Did you point out to this person that they contacted you, that you never claimed to be a Node expert, etc.? If so, did they have any sort of coherent response to that observation?
Yep, I sure did. I never got anything about why they reached out to me specifically or any such explanation. Just that they needed a "node expert". The call lasted maybe 5 minutes when they'd scheduled half an hour.
There is no provider network (or even non-trivial corporate network) without over-subscription somewhere. It is completely impractical to achieve. Consider a simple Ethernet network with 4 nodes each with a 10gbps connection:
A
B # C
D
Assume the switch in the middle (the "#") is a non-blocking cross-bar switch, so every port has a dedicated internal 10gbps path to every other port. Even in this simple example, you already have over-subscription which cannot be resolved except by having every node directly connected to every other node: while each node can transmit (and receive) 10gbps independently, if, say, nodes A and B both want to transmit 10gbps towards node C, the egress buffer for port C on the switch will fill up and overflow.
Ok, you say, I'm just worried about ISP networks, not some free-for-all hypothetical Ethernet network where the nodes want to talk to each other. All the subscriber nodes just want to talk to the uplink, not each other:
----+ 100 gbps uplink +----
| DSLAM or similar device |
----+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+----
| | | | | | | | | |
A B C D E F G H I J ...
Here we have a (practically speaking) non-blocking node. But, ISPs need to have way more than 100 subscribers to be practical. So we need a lot of these devices. And we've just moved our contention up a level or two:
If we have 10 of these DSLAMs connected to an uplink (still quite small for an ISP in a moderate-sized town,) we need 1tbps of bandwidth going to our core router. If we have 100, 10tbps, and so on.
From there, at a typical big ISP, you'd have connections going toward (directly, or via another intermediate location) two different exchange points. And there, the math, which is already completely implausible, becomes totally bonkers. The reason being that a typical ISP wants to do what's called settlement-free peering to exchange traffic with other providers, rather than buy connectivity from one or more of them.
So, to keep our network "oversubscription free", whatever max uplink (likely in the thousands of terabits per second range at this point, at the very least,) has to be provisioned with every single provider our hypothetical ISP peers with. After all, we aren't doing any statistical traffic analysis. We're just making sure that there is no point of contention between any of our customers and any provider we peer with, anywhere in our network.
Even if you take peering out of the equation, all you've done is move the problem around: a provider could buy, say, 10,000 tbps of bandwidth from another provider, I guess, but then that provider which is peering with hundreds of other ISPs has the same problem. Otherwise, its just a shell game where provider A says "we don't oversubscribe" knowing full well their upstream provider does.
This is all completely insane. Nobody does it. What good operators do, instead, is proactively monitor their network and add capacity as needed, preferably before anything gets saturated.
There is no any practical network without over-subscription. Power, water and waste grids, roads etc – none of these are designed to handle "all users use all their last mile pipes can handle" loads. It would be just impossible.
Have you expressed disagreement with a duly sworn officer of the Mastodon HOA before? Because they definitely like to yell at and call people with whom they disagree idiots.
Live in London is a great representation of how he sounded toward the end of his touring career, and I think it is a great place to start. IMO, there's not a bad track on the album.
Kyndryl was spun out of IBM a while back. My cynical take is that the “IBM GS” brand was so toxic this was the only way to continue to sell those billable hours.
As others have noted, the Xjack was neat, but a bit fragile. I really liked my Xircom Realport[0] card - it had durable Ethernet and modem jacks, but did take up two card slots. It was great for field work.
> How is Wayland support these days? I love i3 but I know Sway promises to be close enough.
I think it depends on what you mean by “Wayland”, but I’m an Arch/Sway user with AMD hardware on my desktop and Apple silicon on my laptop, and Sway performance/stability is great on both, with the caveat that my laptop is now running the Asahi Fedora remix instead of Arch, since the Asahi team killed the Arch port off a while back.
Depends on your tolerance level. I get random crashes under heavy load at least once a month or so under CPU-bound tasks. As I said, GPU/Sway stability is perfect - I've had no issues there, but large rust builds seem to tip the system over occasionally.
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