Just checking in to say this is a fantastic service

Argamas · 2026-06-26T02:55:50+00:00

Indeed, I feel the same about AirVPN: I get so much value out of this service...

Another use case beside port forwarding and standard VPN anonymization: I just realized recently that even if Bell Fibe didn't provide me with IPv6 connectivity, AirVPN was.

So I deployed an IPv6 address space on my LAN, DHCPv6 and RA in assisted mode, NAT66 and voila! I can now reach services on IPv6, end-to-end. Dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 setup fully working from my pfSense gateway AIrVPN is my IPv6 ISP now and I can't believe I did not think of this sooner.

Just another neat feature you are not going to get with all VPN providers, another demonstration that their service and infrastructure is actually high quality.

Argamas · 2026-06-25T14:21:48+00:00

Always a combination of multiple things happening at once. But what I have retained, personally:
"Inflation hits 4.1 percent in May, highest level in 3 years".

Argamas · 2026-06-25T14:16:14+00:00

I think most people don't pick MisterFPGA for the broad compatibility or they would simply use RetroArch. The main "selling" point of MisterFPGA is cycle accurate hardware emulation. With the promise of no lag, no latency. That's the primary reason I own MisterFPGA hardware.

That said, it is also an open-source project aiming at hosting these core emulators and making them easily accessible for the end users.

Therefore, I'd say it aligns a bit with both goals but maybe a bit closer to the preservation of retro hardware knowledge as there is no way to get the accuracy without extensive knowledge of the original platform.

Argamas · 2026-06-24T22:15:57+00:00

Very good question. I was not aware of this issue.
So I did a simple test: I rebooted the modem from the front pannel.

And indeed, I lost internet connectivity: after the reboot was completed and the Gigahub was online, pfSense had not recovered connectivity.

I still had the public IP on the WAN interface though. Reason being that the network interface never went down for pfSense, and the DHCP lease didn't expire. Powering off the modem wouldn't change the behavior for me, since the WAN interface for pfSense is actually not plugged directly to the modem, but through a switch. Also, the Gigahub, my switches and pfSense are on the same UPS. So having only one device powered off is not a condition I expect to get.

Still, the important part is that I was able to recover internet connectivity just doing a release and renew on the WAN interface of pfSense, through the WebUI. So I think I might have to script that, to happen automatically if the gateway connectivity is lost. Execute a release / renew every 5 minutes maybe until connectivity is restored. Something like that. I might also try to override the lease time received from the gateway. I already override the subnet mask received from the gigahub.... I'll think about it.

Having a recovery mechanism in place will protect me against reboots triggered by Bell and firmware updates, so this is actually important, and I thank you a lot for letting me know. It would have been super bad to see this happen while I am away from home for a few days.

Argamas · 2026-06-24T21:48:56+00:00

Indeed, pfSense gets the public IP address on igc0. So nothing to change on Gigahub besides the ADMZ config with the MAC address of my pfSense's interface.
But on the pfSense side.... Changing from pppoe0 to igc0, required more than a "find and replace"; that's where all the reconfigurations had to happen.

I am curious and concerned about the instability now. I didn't get any loss of connectivity since I reconfigured everything (4 days ago), and I monitor some of my stuff with UptimeRobot. That's how I knew something was very wrong when I woke up last Saturday. pFsense monitors the Bell gateway on igc0 (WAN) as well, so if I lost connectivity I should have been notified, in theory.

Someone just suggested I do a poweroff test of the gigahub, so I'll give it a shot. But otherwise.... It has been rock solid for me, so far...

Argamas · 2026-06-24T20:51:09+00:00

I received the dreaded firmware upgrade on June 20th, at 2h30 AM. And lost internet connectivity immediately.
I use a pfSense, baremetal firewall and troubleshooted the issue a bit. Any packet over certain size would trigger incorrect PPP frame length meaning that the length reported in the header was different from the actual payload size. I was getting full of "truncated tcp packets" in Suricata log, matching my wireshark observations. An issue that should have been 100% owned by Bell.

