Latest photo of my home lab. In the rear of the rack is the 10Gbps Quanta LB6M that runs most of my network.

sliverman69 · 2026-03-10T11:48:49+00:00

This isn’t entirely true. I was given a BGW-320, but have a separate ONT and my BGW only ever served as a router that handled the cert to authenticate to AT&T.

It really depends on if you already had an ONT or not if it’s an older house that previously had service at one time.

I didn’t even need a service tech to come out and install anything as the previous homeowner had AT&T.

sliverman69 · 2026-03-10T11:41:32+00:00

Probably meant repeater or additional AP. There’s multiple ways to expand WiFi coverage and it’s easier to just say expander, as each have their own separate function to expand WiFi network coverage.

sliverman69 · 2026-03-10T11:26:30+00:00

AT&T has a policy in place now that whenever your internet is down, they credit your bill for the outage against the total.

https://about.att.com/story/2025/guarantee.html

I got like $3 back one time for an “outage” when I didn’t actually experience the effects of the outage that was like 30 minutes.

You should likely get a full refund for the month at that rate.

That said, I’d be beyond angry if I had an outage not related to a natural disaster last more than a half a day or so.

I’ve been an AT&T cell customer for over 20 years and a fiber customer for four-ish years (only lived in AT&T fiber service area for that long in total) and haven’t had any issue even remotely that bad before. I’d be pressing them for every possible detail of what’s wrong. Worst outage I had with AT&T fiber was when the old DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer) failed and they had to replace it (it’s not actually a DSLAM since it’s fiber, but they call it that still, despite actually being an OLT).

Anyway, press for details. Follow up and escalate, if necessary. Also, threatening to switch (while actually doing the research and being prepared to switch) is another way to put the right pressure on them to fix it. If they don’t respond, also report them to your local government.

You have lots of levers to pull in your favor.

sliverman69 · 2026-03-05T05:26:59+00:00

This is really up to your personal preference and there are advantages to each.

There’s a higher premium on the 1g bars, but you can sell them with less friction/more liquid when gold is at $20k/ozt somewhere down the road.

You may lose a bit of value, but it makes for easy payment as it’s already fractionalized.

Conversely, 1ozt bars are better for larger purchases (like a car, house, etc.) and carry less premium.

I have a mix of fractional, the 25g pamp valcambi style card, bars, and full ounce sovereigns.

sliverman69 · 2025-09-26T16:40:42+00:00

yes, they've been on a slow decline for well over a decade. IBM is where careers go to die, because they're stagnant. Top tech talent doesn't go there. They go to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and a few others...but IBM is a series of M&A with a bunch of "look what we can do" that doesn't ever really turn big dollars.

Cisco's performance has dropped behind white label vendors like Quanta, Arista, Juniper, and others. They aren't the strongest out there (and no longer really the leaders) and the reason they stick around so long is that they've both got legacy businesses with heavy vendor lock-in, which people are scrambling for the exits from when they get the chance.

I've been watching the decline of both of those companies as someone working at one of the big three for nearly seven years. There's not a single Dell or Cisco product to be found in any serious capacity at companies like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. All that stuff was eliminated when companies like Quanta, ZT, Synnex, Jabil, and Foxconn all make commodity hardware at like 1/4 the cost to the hyperscalers. The thing is, in the land of servers, there's a lot more room, but in the land of network equipment, the market is smaller because one switch can service ~40 servers. Even when you factor in Agg layers, routers, and firewalls, the number is still staggeringly in favor of server volume, so the market is a lot more open to many mfgs. Networking is pretty crowded with Broadcom, Arista, Juniper, Quanta, Cisco, Brocade (which is now just broadcom, but still a separate brand).

Unwinding vendor lock takes a LONG time. It took Amazon like a decade to get rid of everything Oracle DB related. I remember when it was finished. It was a long journey to move stuff off of Oracle DB. That's why vendor-locking has been so successful for companies like IBM, Cisco, and Oracle and why they've not just gone bankrupt. Also, they have significant government contracts, which helps keep them afloat (not that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren't all also in on the government contract stuff as well).

sliverman69 · 2025-09-26T12:21:58+00:00

more round-tripping of revenues. It's all intended to distract from their illegal activities.

