SMTP, or, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is the communications protocol that email servers (Mail Transfer Agents, or MTAs) use to talk to one another to… transfer mail. And SMTP has one glaring issue: A rather ambiguous “try again later”.
Continue readingAbstract: You suck, and do not know not to manage many of the security aspects of email.
Continue readingSo here’s a short one for you: Do you like your temperatures expressed as °F, or °C?1
Well, there’s one fundamental issue with me writing like the way I have been. I can put, say, “I decreased temperatures by 20°F by cleaning the fans,” but if you’re a °C person, then you need to take a quick detour to convert that to units that you’re more familiar with. A common way to do this would be to notate that as “20°F (11.11 °C)”, which works, but I’m effectively stating myself twice, and hoping that I actually got my numbers right. Plus that opens up the possibility for writing °F (°C) one time, and °C (°F) another. So for basically no benefit except me getting to be proud of myself, let’s improve on that.
Continue readingYou all know how footnotes work here, right? A little superscript number at the end of a sentence, and a list of numbers at the very bottom of the article, usually little remarks or extra details that are useful but not worth interrupting the flow of the article as a whole (or references). There’s just one problem: the notes aren’t anywhere near their associated text, meaning if you do want to read them, you might need to do some bouncing back-and-forth to understand everything. Well, no more!
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See also: managing to mildly destroy a network for 5 minutes while the switch has an anxious breakdown. Unfortunately, my reliable Dell PowerConnect switch has, well… it failed (kinda), and I was looking for an excuse to upgrade switches, so… I did. Admittedly, my impressions of Netgear kit aren’t the highest, but, hey, this switch is actually stupidly good for the price (I paid).
Oh, yeah, I also replaced the UPS since the entire network was offline anyways.
Continue readingFun fact: I’m writing articles on initialcommit.com now! I’ve worked with Jacob in the past to bring you the evolution of version control systems (go look that up there, hugo doesn’t like links in the body of link posts, hah), but now I’ve actually got articles under my name there. If you like Git things, check it out.
Anyways, to the point. Did you know that Git and Bitcoin are actually based on some very similar concepts and at the very low level are nearly identical in implementation? In the two-post series over there, I pick apart just how closely related the two are.
So here’s a fun one.
Have you ever noticed that even for huge changes to a repository, a git push only sends over a few kilobytes, maybe a few megabytes at most?
If you’re familiar with the internals of git, you know that git stores an entire copy of the new file on commit.
So how are these changes so small?
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the BPDUs.
Spanning Tree Protocol, as mentioned previously, is a protocol used by switches to build out a loop-free logical topology of an Ethernet network. The protocol itself is built off of a concept called, well, a spanning tree.
How does this work? Well, that’s what I’m here to explain.
Continue readingYeah I figure why not, at the same time that I’m replacing another key piece of network infrastructure, I might as well just replace the (second) most important piece, right? So cue the music, because…
Now, this is a story, all about how my life network got flipped, turned upside down, and I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air the owner of a… just… just cut the music. Let’s begin.
