trains always need infrastructure, at least a rail line, trucks usually need some kind of infrastructure, though, not always. Drones don’t need any, so if you want to preserve nature in the game, you can go that way, but drones are very late-game and require batteries which are difficult to build in sufficient quantities. Not impossible, but not easy either.

I tend to build a road with conveyors hanging underneath. The road is for me to get there and to provide the necessary structure to place the conveyors.

One thing I’ve heard of that factorio has that satisfactory lacks is the idea of pollution. In satisfactory, you can spew all the toxic gases you want and the environment doesn’t change at all. Plants still grow and the world keeps looking the same. IDK, it’s a difference I know about.

The first-person style of satisfactory is more like building in Minecraft (I would assume) so getting things lined up is sometimes a challenge until you get to the hoverpack. But the hoverpack requires power, and to get it, you have to be within a certain proximity to a power post.

In any case. I was thinking the tour would be a “before you buy” kind of thing, maybe over discord or something, where I can stream my game and you can ask whatever questions you want, and I can show you the mechanics. If you’re not interested, that’s fine. There’s plenty of that kind of tour content on YouTube too if you want to look around.

For transporting materials, you don’t have to. If you build modular factories right next to where your nodes are you can produce your items and store them at that location. The only down side is that when you need that stuff you’ll have to go to that location and pick up what you need. A lot of players like to build a resource hub and dump all their finished products into bins there, so they have a single location to go to when building anything. Just pick up whatever mats you need, and head out.

I have a lot more I could say about the nuances of design and structure in such a place, but it’s all up to the person playing for what they want to do to put it all together. I tend to keep cramming too much into too small of a space and I have to engineer my way around the limitations. I need to plan better.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy factorio, as I enjoy satisfactory. My offer stands if you change your mind. If you ever buy the game and want to play some mp, let me know, I usually have a server running.

MystikIncarnate ,

As an armchair economist, lots of things. Loss of money from workers standing around unable to do their jobs because of the technical issues, the cost of doing a restore from backup (technician time, extra help, direct costs of accessing the data), etc. Opportunity costs from having to send business away, or otherwise unreasonably delay taking/delivering orders that have either been given to competitors or cancelled because of the issues.

Even the dang electricity costs of keeping the lights on while waiting for a fix…

Large companies calculate this value as a “burn rate”, which is to say, how much is it directly or indirectly costing to have everyone here, ready to work, and unable to do so because of an issue that affects everyone. Usually measured in dollars per hour. So if their burn rate is 100k/hr, and it takes 10 hours to fix the problem, it’s ~$1M in losses.

They may be able to recoup some of those losses by adding an extra shift or granting overtime to catch up, but for the most part, a large percent of that money is simply gone.

MystikIncarnate ,

Yes and no. If people had access to correct information, rather than every passing thought anyone has ever had ever, including complete fabrications and things that were never meant to be taken seriously, then they’d probably be okay.

Even making a claim about what is true and factual seems to be a point to be argued on the internet lately.

We’ve given everyone a voice and access to everyone else’s voice as well as access to all information. Most are lost in the noise, and can’t find the signal.

MystikIncarnate ,

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/bdb5da1d-3ed0-4b0e-a85d-fbe1e002c8d1.jpeg

MystikIncarnate ,

Thanks? I think?

MystikIncarnate ,

As a networker, ipv6 is the future. I’m a fan of it, but I don’t really talk about it anymore because there’s no point.

I threw in the towel after an ISP messed up so badly that I just couldn’t bother anymore.

At a previous job a client I was doing some work for got a new internet connection at a new site, the ISP ran brand new fiber for it. This wasn’t a new building or anything, but the fiber was new. They allocated them a static IPv4 thing as usual, and I asked the tech about V6, and they said we would have to take it up with the planning team, so I did. I was involved in the email chain at the end of the sales process to coordinate the hookup. So I asked. After many emails back and forth, I was informed the connection was allocated.

They allocated one single IPv6 subnet directly off of their device. I couldn’t even.

For those that don’t understand, the firewall we had connected to the device is an ipv6 router. What normally happens, especially in DHCP customer connections, is that the router will use DHCP-PD to allocate a subnet for the router to use on the LAN, and automatically set up a route to say “reach this subnet we allocated for this router, via this router” kind of thing. I’m dramatically simplifying, but that’s the gist. In DHCP-PD, the router will also have an IPv6 address on the ISP-facing link to facilitate the connection. In the case of the earlier story, they gave us an entire subnet to communicate between the ISP and the router, and didn’t give us a subnet for the client systems inside the network.

I did ask about this and I can only describe their reply as “visible confusion”.

I know many who will still be confused by this point are people who have not used IPv6; to explain further: the IP on your local (LAN) systems needs to be a public IP address, because the router no longer does network address translation when sending your data to the internet. So the IP on the router has no bearing on your computer having a connection to the internet over v6. If your local computer does not have a globally unique ipv6 address, you cannot use IPv6. There are ways around this, NAT66 exists but it’s incredibly bad practice in most cases. The firewall I was working with didn’t really support NAT66 (at least, at the time) and I wasn’t really going to set that up.