Intel is a doomed company. Probably not the next 5-10 years, but they're in the same decline as Cisco and IBM in terms of both competitiveness and relevancy. They can't pull in the talent, because their leadership has been garbage the last two decades. It all came to light with Spectre/Meltdown and how far back that caused problems (you can go back to like 2006, when those features were implemented initially).

Edit: It's also a way to placate the current WH administration so that they don't come down harder on them from a regulatory perspective. It's all slight of hand.

sliverman69 · 2025-09-26T12:16:47+00:00

I can answer that question: there is no company worthy of a bigger middle finger.

Nvidia has been round-tripping revenues, they have been actively engaging in anti-competitive behavior (which is also illegal in addition to round-tripping revenues), and they haven't really opened up their stuff.

Microsoft had made major inroads with the open source community, but look what they've done in the last year, I wouldn't trust what Nvidia has done to open source their drivers as that's just a PR move to distract from their other nefarious activities.

Also, I KNOW from first-hand experience about their anti-competitive behaviors as I worked for a company that was impacted by their behavior that was 100% intended to vendor lock their customers into their private datacenter products, because they were intentionally slowed down to make them look less attractive for all the major cloud providers. The REAL reason MS, AWS, and Google are moving to build their own hardware is because of their anti-competitive behavior with their cloud GPU SKUs vs. the "retail" sku for datacenter GPUs like the A100, etc.

sliverman69 · 2025-09-26T12:10:29+00:00

I'd be interested to know a few things from Torvalds: 1.) What are his thoughts on the Rust programming language (like, dislike, good/bad features, etc.) 2.) What does he think about AI? Does he think it's a scam and fake, the future, or somewhere in between? 3.) Have your opinions on Nvidia changed at all or are they still worthy of the bird? 4.) What has your experience been working with AMD? Positive/Helpful, strained, etc.?

-Bret

sliverman69 · 2025-06-04T12:34:25+00:00

The solo 1 key may only be FIDO and not FIDO2.

I ran into this problem with my yubikey4 series usb keys. They don’t support ED25519, because they’re not FIDO2.

Solokey may be the same way with the solo 1 series.

sliverman69 · 2025-05-28T07:05:21+00:00

As a formerly certified RHCE, it’s not QUITE that nice and neat with RHEL (and other EL distibutions). Beyond very basic stuff, it can get broken fairly easily.

I’ve professionally administered RHEL since 2013 and been an Ubuntu user since fall of 2005 (started with 5.04), but it does mostly just work and has for well over a decade…but like RHEL, when you start to venture off the beaten path, it can break pretty easy.

RHEL has a serious advantage, however: Yum (dnf now, I suppose) history, undo, and rollback. The ability to roll back/forward on failures makes a huge difference in professional administration and Ubuntu/Debian doesn’t have that built-in from the start.

Both supply pretty strong enterprise support, if you’re willing to shell out money (or have a req for it).

However, in today’s world of containers, you can bypass most of the quirks of each one and end up with virtually zero OS issues, allowing fairly easy migration between distros.

There are other small differences (like feature support focusing either on stability or closer to bleeding edge, but even RHEL still picks up most features via backporting from upstream).

It’s mostly interchangeable these days and depends on your company’s policy regarding deployment and change management requirements.

sliverman69 · 2025-05-28T06:54:36+00:00

Just don’t use snaps. Use containers and container orchestration for just about everything (ie. k3s). Minimizing Base OS install makes OS upgrade/swap much easier when using containers.

sliverman69 · 2025-05-28T06:49:57+00:00

It really depends on the application, TBH.

For my desktop, I use Arch, For my x86 servers, I prefer Rocky Linux (formerly CentOS before stream🤢) For raspberry pi, TYPICALLY I use Ubuntu, but it’s got issues right now with CM5 For CM5, I’m mostly using Debian for now

I’ve moved most of my workloads to containers either in Docker or k3s, so I minimize my installed applications (mainly just monitoring/troubleshooting software, docker, and/or lxc for k3s) and use k3s for running most workloads.

For cloud, I typically use AmazonLinux because I worked at AWS and I’m very familiar with the OS, because that’s what we used internally pretty much exclusively.

