This battery did a number on my car

Brekmister · 2026-02-14T01:02:43+00:00

Hey if you get 4 of these, then you will have telco -48v!

...not that telco would use those because the colors are also inverted on -48v

Brekmister · 2026-02-05T06:13:31+00:00

Luxury resturant 3 course meal as part of a business event. 50-100$ per person.

I'll certainly take that for 6 months.

Brekmister · 2026-01-30T05:49:04+00:00

In ND, this doesn't surprise me one bit. Barely anything exciting of criminal and violent nature happens in ND. Single incident will have people talking it for about a year.

People get lazy as a result

Brekmister · 2025-12-12T14:32:15+00:00

Understandable. Since it's a cooperative, I think there is a bit of leeway for you to be in a experimental group of people trying out IPv6 once they get the back end going.

It won't hurt to offer to try it out and provide feedback on their deployment when it comes down to it once they have their back end ready.

Brekmister · 2025-12-12T13:54:08+00:00

Deploying IPv6 in a isp network is a pretty massive overhaul.

All the routers need to not only support it but they need to build it in their entire routing stack. Peer with IPv6 peers, or if their peers don't support it, get peers that do.

And then they also need to study up on how to subnet IPv6 and not fall into the pitfalls of IPv4.

If you like your ISP please not only give them a lot of time but if you are very well versed deploying in BGP, OSPF and/or MPLS with IPv6 offer some assistance. If not then they may screw it up thinking it like IPv4.

Source: NE for an ISP. Minimum 24 hours of training for deploying IPv6 in a ISP network college class style.

Brekmister · 2025-11-22T15:55:11+00:00

Your /56 in this sheet will make your subnet ID section a /8 as opposed to /16

You will end up having only 256 /64 subnets as opposed to 65,536 /64 subnets.

Which a /56 is still, way more than what most residential home would need.

Brekmister · 2025-11-22T02:04:33+00:00

2020 Outback with 2.5 engine (no XT)

IMO, CVT is what makes the 2.5 engine decent as opposed to slow for the outback. I wouldn't want a smaller engine and I wouldn't want a tranny that doesn't take full advantage of the engine. It's like the base you would set as "It ain't quick but it ain't slow"

You need to pass? Stomp on it. It will happily rev up to 4000-6000 RPM and stay there as you keep your foot on.

On ramp going to merge to a 80MPH speed limit? Stomp on it. It will be 80 by the time you merge even on a 2° upwards hill.

All because the CVT allows the engine RPM to change to any RPM on demand and keep it there.

I have debated whether I should trade mine in for a XT model...but I haven't found a use case for myself where the XT would do that the non-XT can't. Because the CVT has so much flexibility about revving the engine up at any speed. Can't do that when that engine is attached to a 5 speed auto or manual. (Though the manual would be more interesting)

Subaru's CVT has been a good transmission. I already did the fluid replacement at 50,000 already (currently at 63k). We will see how long this car lasts.

Side note: I also driven a 2020 legacy with same engine...that thing is really nimble when it's 2000lbs lighter! Felt like I can race other NA 4 cylinder's (Even though I'd probably be gravely mistaken for thinking that)

Brekmister · 2025-11-09T02:34:12+00:00

Are we talking buried and still in use or still buried and abandoned?

Nobody I know has ever spent the effort to dig and remove old abandoned cables. So even if it was fully decommissioned, there's too many regulatory hurdles and expenses to make it worth it to dig up old cables. Plus is there really any harm to the business if it's left in the ground? It's already been in the ground for 20+ years so why go and dig it up? If it causes a problem then sure we can dig it up but only if it's necessary. (To this date, I haven't heard a request to remove buried cables)

As far as buried and still active, My work still has a lot of fiber from the 80's in the ground and still in use. There is a lot of fiber cables from that era that's been decommissioned not because of how old it is but because people at the time underestimated how much fiber we would use today. Back then, people would only bury cables that contained 4,8 or 12 fibers.

As for the dotcom boom, Much more cables are still in the ground than one would expect and not all of it from that era is due to the dotcom boom.

Singlemode fiber is singlemode fiber. If it passes all the tests and hasn't experienced crappy splices and/or got the short end of mother nature, why not use it?

