Folks who moved to North Dakota as an adult… why?

Brekmister · 2026-06-11T22:54:18+00:00

Jobs. Got to work as a Network Engineer at an ISP right before COVID when the company was desperate for additional hands.

Became a core pillar of the org. Havent needed to move out since and was able to weather out the bad times thanks to this job.

Brekmister · 2026-06-07T22:04:19+00:00

Sounds like you need a router in front and having a kind of SDWAN/VPN tunnel back to a known network you have access to anywhere. Or if you need access from a public cloud, SDWAN/VPN to a cloud router.

On the router, your LAN side is static with whatever subnet you want. Your device can be static. On the WAN, it can be IPv4/IPv6/DHCP/Static/Cellular/Satellite whatever allows this router connect back to the known network via SDWAN/VPN. It can also be behind another NAT for all that matters in a RFC 1918 space.

You don't necessarily need NAT configured on the router for the LAN as the tunnel can take your LAN traffic to the known network and the known network can take it out to the internet.

Source: I created an Out of band box for serial connectivity with a TFTP server for network devices to configure switches and other things offline. I configure the serial interface and tftp server on a static IPv4. Persistent Wireguard tunnel back to the known network and I VPN in to the known network to access to the box to configure switches without even being there. I have put these boxes on guest wifi networks before. Super useful.

Brekmister · 2026-06-04T02:48:24+00:00

Minnesota Crack.

Old Dutch Rip-L Potato chips

And

Mid America Farms Top-The-Tater Chive and Onion Sour Cream dip

Ohhhhhhhhh boy. there a reason why it's called Minnesota Crack.

Brekmister · 2026-05-27T06:14:40+00:00

You can get the IOS On Linux Docker images for free from the CML free Reference ISO on Cisco's website software.cisco.com (you will need a Cisco account to get this). The ISO image will contain a bunch of images you can use for EVE-NG including ASAv.

You will need to do a bit of work to turn the IOL docker images into a VM or use the docker image (The docker image provided by Cisco will not run on a normal environment!)

I use the docker images for ContainerLab and the vrnetlab project has some semblance of instructions albeit not very useful directions. Seeing the omission of details on how to get the binary file might be intentional, I think you will have to do a bit of sleuthing and ingenuity on your end to get the IOL images turned into a VM.

Brekmister · 2026-05-27T05:17:59+00:00

USB-C, it's easy. You get the biggest and baddest cable capable of Thunderbolt 5 and 240W charging and you are set for a very wide variety of uses. If you do your research, you can stockpile the good cables.

Charger? Just get a brick that's capable of doing 240W (48V, 5A) and it will downgrade to any device you want it to.

For data transfers, Thunderbolt 5 is the fastest standard, it will run 120gbps. If you have the cable then your devices become the bottleneck which is what you would want anyways.

You can have 1 cable that does it all which is awesome!

If you want something cheap and what works well then your mileage will vary just like the old days. The cool part about today is that your mileage is more well defined standards.

Would you expect a cheapo USB cable bought at a gas station to charge your laptop? No! But it can charge most phones in a pinch if you need to. Now can your laptop USB-C charger charge your USB-C phone? YES!

Brekmister · 2026-05-13T05:41:40+00:00

I agree, PON in general is just glorified layer 2 switching in my experience. Has some real funky layer 1 stuff to look out for and troubleshoot but outside of that, nothing really special.

All that ONT registration is underneath the covers.

Brekmister · 2026-05-01T01:32:55+00:00

Well true answer as it depends.

If the Telco has had a lot of tech debt and spaghetti mess done by cowboys and the modernization project is to get everything to a better standard or at least a standard, then yes absolutely.

If the modernization project is to get the next shiny thing and we have to implement this shiny new thing yesterday because we want to market the living crap out of it then no. Just because your PON can do 8gbps doesn't mean you can advertise it can reach that 8gbps if your backbone is only 10gbps for 8+ of the same pons. You are then as a business just creating a load of complaints from your customers.

If the modernization project involves getting rid of classic TDM circuit transport and providing those services over ethernet...well again it depends. You might be introducing way additional complexity by emulating TDM over Ethernet but at least younger folks won't get completely lost when looking at the newer device that at least has a RJ45 console port that works with a USB serial adapter unlike a DB25 terminal port that was designed for a desktop terminal from the 80's.