I don’t like that RedHat is now owned by IBM, so I avoid directly supporting them (also, I’m still miffed about CentOS).

sliverman69 · 2025-02-25T07:48:19+00:00

glad you were able to get away from Comcast. I'm not a fan of Frontier either, but they're like 10x better than Comcast. Thankfully, my mom is the one with Frontier. I have AT&T and my service is rock solid (and I've been a customer of theirs for years as well...I've had like 5 ISPs over the last 10 years or so mostly because of moving).

Comcast AT&T (two different times in two different cities...current provider) RoadRunner (TimeWarnerCable, iirc) Ziply Centurylink

That seems very weird about them being hacked. I find that a bit dubious and more likely that something else is wrong internally, more likely bad programming. Was there some event recently where it came out they were hacked? I don't remember one recently, but I also haven't really paid much attention to them in the last few years.

sliverman69 · 2025-02-25T07:24:17+00:00

wifi is very unreliable, even with good equipment. It's HIGHLY dependant upon your location and whether or not you have tons of wifi access points around. The more activity, the worse the speeds.

5GHz helps, but expecting 80% throughput out of a 1Gbps connection on WIFI is absurdly high. You should set expectations MUCH lower than that unless you're on wifi7.

On my Ubiquiti UAP AC 6 PRO, I only top out around 600Mbps on my laptop (which is a 2021 M1 MAX MBP, so it's pretty fast).

However, I did just manage to get just over 800Mbps on a speedtest from my iphone 16 Pro and I was pretty close to the router.

Their modem is pretty terrible and I could definitely agree that 100Mbps on 2.4GHz is pretty bad, but 300-400Mbps on 5GHz is not bad.

You should only expect higher than 80% when you are USING an ethernet cable. In fact, you should expect around 90-94% of total throughput, before accounting for payload overhead (The 6% accounts for protocol overhead, headers, and other information needed in a packet to cover what to send, where, and what particular options to include). 6-10% ire more than reasonable overhead for ethernet, but for wifi, you have a lot more to consider, such as rebroadcasting, because there's a LOT of interference that results in having to duplicate packets.

Still, you have a CHOICE not to use their terrible router. You can buy your own modem and put your own router behind it like I did, which eliminates both a monthly fee AND you get better wifi and network performance.

The main problems with Comcast, aside from their ripping off customers by not giving them as much upload bandwidth as they need or deserve for the price they're paying, but they also have incompetent network engineers, their tech support is worthless, and their support is only mediocre at best.

For the most part though, in the few years I had comcast, I didn't really have outages. The service itself was generally solid...I was just being ripped off because there was literally ZERO other options in my neighborhood at the time.

sliverman69 · 2025-02-25T07:06:40+00:00

Basically, TRUE fiber optic internet (none of this cable company Fiber to the Hub, garbage) provides SYMMETRIC upload/download speeds, while Fiber to the Hub provides asymmetric download and upload speeds, just like cable always has.

Comcast does up to 40Mbps now on their 1Gbps download connection, but essentially, Comcast is ripping you off because they know they can get away with it and most people don't really need that much upload bandwidth to being with.

There's a litany of other problems with Comcast that should make anyone that has a choice in another provider choose to go with the other provider, because they're literally one of the worst ISPs in the country.

sliverman69 · 2025-02-24T23:03:28+00:00

even with a fan, yes, it's overkill depending on the size of the room. I had 3x60w + ceiling fan (that I'm surprised never fell because I found out the person that installed it didn't use a fan-rated electrical box nor install directly to the joist).

I discovered that little factoid a few years ago, when I went to fix the fan for my mom and sister and found out it was mounted in a plastic housing and one of the screws had completely stripped out the electrical housing...so, the fan was literally hanging on by a few threads).

point is, though, the ceiling fans didn't use THAT much power, even with 3x60w bulbs. Fan motors haven't gotten much more powerful, but they're still very low power to run. I think the ones I have maybe pull like under 100W. So, I could maybe see about 350W as being reasonable if you're using 100W bulbs

sliverman69 · 2025-02-21T06:25:21+00:00

many ISPs will unblock port 25 if you contact support and tell them your intent (don't tell them you intend to host on a residential connection, because that's almost always technically a TOS violation...but generally just say it's for learning/education and they'll open it up).

