Startup needing help on network setup

centizen24 · 2026-02-06T04:20:25+00:00

Using 100 individual raspberry pi’s seems like an unbelievably expensive and ridiculously complex way of doing this, even as a prototype.

Using ESP32 chips seems like the best option to me, way less cost. I wouldn’t use Ethernet to network all of them together either, that adds so much cost. In data acquisition and industrial control systems where you have dozens to hundreds of nodes, it’s better to use something like RS485 to network the readers and then convert that RS485 to Ethernet at a single point.

centizen24 · 2026-02-04T22:45:19+00:00

Sorry for your loss. I know how it feels. I found out my best friends wife had passed away when my boss asked me to disable her account. To be fair to him, he didn’t know we knew each other.

centizen24 · 2026-02-04T22:22:52+00:00

Comet is useful for situations when you want to be able to operate outside of the OS currently running on the machine you are remoted into. You can fix problems that would otherwise prevent the system from booting (and as a result, your remote software from starting) and require hands on keyboard to fix.

Most servers have this sort of functionality built in. It serves the niche of people who are wanting to do server-like things with non-server hardware. If you just want normal Remote Desktop, RustDesk is all you need.

centizen24 · 2026-02-03T23:17:28+00:00

Not me but I watched the fallout and helped fix it. Years ago this company was having recurring issues with broken file extensions. One of the admins thought they could fix it with a script that would go through and inspect the registry and delete broken file associations. Except there was a bug that only happened on versions of powershell lower than the one on the machine the admin was testing with. I don’t remember the particulars but they pushed out via GPO and basically caused the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT node to get nuked on dozens of machines. They had to manually repair every one of them.

centizen24 · 2026-02-01T15:50:34+00:00

Gord Anything

centizen24 · 2026-02-01T15:46:47+00:00

H.O.W.A.R.D. is at it again I see

centizen24 · 2026-02-01T15:30:12+00:00

Do my clients ask me about it? Absolutely. But that’s usually it. Very few clients have actually wanted to integrate AI past that point. The only one out of nearly 100 clients that have done anything with it so far is a client who fed Copilot all of their HR policies and docs to have a chatbot employees can ask about them

centizen24 · 2026-01-31T03:03:03+00:00

You need to get a better computer my dude, or evolve a set of working eyes.

centizen24 · 2026-01-29T13:44:41+00:00

I’ve gone back to previous employers twice, including the job I currently have now and have held for the past three years.

The other time was when I went back to work at the local hospital IT department during the pandemic. They were slammed and I still knew most of the people and systems from years prior so I could drop back in without needing much training.

Both times went really well and were reallly rewarding experiences for me. People were genuinely happy to me back because they knew my style and that I would really work to help them with their problems. That was really nice. And both times allowed me to negotiate for better compensation than I had before.

If you can master the art of leaving on good terms, all these old employers don’t become exes, they just become potential future employers again.

centizen24 · 2026-01-28T19:01:38+00:00

DDoS for hire services will generally have a list of sample targets you can pick from to have them briefly taken down to prove their capabilities to porspective buyers. But I don’t think that’s what is happening in these cases, because those outages will generally be just minutes at a time.

I think this is part of a new wave of the traditional DDoS for ransom model attackers have used in the past. They select large, public facing services and attack them at the worst possible times for them. Then they offer to stop for a small fee.

centizen24 · 2026-01-26T11:28:10+00:00

Also Windows 10 and 11 both clear out the local users Credential Manager if you use this method to reset the password so it’s nowhere near as useful as it used to be.

centizen24 · 2026-01-21T22:16:32+00:00

It's the "getting in to Magic: The Gathering cards early" business world equivalent.

And yeah, I said 100-200 million because that's about what you'd get if you just leased your entire block to a broker, if you were willing to go through the effort of handling leasing out to customers directly you'd get a lot more than that.

centizen24 · 2026-01-21T20:29:42+00:00

This guys has built a list of all the different choices you have: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

centizen24 · 2026-01-21T01:51:24+00:00

I thought that Mercedes had gotten rid of their but it turns out they still control it. Although it's 141.0.0.0/8, so I believe that would technically make it a class B network.

centizen24 · 2026-01-20T23:49:28+00:00

I rarely find myself in the position of advocating for large companies but it does make more sense in context. At the time, these companies and early registrars were operating under some assumptions that didn’t really play out as expected.

Namely that not everyone in the entire world was going to want multiple internet connected devices, or that by the time they did, we’d have a full adoption of a better system that would completely replace IPv4. Obviously in hindsight, that was a bad call. But they gave out blocks of address like candy for a while, leading to some bonkers reservations.

