Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 8th, 2024
TIL a DHCPv4 server can respond with two different TFTP boot-file-names in a single DHCPOFFER packet. And how the second filename can get corrupted with extra junk that shows up as a PXE client trying to download a slightly wrong file from your TFTP server. The latter I’ve seen before but I don’t think I […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 17th, 2024
Years behind schedule I finally got around to replacing ISC DHCP with Kea DHCP so I could finally have proper IPv6 host reservations. What I just learned, and should have learned years ago, that several of my motherboards such as the Supermicro A1SAi and Intel NUC while they support UEFI PXE booting, they do not […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 16th, 2024
[photos: flickr – Vintage dial-up modem teardowns] [photos: flickr – Analog telephone adapters] For several months I’ve been buying old popular models of dial-up modems from the 1990s to test how they fare over VoIP connections along with different analog telephone adapters. To my great annoyance maybe a quarter of them didn’t include an AC […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 16th, 2024
This is my second Petcube Bites and after a few years of operation it stopped dispensing treats. Treats started getting jammed between the rotating loader head thingy and the slot loading to the launcher chute and I’d have to empty it out and pick out the offending treat, only to have it jam the next […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 26th, 2024
Here’s one for the future troubleshooting seekers. I was testing IPv4 UEFI PXE booting a Supermicro A1SAi motherboard after applying the Atom 2550 fix and couldn’t get the thing to load the network bootstrap program (NBP). I’m not at all saying this is the only reason for hitting a PXE-E99 error, this is just what […]
Posted in Uncategorized, vintage on Aug 26th, 2024
This is part of the project to connect my Wildcat! BBS to a retro X.25 network, but it also applies more broadly to “reverse telnet” operation of a Cisco router where you telnet/ssh to a router at a given port to access a serial device hanging off of the aux or a terminal line. I […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 28th, 2024
I was recently expanding my analog voice empire and noticed my Cisco ATA191 was blinking like it was rebooting, and coming back. Looking at logs it was indeed warm rebooting and SIP re-registering every few minutes. I ruled out a duplicate IP address, and it never missed a ping. I was wondering if the VoIP […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 15th, 2024
Many years ago I was out of the country turning up a new site. Along with racks of servers we had a pair of cabinets shipped to us that contained Cisco 6509s, patch panels, with 300+ ports pre-mounted, pre-cabled, and tested from our main US site. This was a weeks long project and we were […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on May 25th, 2024
[photos: flickr – 1995 Tape backup pulls] Data has been recovered from my 1995 backup tapes! After badly mangling one of my three QIC-80 backup tapes trying to repair it to make it readable, I gave up before I screwed them up even more. Finally a couple of weeks ago I contacted Dmitry Brant, who […]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 24th, 2024
TL;DR so awesome, so much room for activities I should have done this years ago This is such an exciting game-changing, lifestyle change! I moved my desk! Ever since I moved in years ago into my small apartment my desk has always been in my bedroom, where in my place in Redmond it had been […]