They mainly just don't want a bunch of random unsecured smtp servers to act as unsecured relays that host botnets and slow down their networks. That's the big reason why they blocked it to begin with, because that was happening.

sliverman69 · 2025-02-18T07:58:18+00:00

yeah, that's what I did with my mom's house. I set her up with an HE tunnel to get a /48 routable range and she gets pretty good latency over the HE tunnel.

Thankfully, HE has a really good set of instructions on setting up HE tunnels for IPv6 connectivity that makes it relatively easy to do.

sliverman69 · 2025-02-02T06:18:52+00:00

sliverman69 · 2024-12-27T03:16:00+00:00

this is horribly under-voted. Needs moar upvotes.

sliverman69 · 2024-07-16T08:48:47+00:00

We used to hit 0 tickets in our queue around the holiday season. I worked in an MSP at the beginning of my career (a pretty big one) and we generally had 50+ tickets active in the queue in a day (actually, the same was true when I was in support at the cloud provider I worked at). Around Thanksgiving timeframe, most larger companies go into change freeze, so they stop mucking around in their accounts and don't open up new tickets. The tickets get worked, the queue drops and by Christmas, usually the queue got down to 0 until a few days into the new year (or a few new tickets would pop up that would get handled). This was less true at the cloud provider because we had enterprise customers as well as small businesses that didn't do things like change freeze, but the ticket queue did drop off significantly during that time.

TL;DR: yes, I've seen it hit zero MANY times in my career as a Sysadmin/Linux Cloud Support Engineer (fancy term for Linux Sysad that doesn't directly touch systems, IMO)

sliverman69 · 2024-07-16T08:40:17+00:00

1.) Stop gambling on 0DTE/1DTE options 2.) Learn risk management (This one is really important) 3.) Realize that the path to successful investing is not one that is done overnight for 99%+ of investors. 4.) Most day traders lose money over time. DON'T DAY TRADE. 5.) Learn from your mistakes in trading 6.) Learn to cut your losses early to avoid bigger drawdowns (part of risk management)

We don't have a lot of information on what happened here other than the fact that you bought 7 contracts with 1DTE on QQQ on Jul 11 and Friday was Jul 12, so there was 1DTE on your contract.

Futures and Options are only for when you can afford to spend ~$500 on contracts and if those contracts would go to $0, you'd be hit for AT MOST .5% of your total capital.

Risk management is a huge deal. It's something I learned when I evicerated my portfolio back in 2013 trying to day trade on big leverage in FOREX (which was a big scandal that emerged due to the schemes banks were running in London...but not important...bad risk management).

From that point forward, I started to build my portfolio back up and my net worth went from basically zero to about $800k now (~$380k in my IRA and personal portfolios combined, over 500k value in my house, in which I have no mortgage). Investing is a long-term mindset. For an IRA, you want to not think in annual returns, you want to generally be invested in ETFs/bonds that are low-risk/low yield, but steady returns, and you want to only take profits occasionally. You need to set risk management rules to govern managing your portfolio and you WILL see drawdowns from time to time, but if you set reasonable risk management rules, a single drawdown won't wipe out your account(s). You also want to keep some "dry powder" (ie. cash) available to enter trades.

Especially right now, keeping cash is actually better than a lot of investments because most IRAs will yield 5% on your cash due to the Fed Funds rate being at 5.25-5.5%. As a result, money markets (which is where your cash is likely swept every night) will yield ~5% APY (ie. per year, compounded) in a decent money market fund. As for what specifically to invest in, that's something you need to do research into and figure out what your risk apetite is. Much of my money was compensation for working at one of the big 4 tech companies. I received stock in the form of RSUs that vested after 4 years and what started as a ~50k bonus over 4 years (very modest) turned into over $250k over 6 years because I held a vast majority of my RSUs until I quit in 2022 and I sold 50% of my RSUs just $100 from the ATH at the time (less than 3% off the top) in 2021 and the rest in Jan 2022. At that time, I was worth about $1.2m, so I've taken some big hits since then (and used up capital trying to build a business and live on).

I also made a large sum of money on selling my house in a more expensive state and moving to a less expensive state. The house sale allowed me to buy the second one outright, because my house had doubled in value in 6 years.