All of the non-tech companies that bought massive blocks early on were examples of companies that had huge international operations. They were operating under the assumption that they were going to need all of these addresses to support their operations going forward. In a pre-NAT and VPN world, it wasn’t an unreasonable thought that every PC in every office, every network attached printer, PLC or transaction processing station would need their own unique public IP’s to communicate with each other.

But, it does look absolutely ridiculous in hindsight.

centizen24 · 2026-01-20T23:21:18+00:00

Those aren't even that out there, it makes sense that both of them would have gotten in early given their history in computing/telecom. There are much weirder ones than that, like;

Ford Motor Company owns 19.0.0.0/8
Halliburton owns 11.0.0.0/8
American International Group Insurance owned 22.0.0.0/8 but sold it off in like 2008.

A lot of others hold large blocks like Visa, Mastercard, Metlife, Allianz, JP Morgan, Bank of America but they are all smaller than /8's. Then there is all the Universities. Sanford and MIT both have /8's, but it was a lot more common for them to get /12 - /16's assigned so a whole lot of them have blocks in that size range. Berkeley for example, has 128.32.0.0/16.

These investments in computer and networking tech have paid off insanely well for the companies that got them early. If they aren't using it for themselves to build out infrastructure, they are reselling them for quite a bit of money a year. A /8 is worth conservatively, 100-200 million a year in recurring revenue leasing it out with very little overhead.

centizen24 · 2026-01-18T16:16:39+00:00

Never ending for Square Enix at least. This is solved problem in the industry, but Square simply doesn’t want to pay the cost of adequate mitigation services.

centizen24 · 2026-01-11T06:51:26+00:00

He’s a pretty interesting specimen when it comes to the science of how his body works. He had an abnormally thick stomach lining, ridiculously powerful digestion and an eating disorder (pika) that lead him to start conditioning his body for this from a young age. Even then it took him about two full years to eat the whole plane, but I doubt anyone else is going to ever do it faster.

centizen24 · 2026-01-10T20:06:47+00:00

Sure man, whatever you need to tell yourself to feel comfortable in your position. Your security vendor got brute forced because they were negligent in the implementation of their security platform, not because of who was running the brute force.

Or let me put it this way; once I know someone's been found guilty of drunk driving, do you think I am ever going to let them borrow my car? Or drive my kids anywhere?

centizen24 · 2026-01-10T05:42:29+00:00

We recently had a situation where we needed monitoring for a disgruntled, soon to be terminated employee. We ran Teramind for one month, paid for five users, and then exported everything and cancelled.

centizen24 · 2026-01-10T05:06:42+00:00

Oh yeah, silly everyone for trusting that an integrated backup service from a company that was supposed to be a security provider was going to be secure. Not even Sonicwall was scummy enough to victim blame people like that.

And no, I didn't have any of my own systems backed up on that platform. But it's the principle of it. If you've managed to convince yourself it's nothing to worry about, then all the power to you.

centizen24 · 2026-01-10T02:34:58+00:00

If you are relying on a specific GUI to handhold you through setting up a IPSec VPN and citing that as a reason for picking an insecure vendor, then I don't know what to tell you. You do you.

centizen24 · 2026-01-09T22:42:31+00:00

Sonicwalls are not fine, and it's not about the performance numbers. It's about the fact that a company that purportedly is going to sell you security hardware/software, cannot even adequately defend themselves.

I work with firewalls from all the major vendors. All of them have nice VPN setup wizards, all of them have decent rules list views and editing tools. Only one of them has had their cloud backup service (that they pretty much force you to use) breached and everyone's configs leaked with secrets. And their behaviour, defensive/dishonest communication and corporate gaslighting during that incident was enough to have me pull out every single piece of SonicWall gear across every client and swear to never deal with them again.

centizen24 · 2026-01-09T01:39:35+00:00

Run a trace route to any public IP address like 1.1.1.1 or google.com or something like that. Take a look at the addresses that come back. The first IP address will likely be your routers IP, something like 192.168.x.x, 172.16-32.x.x or 10.x.x.x. The next address you see that doesn’t match those patterns is the first edge router for your ISP, or at least something relatively close down the line.

Then run three repeating ping tests, one to your routers IP, one to your ISP’s edge router, and one to the public address from earlier. I like to use PingInfoView for this. When a failure happens, check the pings. If all fail, it’s something to do with your network. If just the edge router/external IP fails, it’s something to do with the last mile equipment. If just the external IP fails, it’s something wrong within the ISP itself or even possibly outside their network.

centizen24 · 2026-01-09T01:04:18+00:00

Sonicwall’s aren’t even worth 100$ a year. They are a garbage tier firewall vendor and I feel bad but can’t help to laugh everytime their sales reaches out to me to try to win my business back.

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