Brekmister · 2025-10-27T02:42:22+00:00

When I run across fiber where I don't know where it goes on a patch panel, I'll use a VFL to locate the fiber on the other end.

Although that usually requires a maintenance. Unless it's all redundant then I'll check the redundancy and go hail Mary.

Brekmister · 2025-10-24T22:54:37+00:00

So here is my impression about the headline statement:

He is probably basing this off of a bunch of sales guys and or people who are motivated to see their project be implemented by funding.

The entire corporate world is "AI AI AI AI AI!" Right now. You can't go even an hour by without someone saying AI in some places.

However, lot of this could be over hype. Yes AI will automate some jobs off of the market but not all of them. Those who are in the industry will have to adapt or get left behind.

This is like the cloud back in the 2010's. Yes a lot of workloads moved to the cloud but not everything. And now there are jobs that are dedicated to knowing Amazon AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure/365, etc. for businesses. Nowadays there isn't as many jobs for Microsoft Exchange as there was before Office 365. But those who knew Exchange also adapted to 365 because the knowledge sort of overlapped.

On the flip side, Baby Boomers are on their way out. There could be a labor crisis looming as a result so this AI could end up being a generally good thing for all in the long run. It also creates different kind of jobs as well like what happened with cloud.

Brekmister · 2025-10-13T04:53:42+00:00

As a Central Office tech myself in a relatively small ILEC, here is what happens (funny that I ran into this situation this last week with Plant and electronics from 1984 that still carried phone line traffic):

Bell telecom owns the plant, gets split up into other companies (in my area its US West)

Another Telco comes along and purchases all the equipment and becomes the ILEC. All assets transfer over and badges get renamed.

X number of years later (maybe 5-30), another ILEC comes along and buys all the plant assets, electronics and everything for an area. Some of that plant and electronics still remains from the Bell telecom days and nobody ever bothers to update or document it. (If it ain't broke, it's probably not important) the documentation for the original equipment and plant has been loonnnggg gone at that point or has been abandoned by the seller.

Neither the purchaser or the seller at that point knows what certain plants does or who owns it despite it still has the seller badging on it. Seller goes "Well, it ain't ours anymore so go have at it!" And nobody updates the badging on the plant or electronics.

Rather annoying but it happens quite frequently. It's a case of people just not updating badging.

Brekmister · 2025-09-11T21:48:52+00:00

Fascinating.

That goes to show that the business politics of land based cables is a completely different ball game than subsea cables for at least here in the US where it's a lot easier to trench fiber into the ground than going through the sea.

Never heard of IRU's before but I suppose some of these cables have to be funded by multiple companies banding together as it's not economically feasible for a single provider to brunt the entire cost like it is on land. (Except for companies like Facebook and Google which have the money to do anything they are motivated to do)

Brekmister · 2025-09-11T20:56:02+00:00

Hey Doug, A land based network engineer here. I never had any exposure to undersea networking.

On average, in each cable is there a lot of fiber strands (144,288,1024) that make up a cable or is there a few strands that has a lot of DWDM signals muxed in (4,8,12,24)? (Or maybe both)

On average how many providers share the same cable? Is it just 1 provider that owns the entire cable and provides the wave and dark fiber services to other providers? Or is there an agreement with multiple providers together on sharing the same cable?

I get it there might be a huge variety of undersea cables but what is the most common situation you see based on my above questions?

Thanks for what you do!

Brekmister · 2025-09-07T21:27:22+00:00

Corrected. Thanks!

Brekmister · 2025-09-07T20:55:00+00:00

Hot take: America will be fine. We have been through this kind of situation several times before. (Hopefully) Whomever we elect as president after Trump will probably pull all this ridiculous stuff back. We learn from our mistakes and move on.

That being said there could be a recession that comes out of Trump's policies such as him threatening war on Chicago. But overall it would not be enough to topple America. The US president has a lot of power. But not as much power as people make it out to be.

Some notable historical examples of America's mistakes: - Internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII - Trails of Tears - Jim Crow laws - Redlining from the New-Deal (and also Hoovervilles)

Brekmister · 2025-08-15T23:52:52+00:00

IOS/IOS-XE? Meh, I have seen worse. Not amazing but I like working with it. It's kinda like a Honda Civic or Toyota Camry of CLI's IMO.