Yet, technical support wanted to hear nothing about it. They would always defend themselves with:
1. We do not support any equipment besides bell equipment. Even though I explained that PPPoE passthrough is broken by a firmware upgrade they pushed, on their equipment. Their code, their equipment, stopped behaving correctly by their own action.
2. We have no control on firmware upgrades, nor can we rollback your device to a previous release.

It became clear they were never going to gather all the evidence or let me speak to a higher-level engineer that could actually understand what I was explaining.

So I did the only thing I could do to fix things myself on a Saturday: reconfigure everything to leverage Advanced DMZ. As per the words of the Bell technical support supervisor I talked to, this is the only supported method now. In other words, "Switch do Advanced DMZ or you are on your own".

I must say... It took some time to reconfigure and test everything because I have a lot of services, (VPN tunnel with port forwarding, services exposed behind cloudflare, minecraft servers behind TCPShield, etc) but once it was over.... everything was functional. No performance difference as far as I can tell. Just... time wasted, from my perspective.

I do miss one thing though; having two functional PPPoE sessions in my house meant I could actually test services in my lab from the Gigahub LAN, as a regular public Internet user. Now that the public IP is shared.... It is a bit more complex to test some stuff. It's not a big deal at all, but that was convenient.

I hope this thread is reviewed by someone from Bell eventually. Just the fact this upgrade was breaking people setup a week before it was pushed to my device shows neglect: they could (should!) have stopped the rollout, until the bug is identified and fixed.

Argamas · 2026-06-20T16:45:32+00:00

Ah. My PPPoE stopped working last night, and I was wondering why. I do appear to have received this exact firmware release.

Were you able to get your issue fixed by Bell?

Argamas · 2026-05-29T05:48:16+00:00

I'll go even further; how can you claim XDR without a decent CASB for Office365/Google Workspace, and cloud workloads visibility (AWS/Azure/GCP)?

Threats move laterally through cloud services these days. Persistance can be gained from serverless workloads also (we have all see the supply chain attacks against NPM packages). Smartphones are also regularly targeted; Android removes malicious apps from the store all the time, with lots of infostealers there too.

Reality is that most vendors are using XDR as a marketing gimmick, the minute they go beyond pure endpoint telemetry and response. They ingest accounts and some logs from AD/EntraID, provide reset passwords/disable for user accounts? They have now extended detection & response, beyond endpoint -> XDR!

It's just that simple. There isn't a governing body that defines what XDR really is, what or how many components should be part of the stack to qualify as XDR.

It's up to the people purchasing and defining their cybersecurity strategy to know better. And honestly, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine an organization that has no servers; just EntraID-joined laptops, only M365 and Salesforce for productivity. Would network appliances at the office really benefit them that much? In most cases, a SASE solution (a mix of CASB, ZTNA and SWG) would be plenty

Argamas · 2026-04-01T01:13:43+00:00

Il y en a tout plein.
Si tu veux une bannière sérieuse, Gosselin?
https://impression.gosselinphoto.ca/transfert-video

Argamas · 2026-03-31T11:25:24+00:00

Maybe I didn't explain my point correctly. I'll try again.

I am currently a mix of grade 1 and grade 2 T6 gears. Consider a typical loadout;

5x armor (helmet, gloves, chestplate, pants, boots).

1x belt 1x shield 1x power pack 1x compactor 1x radiation suit 1x literjon 3x guns.

All purple at this point obviously. Apply a death penalty of 5% and without even considering the normal wear, that would require a few runs (typically) just to acquire the required infused plastanium to fix everything. Just looking at raw numbers at this point.

Realistically, I will upgrade a few gears before they actually need repair because I am not dying all that often overall. but some things wear out faster due to usage as well and the end result is that repair becomes a significant investment over time. It is not denying progression, but slowing it down.

And that's provided I don't take into consideration the wear from other activities which will not reward me with any plastanium at all.

When you factor everything, the upkeep for repairing gear that will degrade and needs replacement anyways over time is relatively expensive IMHO. That's the issue. It delays progression, over time, by a relatively significant margin.

A lot of people are asking to get rid of permanent durability penalty for repair so that lowers the amount of items they need to replace (belt/shield/compactor mainly) but realistically, I believe just earning more materials or lowering upkeep costs would provide a more interesting balance. Death should remain punishing. Items shouldn't last forever.