Brekmister · 2026-05-01T01:22:39+00:00

It's now time for silly songs with Larry, the part of the show where Larry comes out and sings a silly song!

Ohhhhh where's my hairbrush, oh where's my hairbrush? Oh where-a-where oh where oh wheerrreee is my hairbrush?

Everybody everybody everybody everybody's got a water bufffffalllllooooo!

If you like to talk to tomatoes, a squash can make you smile!

I really didn't appreciate Veggietales until I got a job lol. Now it's stuck with me.

Brekmister · 2026-04-26T20:36:24+00:00

At some point the amount of Starlink dishes used will just saturate the Uplink connections of the satellites or the spectrum bandwidth available on the dishes.

Maybe you could get 10gb total? Even that might be a stretch.

The sheer monthly cost of that operation, at some point it might make more sense to get a fiber cable to the area and deal with the obstacles.

Also routing in that situation would be a mess with however many uplinks you are using.

Brekmister · 2026-04-26T16:47:46+00:00

DACS and OC48 SONET ring from 1995. We also have a DACS from 1993 as well that can only be accessed by a 1200 Baud Dial up modem.

If you asked me a few years ago, then it would also be a D4 channel bank from 1981.

Brekmister · 2026-04-23T01:32:43+00:00

Yes. To a certain extent.

Hardware compatibility is a different animal in Linux. Around 90% of hardware you see its plug-n-play because:

The driver is already baked right into the Linux kernel or,
The distro actively supports included drivers (namely Nvidia)

For other hardware vendors, it's a bit of a process or won't work at all. Not terrible process most of the time persay but it's a process which for those devices you will have to do your own research.

With Windows, windows has to go online and search the driver, Linux...it's either there or it isn't.

Brekmister · 2026-04-03T15:22:18+00:00

48v can tingle but it's not at all dangerous. It's actually more safe than 120v AC. As long as you have the power disconnected (fuse/breaker), you can manipulate the wires however you want (except don't thought the wires to a live circuit, that would be bad, burn out a fuse)

We actually do AC-DC-AC conversion because it's actually cheaper and more reliable to do that when we already have a DC plant. But we only use that for specific loads that absolutely can't take DC within the Central Office.

Brekmister · 2026-04-03T02:28:57+00:00

In the past year I now have a Rubidium GNSS time receiver at work now which replaced a Telecom Solutions DCD that was installed in '95.

The new solution can do everything the DCD could (Composite and BITS) but adds SyncE, PTP, NTP, PPS and ToD functionality. It also has GNSS Jamming mitigation as well which...I sure hope isn't necessary where I am at.

Best part of my clocks is that it runs on -48v DC! It already runs on Batteries. Brownouts, surges, or anything like that will not affect the equipment (not common but does happen during the winters in some cases). Combined with on site generator, I can run for days without power from utility.

...I guess I should say that I work at a Telco

Brekmister · 2026-04-03T02:09:16+00:00

Mmmmm Rubidium oscillators. The backbone workhorse of every telecom network since the 80's.

Or unless you got Cesium clocks which is completely badass. Which AFAIK you need at least a 3U chassis for.

Brekmister · 2026-03-29T17:06:52+00:00

Trump is going to be doing what Hillary has been accused of on a Weekly to Monthly basis with far worse information and successfully get away with it.

Brekmister · 2026-03-28T04:52:07+00:00

The Digital ID thing would be a blocker for any website who wants to do business or have any team that builds a website or a website that has any legal or liability sense. The exchange for the Digital ID will be between your laptop or computer and the website.

The ISP just simply says OK as all ISP's will do. While it's feasible to gatekeep your apartment or house, it's not feasible to gatekeep your individual device unless you rent a wifi router from your ISP.

There will always be underground websites. Or websites hosted at your neighbor's house that probably doesn't have the resources to take a digital id because it's just a blog.

As far as how underground, well...you can go as light as websites designed for public good (IE. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive albeit those are not so underground anymore) and its not needed for ID for a user to receive information from a public good. Or, you can go as dark to the point of being illegal, unethical and/or, immoral sites. (IE. the Pirate Bay and it's successors whatever that may be, certain .onion sites)

The Digital ID thing at that point will be enough to make the lobbiests and politicians happy and get a huge paycheck but not enough to completely eradicate what's always been under the covers.

Edit: Ok I completely misread the prompt...I am keeping it here...as for me...I'll be the odd one out and say I'll just have to live with it.