ISPs are the reason I gave up on IPv6.

I’ll add this other story to reinforce it. I’ll keep it brief. A different ISP for a different company at a different site entirely. The client purchased a static IPv4 address, and I asked about IPv6, as you do. To preface, I know this company and used them for my own connection at the time. They have IPv6 for residential clients via DHCP-PD. I was told, no joke, that because of the static IPv4 assignment, and how they execute that for businesses, that they couldn’t add IPv6 to the connection, at all.

The last thing I want to mention is a video I saw, which is aptly named “CGN, a driver for IPv6 adoption” or something similar. It’s a short lecture about the evils of carrier grade NAT, and how IPv6 actually fixes pretty much all the bs that goes with CGN, with fewer requirements and less overhead.

IPv6 is coming. You will prefer IPv4 until you understand how horrific CGN is.

MystikIncarnate ,

This is remarkably common. A major factor is how to handle renewals. There appears to either be bugs with the procedure or there’s disagreement on how it should be handled. So it will work, for a while, until a renewal needs to happen, then everything goes to shit.

I’ve directly witnessed this in router/firewall logs. That there’s an attempt to renew the DHCP-PD, which does not get a valid reply.

MystikIncarnate ,

The important bit is that almost every major web service is already running fully dual stacked. Azure, Amazon, Meta, CloudFlare, Google… If it’s a commonly known internet company, it’s probably ready for IPv6.

There’s still plenty that isn’t ready, but most well known things have been ready for years at this point.

MystikIncarnate ,

All I want to say about this is that the technology specialists, especially in networking, are usually not this opposed to change. Things change for networking and systems folks all the time. We’re used to it. Most of the time the hard sell is with the management folks who Green light projects. They don’t want to “waste” money on something that “nobody wants”.

Legitimately, one company I asked about IPv6 said to me that customers had not requested it, so they haven’t spent any time on implementing it.

As if customers know what’s good for them…

MystikIncarnate ,

So, my argument here is… Why the hell are you memorizing IP addresses?

Is your DNS so misconfigured that you’re still punching in IPs by hand?

DNS is the solution. Going to “router.domain.local” or whatever your internal domain is, is easier to remember than… Which subnet am I on again? Is this one 192.168.22.254? Or 192.168.21.1?

Stop punching in numbers like a cave man. Use DNS. You won’t even notice if it’s IPv6 after that

MystikIncarnate ,

DNS, by its very nature is redundant. So DNS shouldn’t just fall over. If it does, you’re doing something wrong.

If you absolutely need to go to IP addresses, they should be documented.

Unless DNS is outright wrong, there should not be an issue.

For scrolling: are you staring at active log files? Who isn’t using a syslog aggregator? You can easily look up the IP of whatever device that is interesting and filter the log by that IP.

MystikIncarnate ,

This is less to do with the ISPs and more to do with the implementation of DHCP-PD renewals on various software/hardware devices. I’m not going to point any fingers, but it seems that some vendors don’t play very nicely with other vendors.

MystikIncarnate ,

At most, the difference between your experience and mine was that the support I recieved at least understood what IPv6 was, which is likely a function of most of my stories being from business support, rather than residential support.

Almost every time I call I get nowhere. Which is why I’ve given up. Obviously, someone high up in the technical teams is trying to implement IPv6 with very limited success. So I’m just trying to be patient, as they navigate the hellscape of corporate approvals and get things working.

It’s slow going, but at least it’s going.

MystikIncarnate ,

Always has been

MystikIncarnate ,

This is 100% truth.

When you’re young, you have a lot of free time and no money to enjoy that time

When you get into a career, you have money, and no time.

When you retire, you have money and time (to some extent), but you’re old and likely not able to enjoy things nearly as much as you would have been able to when you were younger (generally due to body aches and whatnot).

Being middle/lower “class”, you’re basically fucked.

MystikIncarnate ,

I feel like the executives are all in this “AI” echo chamber. Like, most people grossly misunderstand what AI is, what it does and what it cannot do, with current tech… And all the execs are sitting around in a circle jerk making up solutions using AI, for which there is no problem to solve.

Don’t get me wrong, some companies are doing cool shit with it. Not necessarily practical shit, but cool nonetheless, other companies just seem to be drinking the AI Kool aid and throwing it at fucking everything for no goddamned reason just to get in on the hype. Investors are close behind, trying to ride the coattails of their “success” to riches, and it’s all just a self-reaffirming system with no basis in reality.

Nvidia is the one profiting here, all this AI smoke and mirrors needs something for it to run on top of, they’re selling the physical tools to make it go. Whether it goes somewhere useful or drives off a goddamned cliff, doesn’t matter to Nvidia in the slightest. They made their money. Get wrecked.

MystikIncarnate ,

I do. With the select a size version, I almost always pull at least two.

MystikIncarnate ,

That’s new to me. I don’t think I’ve seen them like that.

Alright.

MystikIncarnate ,

Legally, it’s fully owned by the company.