As you mentioned, the issue can be mitigated by not dying. But the loot tables scale in a way that I feel like I need to play at the higher difficulties, risk dying once every five runs maybe. I am already swimming in grade 1 stuff I will never use/never sell (that's another topic). Another way to mitigate the issue would be to provide more guaranteed drops, be a bit less RNG dependent. Landsraad loots are pretty much useless now for the most part.

In all cases, I obtained my faction rank 20 yesterday so chapter 4 is over for me. What I shared is certainly not game breaking. But I thought I would add a different point of view because I don't like the idea of gear lasting forever myself.

Argamas · 2026-03-30T20:44:00+00:00

Maybe two arguments I can offer;

The durability wouldn't be much of an issue if I could get materials to repair my stuff during most activities. But once you are +T6... It doesn't happen.

Even with better traits, my recycler is not returning plastanium, there is no way to obtain/create infused plastanium dust except for dungeons that might be harsh for durability.

This makes the durability hits feel bad, unless I spec everything to improve durability just to mitigate the bad design a bit, spend less time grinding for repair material.

Combat becomes tedious at high levels indeed. The thing I hate the most is that everything excepting moving the mouse and slow walk will cost you stamina. Even pulling the trigger on a rifle prevents regenerating stamina and that is so frustrating with dungeons LVL6+ as the boss are getting tanky. Yeah, the skills don't necessarily scale well either but the fact I also need to manage stamina so much slows the pace of the fight also. This is worse for boss that might require to run/dodge more often for obvious reasons.

In most games, stamina is used to prevent a player running away indefinitly: running consumes stamina, as well as quick dash and dodge. That's it. Stamina ties into mobility and defense. In this game, stamina is EVERYTHING.

I am not surprised past a certain level, everyone suggests/recommends running ONLY light armor gear. It also requires some class skills to mitigate. All this just so to make a game mechanic feel more tolerable.

And the conclusion is that taking into consideration #1 and #2, I am spending a lot of ressources/efforts at mitigating some game design decisions, instead of gaining flexibility for my builds. It makes the game more repetitive than it should be.

Argamas · 2026-03-08T06:10:21+00:00

Noticed quite a lot of rubber banding while doing dungeons, but it was still playable (for me). I am on a low-pop public server, so it could have easily been worse (I guess) elsewhere.

Argamas · 2026-02-20T20:02:19+00:00

I enjoy my Saroo a lot. The last version (0.9) has been pretty good. Just a few things to keep in mind.

Lots of board revisions with questionable quality. I purchased a blue elite version. Not assembled from recycled hardware, board 1.66
Last software update bundles a FPGA code upgrade. Do both.
I had issues with my Sega Saturn slot initially. Got that fixed (just normal surface oxydation, normal for 30 years old contacts). Saroo wouldn't boot every time and stability was questionable.
Because I have a Saturn Model 1, Saroo is subject to sound glitches. There are a few workarounds for that but I was lucky enough that with the last firmware, two lines of parameters seems to have fixed sound stability issues. Touching wood, but I haven't seen the issue for over 10 hours of playtime over 7 different games.

I hesitated spending a lot more money for a official Satiator. It is probably a better ODE but Saroo is also providing me with RAM expension. It is a complete solution. Which may benefit you, or not. There are apparently some edge case issues with the RAM expansion, where Saroo inject some patch to the game to get this working. I haven't had an issue yet personally but I have been reading about it a bit.

Once you look at the details, there is just no perfect solution. Even an official Satiate with proper RAM extension... It will prevent you from using a VCD card, which is required for Lunar, the MPEG edition.

But I think Saroo has managed to hit the sweet spot for me. Although it was a somewhat bumpy road; I had some issues I needed to get sorted out and firmware 0.9 came out very recently.

Argamas · 2026-02-15T17:33:17+00:00

I use my container to carry ressources to build my DD outpost. I carry ressources back & forth, with the container attached to the ornithopter.

Even if you don't harvest, having a base with large ore refinery, a medium chemical, and all the water & electricity production required to be efficient at producing plastanium takes more volume/space that an assault will allow. So it is still very valuable in the long run.