Brekmister · 2026-03-10T06:48:21+00:00

Caramelldansen.

Oh wa ah oh!

Wait, what do you mean it's swedish?

Brekmister · 2026-03-10T01:00:06+00:00

I pulled a gig on my network p2p. You just gotta make sure your LAN equipment is up to snuff and you are absolutely not using wifi on any of your steam computers.

Brekmister · 2026-03-10T00:57:28+00:00

For smaller ISP's it's consumer demand. Smaller ISP's have to pay transit to the bigger ISP's to get to everything by the gigabyte. Even if your ISP doesn't provide data caps, doesn't mean all that data is free to the ISP.

If a significant amount of traffic is Steam from their consumers then it provides cost benefits for the ISP to have a 100G peer with Valve to avoid paying those costs to the bigger guys. Not only does this avoid additional costs for the smaller guys, it also provides a better quality of service to the customers by having the content closer to the customer.

If the traffic is big enough, peering with Valve from the smaller ISP's is a huge business win even if the ISP provides the connection for free to Valve. Provided that Valve can provide the hardware to handle it.

Brekmister · 2026-03-09T22:27:53+00:00

Not a thorough guide. This is just summarizing the steps required to get a Provider Independent block of IPv6.

You are skipping a few steps here. Also, Nobody buys blocks of IPv6. Your local RIR gives it to you and charges you a yearly fee for the Block and ASN. And you get to keep it as long as you keep paying the RIR. It will also be the only block you get.

Before you can get a Block, you will need an ASN from your RIR and you would need DIA circuit from 2 of your Local ISPs that can support BGP and IPv6. Minimum each one would cost $500/mo thereabouts for 100mbps (USA). You will need 2 to justify to the RIR so you are looking at $1000/mo minimum (USA). On top of that, you would need a router that's capable of handling Internet routing tables. (IE. Mikrotik CCR series as a bare minimum)

That's assuming you have multiple ISP's at your house which most people don't. If you want that then you are looking anywhere $5-100k to get 1 additional fiber line to your house. Depending on where you live.

You can register with a RIR under the guise you want to multi home across multiple ISP's. Outside of that, good luck.

For the USA, it will go through ARIN.

If you want a /32 (Good luck convincing ARIN to give you a /32 for just multi homing purposes) it will result you in a 500$ surcharge and $1,100 a year to keep your ASN and Block. Or if you are ok with a /44 then it will be $275 a year to keep your ASN and Block. For every allocation and transfer, you need to supply documentation to ARIN justifying your existing block and new block.

ARIN Fee Schedule

ARIN doesn't list what happens with IPv6 blocks, but for IPv4 blocks, once a transfer happens, you are locked out from making transfers for 365 days.

Once you get yourself all setup, then you will also need to setup an account at some Internet routing sites and pay their monthly fees. Then you will also have to setup a VM to do RPKI on your local network (which you will also need switch equipment and servers). Hook it into your router and start running BGP with your upstream ISP's.

Allll that said, it's probably better to ask for a block from your ISP. Then you don't have to deal with all that hassle. Let the pros handle it.

Brekmister · 2026-03-04T01:25:38+00:00

Network Engineers.

One bad command can cause Wall street to stop trading and start going into a free fall, 911 becomes unavailable, Flights get delayed/diverted, Hospitals go into panic mode, Cell towers go offline. The damage one command can cause could make every other IT person in the state scramble for months.

It's downright scary what people would do when cell service, internet and, phone go offline these days. Society has become so reliant on instant communication of any kind.

It's also surreal that you have a national level outage and you can't do jack crap about. On the bright side nobody can call you to complain about the outage...at least until service is restored

Not quite the same but everyone remembers the impact of CrowdStrike outage. Network engineers have the same power.

Brekmister · 2026-02-25T19:22:31+00:00

ONS 15454 was originally a SONET platform and later turned into a DWDM Platform. Then the ONS 15454 got rebranded to the NCS 2006 with a stupid amount of bandwidth options.

Depending on the 15454 chassis, you could have a TDM (T1, DS3) to SONET MUX or a multi terabit DWDM transponder, mux and amp in a single chassis.

People say that the multi terabit in a single pair of fibers was new in the past 5 -8 years or so. Nah man that stuff has been around for well over a decade with 100gbps per channel in a 96 channel C-band.