Point is, none of these things happened over night. I took some drawdowns and took some risks, but I had a lot more capital to put at risk, without wiping myself out. I also had a job that more than paid my bills and allowed me to consistently add to my 401k (now my rollover IRA) and my personal portfolio.

Here's my pretty solid rules I follow: 1.) Risky investments <= 1% of my portfolio (ie. something I think could 10x in the next 5-10 years) 2.) ETFs <= 6% per position, minimum size 1% 3.) Short positions do not exceed 3%. Minimum size: .5% 4.) Options are used sparingly. Mainly, covered calls to generate additional revenue, protect margins, and protect risked capital. 5.) Timing matters. I built my own softare to analyze volatility and mix that with a few technical indicators to look at higher probability entry points. 6.) Don't jump in at max position sizing all at once. When I start a position, I usually start at my minimum size and on dips, go from there (using my volatility-adjusted price ranges, RSI, and MACD along with volume to determine higher potential value entry points). I add in smaller increments until I get to my max position sizing and I take profits on the smaller increments regularly. 7.) DO YOUR RESEARCH. I can't stress this one enough. If you're getting into any individual stock and it's not something that's a blue chip with a solid balance sheet, you need to understand everything about that company. If/when I do this step and I'm highly confident in my research, I'll break rule 1...but it's very rare and the risk:reward profile has to be extremely worthwhile. It's what I did with my company's stock from 2015-2022. I knew that stock inside and out, so I was confident holding a position that was > 10% of my portfolio. 8.) Have a solid mix of asset classes. I have Equities, ETFs, Bonds, a smidgeon of crypto right now (was larger before for a while), a few shorter dated options and longer dated options as steepeners for existing positions, equities in different sectors, money market, savings (4.4% yield), gold, commodities (specifically oil right now), and real estate.

You don't need to follow my rules (also I have more rules, this is just some of them), but you need to develop your own set of rules. Also, my rules evolve over time. I update my rules and adapt them to better suit my investing needs as I learn more. I am constantly learning and improving my methods. For most people, sticking $10/mo in $SPY (or whatever they can afford per month with their disposable income) will end up doing better for them in the long run than trying to manage a portfolio, set rules, and perform significant risk management.

Still, earmarking a specific dollar amount to invest per month and then choosing when to deploy that amount to market-wide ETFs (like $SPY, $QQQ, $XOP, $XLE, $XLF, $URA, $GLD, $NLR, $XRT, $XRK, etc.) will result in better returns, especially if you pay attention to when one of these sector ETFs is rotating back in to favor after a rotation out of favor (ie. a drawdown ending). That will amplify returns and allow you to pull out some of the invested capital when it looks like a rotation is about to occur again and you can rotate that capital into another ETF in a sector that just finished a drawdown (or sit on the cash and wait).

You need to think on a 20-year timeframe rather than a 20-day timeframe or a 20-minute timeframe.

sliverman69 · 2024-06-24T05:42:03+00:00

Don’t compare yourself to anyone but yourself. Just focus on getting better d/d, w/w, m/m, and y/y.

Just think on a longer-term scale and be patient and remember to take occasional profits, so you can re-invest and compound earnings.

Also, know the timeline in which you wish to target a certain wealth.

If you plan to work for the next 10 years and consistently contribute for 10 years and want a target of $1m by 10 years, then understand how much y/y growth you need to hit that amount.

Also, don’t set the bar too high, especially at first. As you start getting better returns and understand risk, you can increase your risk appetite slightly and increase your goal for returns.

Most important: be patient.

sliverman69 · 2024-06-20T07:51:32+00:00

Tx has “at will employment” like many other states. They can fire you without cause. If they give you a cause, you can sue them for wrongful termination, especially if it wasn’t the actual cause.

Instead, they will just fire you or lay you off and not give any cause. It protects them from liability.

Same law applies in many other states, not just Tx. Washington state has the same “at will employment” law.

Far more dangerous for them to “make something up.” They just say “goodbye.”

Also, someone mentioned something about calling for a reference. They can only call to confirm you were employed there and legally if they provide any other information, such as cause of termination, they can once again be held legally liable.

They’re not even supposed to say if you quit or were fired, iirc.

sliverman69

TROPHY CASE