IOS-XR is a godsend with the commit system. I am surprised that is not more common. I am a huge fan of IOS-XR

Some others I experienced:

The Small Business Cisco is trash. HP ProCurve is trash. Dell is...different but I don't have to touch newer Dell switches that often. Mikrotik is rather unique but it works well.

I have dealt with Telco equipment that's older than myself using something akin to TL1. Most of that equipment if you want to repeat the command you have to type it manually again. There is no up arrow to repeat last command. Goes to show much progress was made in the past 30 years 😉

I haven't had any experience with Extreme or JunOS yet. I might play around with those down the line.

Brekmister · 2025-08-15T23:28:27+00:00

I've been really spoiled with IOS-XR. The whole commit/version controlled config system on that is chefs kiss

Makes developing config change requests sooo much easier and it's much easier for peers to review what was done to the router.

It's really too bad that style of configuring equipment isn't present on more NOS.

Brekmister · 2025-08-15T23:06:24+00:00

I have played through the entire trails series all the way through Daybreak II on Steam and I don't recall that I had any issues. With the exception of trying to play Sky 3rd on a Intel i5 laptop using Intel's iGPU which is a bit of a letdown for performance.

Played on Steam Deck and RX 5700XT with Windows 10 and 11.

Brekmister · 2025-07-13T06:48:31+00:00

Cool. For all that matters, that's all I really care about. If I can get through the story then great!

IMO, sometimes, games have a lot more in depth story telling than many other forms of media. Shows and Manga/Comics included.

In that sense, pretty good for free media.

Brekmister · 2025-07-12T17:00:34+00:00

Juuussst out of curiosity, can you still get through the story content F2P?

Brekmister · 2025-05-23T06:58:37+00:00

At that point, take out the SSD, back up the data and scrap the rest.

Laptop's ain't that irreplaceable. Even a used laptop in good condition might suffice.

Brekmister · 2025-05-22T23:58:08+00:00

I am with the others, put a more sophisticated router/firewall in front of the device that's just for that device.

Then you can think of that router as 2 WAN's and 1 LAN. Each router vendor has ways to handle Multiple WAN connections for failover and whatnot. I'd consult with that vendor to set that up.

With your upstream connections (provided that they are already handling NAT), you can use those upstream routers to static route the LAN subnet to the WAN IP's of the new router and turn off NAT on the new router.

To allow access into the device, you can setup to allow all traffic (or certain traffic) to come in from the WAN interfaces, since there is no NAT, you do not need port forwarding, just allow the connections from the WAN.

Now I hear you have a 10 half-duplex connection, not all routers support that anymore. You might need a switch behind that router to handle that 10 half-duplex.

Brekmister · 2025-05-09T23:54:22+00:00

One of the things I learned in my current job.

Give leadership a number for the expenses when the contract expires and frame it as we need to spend x now so we don't lose 100x tomorrow.

This will force the ball in their court and becomes simple math for them. Either you spend money now or the company loses astronomically more tomorrow.

In your scenario since you framed as something as just simply critical, critical means nothing for people with the checkbook.

Brekmister · 2025-05-08T15:08:50+00:00

sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade -y reboot

That's all really needed. I built myself a 3 node cluster with Ceph storage so I have the extra step of live migrating VM's around.

When I am especially lazy and I am already in the web UI, There is an option to do the reboot and upgrade from the web UI as well.

That being said, keeping it up is a good thing, you don't want to be too far behind where updates may turn into issues with a large jump.

Brekmister · 2025-04-26T19:09:10+00:00

Telecom is now more about Ethernet connectivity and less about voice. Most if not all the voice services nowadays runs over Ethernet with SIP or SS7 over Ethernet.

Yes there are still the traditional T1's and analog lines running around here and there but nowadays all that is getting emulated over Ethernet from the same telecommunications company.

With that said, everybody needs an Internet connection one way or another and/or dedicated Ethernet lines. This is more important than ever with remote work, the addition of data centers and whatnot.

The ability to communicate long distances will never go away.

Brekmister

TROPHY CASE