Ross Nelson @rnelson@bsd.network

Sunrise over Lake Superior from Minnesota's North Shore this morning. It was -18°F (-27.8°C). I love the sea smoke that the cold temps create and the ice formations in the foreground were wild.

#photography #Minnesota

RE: https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/115894353992485853

If you are a university technologist or administrator, and you have the ability (political and/or technical) to dump data the university doesn't need, it's time.

That includes students' and employees' races, religions, gender markers (probably including pronouns, and I hate that, we fought so hard for that), countries of origin — anything you aren't *required* to keep needs to go.

You can put counts of those things into a database for reporting purposes, but they can't be tied to individuals.

@whitequark you know what you have to do. (Networking using infrared band C so you can run IRC over IR-C)

The other aspect of this whole issue is the gaslighting.

We've been sold the narrative that AI is taking our jobs. But more evidence is indicating that is not true.

How can anyone be expected to thrive where we are under a very real threat, and being gaslit about it?

fortune.com/2026/01/07/a...
https://fortune.com/2026/01/07/ai-layoffs-convenient-corporate-fiction-true-false-oxford-economics-productivity/

I heard that Meta did another round of layoffs.

If one thing can bring tech workers together in this moment its how sick we are of losing our jobs and our peers losing jobs, and always feeling like we might lose our jobs. For years.

I've seen many people leaving this field because of it.

New fantasy book idea: vampire who can’t die, studies for multiple PhDs through eternity

A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.

The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.

To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.

The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.

That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.

The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.

The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.

Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.

Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #ITHorrorStories #Monitoring

I will never use this, but I just love that someone put in the time to figure out how to make realistic coffee stains on a LaTeX document. This is what the world needs right now. https://ctan.math.illinois.edu/graphics/pgf/contrib/coffeestains/coffeestains-en.pdf

So, somebody wrote a program that converts, in-place, an #NTFS volume into #btrfs.

It even keeps an image of the original NTFS volume as a file in the resulting btrfs volume. This can be used to undo the conversion or deleted to free up space and make the conversion permanent.

That is absolutely wild.

https://github.com/maharmstone/ntfs2btrfs

#Linux

I assume DNS and bind is the new Netflix and chill?

All around me are familiar faces...

Great day to listen to Rage Against the Machine as loud as my ears can handle and sing "FUCK YOU I WONT DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!" with my entire being

Vibe coding is hilarious right up to the moment the first generation of vibe engineers enters the aviation, automotive, and defense job market.

What a ceo says: we expect everyone to use AI at this company, 100% compliance is required

What they mean: we spent millions on this fucking bullshit, and no one is using it?

#ai

Computer Chronicles was my absolute favorite in elementary school. it was always a treat to watch that show and I'm grateful that my teachers were quite forward-thinking. Rest in peace, Stewart: https://obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-cheifet

We had 20 stations check in to the final #FediFridayWinlinkNet of 2025. Welcome to first-time participants @AF0AJ and @rnelson.

The question of the week was "What was your favorite ham radio activity during 2025?" Here are the responses:
- Getting back into HF
- Roving to different grid squares operating VHF/UHF and amateur satellites.
- Conducting license exams
- POTA using CW, which helped me get my CW chops back this year!
- Packet Radio, and espescially Convers
- WSPR beaconing using a home brewed transmitter
- Releasing my logging software. That was great fun!
- Exploring various digital modes, VarAC and FreeDV
- HF packet and POTA
- Getting my tech license! Onward and upward in 2026.
- POTA activation
- getting my dedicated AX.25 packet station up and running
- 60M DX success
- APRS & Winlink
- Working the turn Halloween parade with my club, marshaling costumed kids!
- Working to improve SKYWARN participation and reporting for our local NWS office
- Field Day

The net webpage has been updated and confirmation messages have been sent via #Winlink.

https://w0rmt.net/ffwn/

See you all later this week for the first #FFWN of 2026!

#hamradio

if you ever have a CAPTCHA that asks you to identify traffic lights, do it QUICKLY or some guy in a Waymo somewhere could die