damn you vlan 1

scenario you have a switch facing a firewall port and you’re seeing some spurious DHCPv6 hits against the native VLAN despite having no switchport native vlan being set on the trunk interface facing the firewall. a quick look at the link local addresses points at the switches themselves in the network. then you remember that you have cisco switches and that you need to check the most holy VLAN 1. mercifully, the following fixes this broke ass behavior....

July 6, 2021 · steve ulrich

fyrtur-tradfri homekit setup notes

we ended up putting the fyrtur blinds in our condo this month. these are an excellent value. a few nit-picky items that might be helpful for other folks that are considering these blinds. these notes are applicable only to my experience using homekit and ikea’s tradfri gateway. i assume that this stuff is a dumpster fire from a security perspective and i stick all home automation elements on a separate network segment far away from data i really care about....

June 27, 2021 · steve ulrich

america as a racist country

this does not speak well of us as minnesotans. To escape the circle of racism, Floyd moved to Minneapolis, Minn., where the Black poverty rate is more than four times the white poverty rate; where the Black incarceration rate is 11 times the white incarceration rate; where the Black-white income gap is second-to-last among the 100 largest cities in America. Had George Floyd done nothing but be white, he would have been living in the second-highest ranked state for opportunity, according to U....

May 31, 2021 · steve ulrich

the doomsday invention

I arrived before he did, and waited in a hallway between two conference rooms. A plaque indicated that one of them was the Arkhipov Room, honoring Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet naval officer. During the Cuban missile crisis, Arkhipov was serving on a submarine in the Caribbean when U.S. destroyers set off depth charges nearby. His captain, unable to establish radio contact with Moscow, feared that the conflict had escalated and ordered a nuclear strike....

May 8, 2021 · steve ulrich

130 degrees

“For one thing, engineers have done their work and done it well. About a decade ago the price of renewable energy began to plummet, and that decline keeps accelerating. The price per kilowatt hour of solar power has fallen 82 percent since 2010—this spring in the sunny deserts of Dubai the winning bid for what will be the world’s largest solar array came in at not much more than a penny....

May 8, 2021 · steve ulrich