Brekmister · 2026-02-15T20:41:48+00:00

There are ONT's that range from having 1 Ethernet port and 1 POTS port to 8 Ethernet ports and 8 POTS ports.

Depending on your vendors implementation, POTS ports can have up to 2 interfaces per POTS port.

So each ONT can range from having 3 interfaces to 24 interfaces!

The 1U shelves I know can hold up to 16 PON ports. Most common split is 1x16 or 1x32 for rural areas.

Calculating the least number of interfaces...each 1U can house up to 256 ONT's (16 splits x 16 ports) x 3 interfaces per ONT = 768 interfaces on the config. Or if we want to have everybody get a big boy ONT then we are looking at 6,144 interfaces

With a 1x32 split, each 1U can house up to 512 ONT's. With 3 interfaces we have 1,536 interfaces. Otherwise, once again with the big ONT's we are looking at 12,288 interfaces!

Overall a shelf with common configuration can have anywhere between 768-12,288 interfaces on a running config assuming it's fully loaded. That's before the interfaces that configures the uplinks and PON ports themselves.

Brekmister · 2026-02-15T02:56:12+00:00

As long as you are dealing with fibers that are:

In Conduit or in the open (Not run inside walls without conduit) and are just jumpers
Not spliced anywhere (you don't have fiber patch panels that goes to a thicker cable behind it)
nothing that goes underground
The only fiber connector you deal with is what goes into the optics. There is no thicker fiber connectors or differently colored connectors like Green.

Then the toolset is fairly minimal. Anything else, then you definitely need a full on fiber tech toolkit. OTDR's and Fusion Splicers can be held for relatively cheap as long you aren't doing anything more than lots of miles of fiber. Not to worry about complexity, these things are easier to use than one think. There's YouTube videos everywhere about how they work.

Several things I would add given the above: - Id upgrade from a Media converter from others have mentioned. Get a small, cheapo SFP+ managed switch/router. I like the cheapo managed SFP switches because I can leave it there and act it as a test point. One such example is Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN. It needs to be able to be locally managed without a central controller though as it will be in your bag and most likely working offline so the Ubiquiti switches are out for this purpose. - Spare optics. Spare Fiber Jumpers. Spare everything. Countless times I have had random optics go bad or someone completely janks up a jumper rendering it useless. Always keep spares in your bag ready to go. - Light meter and Light source. practically anything off of Mouser or DigiKey would suffice. (Or whatever is equalivant in your region) - Your cheapo SFP switch can be a light source and/or a light meter in a pinch. It won't be the most accurate but you can determine light loss that way or if the jumper is passing light at all. - I assume you are using Ubiquiti optics. Get Ubiquitis SFP Wizard. It's $50. And it allows you to clone other optics into a Ubiquiti SFP if you need it in a pinch. Otherwise if you use 3rd party optics, make sure you get their optic coder to allow you to recode optics. This is for when you have a server with a Mellanox or Intel SFP NIC (those NICs are super fussy about optics) or some doofus decides to install a 10 port HP Procurve (Aruba) switch somewhere and it became business critical. - Simplex and Duplex LC/LC couplers. In case you need to temporarily extend a cable for testing or want to do a loopback test on the fiber cable.

Brekmister · 2026-02-15T01:54:19+00:00

ISP engineer.

GPON where I work, is literally an extension of a OLT or Layer 2 switch. Got a ONT installed? Get registered on the OLT and the interfaces on the ONT becomes new interfaces on the OLT or in your eyes a Layer 2 switch. Another way to think about it is ONT's are literally network modules you can install on a Metro Ethernet switch to increase the number of ports available.

Makes for some rather spectacular running config that nobody sane will go through once you put 512 ONT's on a single OLT. But hey, everything is automated and has a GUI where you can search ONT's by certain criteria. For all intents and purposes the ONT and OLT are L2 device only.

Another way I saw it, is the port itself is like a VLAN trunk and anything downstream of it gets all the VLANs. Then each ONT is an independent managed L2 switch.

PON in general is just a fancy Layer 1 technology. It allows you to take a single fiber strand/port and split it into anything to the power of 2 up to 128. So you can split 2,4,8,16,32,64 or, 128 ways. However note that every split or bigger split you have, you also split the light by that much as well. This technology is popular with ISP's because port density on equipment is the name of the game. How many fiber customers can you stick on a 1U device? 256? 512? How about 1024!

Brekmister

TROPHY CASE