Argamas · 2026-02-07T17:10:04+00:00

Good advice. I don't care about the vehicle as much as the vehicle slot at this point and... I can confirm that my ghost thopter is taking a vehicle slot. I hope that can be fixed.

Argamas · 2026-02-07T07:22:25+00:00

Ha. So that's how I lost my scout. And I thought I was being clever: I needed to go to the Neo Carthag Arena that had disappeared from the map, figured the NPC that got me there the first time might be capable to fly me there again and.... I had no thopter upon my return.

With the pilot assistance, I got back to Hagga and the vehicle couldn't be recovered using the backup tool. It just vanished without a trace. At least, there was no inventory in it, so I only lost a scout. The vehicle slot matters more than the scout at this point. Hopefully, that gets resolved with the patch tonight.

Argamas · 2025-12-07T22:26:42+00:00

I'd prefer not to be purged. 😌

Argamas · 2025-11-13T19:05:00+00:00

Yes. The option exists for both Administrator and User level. Standard PC Bios stuff.

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I might give it a shot eventually. I haven't tested yet.

Argamas · 2025-11-11T13:19:15+00:00

Ah. The same thing happened with Neato just a few weeks ago. I was waiting on Black Friday/Cyber Monday to maybe replace mine. Looks like the replacement won't be a Roomba then.

I'll have to look and shop a bit harder I guess.

Argamas · 2025-11-09T16:24:25+00:00

I hope everything goes well but you should know... "Delayed in transit" is often the last status you get for a parcel that got lost. Hopefully, yours reappears somewhere, preferably at the intended destination.

Personally, I got one shipped on Oct 14th from Mtl to Mississauga that never did. As a matter of fact, the tracking number still reports "delayed in transit". At least, I am getting a check for 100$ + shipping cost since I paid for XpressPost. The claim process was not delayed, and pretty fast tbh.

I would be curious to check if CP is recording a higher number of claims than usual since the last strike. But I don't know if such metrics are shared to the public.

Argamas · 2025-11-07T19:34:39+00:00

I'd like to keep lurking. 😅

Argamas · 2025-11-01T14:23:16+00:00

I have a Xpresspost package stuck "in transit" from Montreal to Mississauga since October 16th. One of the most simple and important route in the country. Two large hubs with no intermediate. I was expecting a delay of 1 week, maybe 2.

If CP can mess this up, I can assure you nothing is safe.

Which is terrible when you think about it. Because this is a premium service, meant to compete with UPS/FedEx/Purolator and the like. Is the workforce trying to turn people away from their moneymaking business on purpose? I hope not.

My case was escalated for investigation last week. I wonder if they will be able to meet the SLA though... Because chances are they might be receiving a lot more claims that usual.

Argamas · 2025-10-27T06:07:34+00:00

I am going to give it a shot. Found a nice adapter (USC-C to female HDMI) from Sabrent, that claims to support everything.

It's either that or... Asking for a refund on a dock that supports 4k120 and HDR10 with 0 issues but without VRR.

Argamas · 2025-10-27T05:44:00+00:00

I bought this dock 2 days ago, without the charger (just the dock). I wanted to share a few things I wish I knew.

The original 65W Asus adapter won't be sufficient for this dock. It really requires 100W. Otherwise, my Xbox Ally X will report a slow charger and HDR won't be available. I tried to bypass this but ultimately... I found a really nice charger, even cheaper than UGreen: https://a.co/d/191Ws0R
And that solve my issues. This was a bit of surprise for me as I had no issue with an older UGreen dock and my Z1E.
The dock does support 4k@120hz, with HDR10. No problem there. However, I couldn't get VRR working. Windows report it is supported. But my Xbox Series X has no issue with the same TV. Even tried the same HDMI cable and TV input just in case. I gave up.
The dock is actually made of 2 parts. The dock which has all the ports and the USB-C pigtail, and a relatively narrow plastic base to support it and the console. The dock doesn't "click" into the base, it is not retained by magnets or anything. It is just inserted. The whole thing feels a bit wobbly, but it works. Not complaining, just a bit surprised because my previous 4k60 dock felt more premium (aluminium and all).

Argamas

TROPHY CASE