My current workplace uses mostly cloud desktops. Basically, even if you’re using a personal system, you install a remote desktop client software (it provides access to another system, it does not allow access to your system), which is used to connect to a server farm of virtual desktop servers. So the work desktop you use kind of overlays itself on your system. Your system is still there, humming away in the background, with it’s only task being to shuffle your input up to the cloud, and bring down the images of your cloud desktop and display them.

There’s some other features, but that’s the core of it. We use a third party “remote monitoring and management” (RMM) tool to administrate company owned systems. You are perfectly capable of using the remote desktop client on a system that’s not company owned. I like this model, since you can minimize or close the remote desktop at any time, and since we (the IT team) have full access to the remote desktop server farm, we can connect to your remote desktop session and see what you see, but only what’s within the remote window. We can’t escape it to see your computer. So if you have a problem with your work stuff, we have access to that. If you have a problem with your personal computer, we need to use a one-time-use (or ad-hoc) remote connection software like LogMeIn or something similar (specifically the LMI rescue type feature set). Once we disconnect from your personal system after doing whatever troubleshooting you asked for, we lose access to that system.

The programs change, but they do the same thing in concept. There are a number of company owned laptops and desktops we have our RMM tools on which allow us to dive into a system whenever we want.

I run a homelab, personally, and when my workplace does not give me the necessary stuff to be productive from home, what I do is build a small virtual system on my home lab, which I remote into when I work (from my desktop), so I can maintain a work/personal division. It’s similar to the cloud system I’m doing at my current job, but the “remote” desktop is a VM on a server in my basement. Other times I’ve been given a laptop, and I’ll set it up in a corner and turn on its built in remote desktop service (to allow remote desktop connections into it), then use the same protocols to connect to my work laptop.

When I’m done work, I just shut down the remote desktop connection and poof, back to my stuff on my PC.

With my current job I went another way, I got a KVM switch, which allows me to switch between two physical computers at the push of a button. (KVM is keyboard/video/mouse) When I’m done work now, I push a button and my screens (I have several) and KB/mouse all switch back to my personal desktop. Same idea but different.

I couldn’t imagine using my personal computer to do work stuff directly. That’s just not kosher in my mind. I have work’s RMM and tools all installed on the system I use for work, and my personal system is entirely free of such things.

I also want to include a short story. Recently a client started a ticket about our company logo being on their personal computer. I grabbed that ticket up and immediately identified the system, and removed it from our system. I followed up with the user to verify that by removing it from our system, the icon disappeared (indicating our monitor agent was fully uninstalled), they confirmed, and I closed the ticket. I kept thinking it’s grossly inappropriate for our software to be on their personal system, and I wanted to get it fixed ASAP. Not everyone is the same, I’ve known users that want or e remote management tools on their personal systems. I don’t understand it, but I can’t tell them that it can’t be there either (the customer is always right, applies in this context).

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, neither myself, nor anyone I work with, nor anyone I’ve worked with in the past, would ever take such an opportunity to snoop or spy on them, but I’d rather not have that liability hanging over my company. All it takes is for one person to have the software on there and accuse us of stealing their private data (say, leud pictures) and publically posting that information on the internet, and I’m sure the policy would change. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, but all it would take is the accusation.

It’s a bad day for us when we see something we shouldn’t, especially if upon seeing it, we’re morally obligated to contact the authorities (in the case of illegal content such as child porn). If course, if something like that is observed by a tech, we must do something about it, but we don’t want to have to get involved in that sort of thing, so we’re pretty careful about it. To put it simply, we’re not looking for anything, and we don’t want to snoop through your stuff, because if we do and we find something we shouldn’t, there’s going to be hell to pay. Not only in the fact that now we need to report it to the police, but also that we need to be able to justify why we were able to see it in the first place. If we can’t justify why we were looking at the content, that’s probably grounds for termination and getting blacklisted from IT, even if it had a positive result (like a pedo being sent to jail).

Bluntly, it’s not worth the risk, paperwork, or inevitable trouble that we’ll face if we do.

Keeping a good separation between personal and work minimizes the risk of IT seeing something that shouldn’t, even if it’s not illegal/illicit. Even your personal financial information. I don’t want to know. I had a call recently with a user who couldn’t log into their bank, and through testing, I was on the lookout for errors while they logged in. As soon as login was successful and their accounts were up, I minimized my remote control so I didn’t see more than I absolutely had to, of their bank info. I got them into the accounts. I don’t care what the accounts are, or what is in them. It seems minor, but that is that users personal information which I do not need to know. I solved their login problem with the site, so I’m done.

I probably have a hundred of other examples, even some where my co-workers had to contact authorities, I’m pretty sure… Every decent IT tech knows that this is a risk and we do what we can to avoid getting caught up in it. We don’t want to have to answer those questions.

If you ever have IT connect to your computer and your background goes black, there’s a reason. At first it was bandwidth related, and we’ll still say that as the reason, but a large reason why we still do it, even into an age of high speed internet, is because a lot of people put pictures of their family, friends, sometimes even inappropriate content, as their desktop wallpaper. It’s hard to miss when it’s your wallpaper. So if it’s blacked out when we connect, that’s one less possible problem we have to deal with.

I’ll stop, but if you have questions for a random internet IT guy, please feel free to ask.

Take care.

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