Hacker News: ecksii

New comment by ecksii in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

ecksii — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:26:01 +0000

This again! Software can be both _mature_ and _useful_. If you trip across a piece of software that's both of mature and useful, your first action should be clone it's git repo into your own storage and save project state. Then you should work against your repo posting pull requests for the greater community. But if no one consumes the pull requests, move on.

New comment by ecksii in "PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server"

ecksii — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 14:49:43 +0000

This looks great as a portable NAS device. I could run it using Raspbian or whatever will run on the rpi. For me it would be perfect if there was a TrueNAS port to arm hardware that could run on the pi. As it is, I use a 2GB pi4 in an argon m.2 case as a traveling NAS. I run FreeBSD on that and it's not so much of a NAS as it is an NFS server.

New comment by ecksii in "The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses"

ecksii — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 18:38:54 +0000

That's a direct side affect of the difference in cost between IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses. If IPv4 addresses weren't economically rare, AWS would charge for them.

New comment by ecksii in "The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses"

ecksii — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 18:36:44 +0000

That solution requires a routable, Non-RFC1918, IPv4 address somewhere to work. If I understand CG-NAT correctly, you don't get a routable address on your equipment.

New comment by ecksii in "The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses"

ecksii — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 18:31:49 +0000

That isn't really necessary any longer. Modern IPv6 stacks devices use and periodically rotate through temporary IPv6 auto-allocated addresses for privacy reasons.

New comment by ecksii in "The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses"

ecksii — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 18:23:31 +0000

Right now IoT devices use a communications model that overcome's NAT by tying the device to a service endpoint in the cloud. The device registers itself as an IoT device in aws and then your local hosts hit the device by going to the device endpoint in the cloud. I don't know if this model will hold up when IPv6 more widely supported though.

New comment by ecksii in "Coherent OS"

ecksii — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 03:02:48 +0000

I don't remember the exact cause per say beyond Bob saying that some drives did a thermal recalibration and if this occured during a multi sector transfer, the filesystem got shot to hell. Everyone at MWC had taken a crack at it and you're right, it didn't show up in any of the MWC equipment. At some point in time I think I bought a brand new WD 504MB disk for my home box and I discovered that I could replicate the conditions of the bug regularly. I do remember having a eureka moment on a Saturday morning when I realized that the the issue was error handling after a multi-sector transfer gone bad. However, that was one of the last things I did on the MWC payroll. If I remember right, the first round of layoffs was in October of 1994 and I was in them along with Ed Bravo and a few others. Ed and I ran down to a pub that Addison Snell and Jeff Day had showed me a few weeks earlier and threw some darts.

PC hardware was all over the map in those days. I didn't remember this bug being tied to cabling but I only worked it to the point where we recognized that the cause was not handling an error in multi-sector transfers correctly. I do remember putting Scatter/Gather handling into the SCSI driver so that SCSI drives could do the same multi-sector trick. I also dimly remember that Louis Gilberto had to patch my driver for a bug afterwards and Hal said that he didn't have kind words for me.

New comment by ecksii in "Coherent OS"

ecksii — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 03:23:57 +0000

While Linux would have certainly killed Coherent eventually, that's not quite the case. First Coherent was out long before Linux. Coh was around long enough for AT&T to have sent Dennis Ritchie to Chicago to inspect the code and evaluate it for copyright claims. Coherent ran on the PDP11 and on the 80286. Linux became a real force in the Unix market around 1998. MWC went out of business in Feb 1995. The first round of layoffs at MWC happened in Oct, 1994.

A perfect storm of several things killed Coherent The two biggest problems were:

The customers dinging Mark Williams Company in the newsgroup mainly complained about the lack of TCP/IP networking. This happened because MWC had done a customer pole to see what big feature should come next? TCP/IP or X11. X11 won.

The real or perceived drop in quality of the product. This one is hard to explain. Coherent 3.10 and 4.0 had been solid V7 Unix clones with V7 sensibilities. When 4.2.05 shipped it included a really nasty disk driver bug that basically destroyed your file system beyond the ability of fsck to fix. The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode. This mode was rare or hadn't existed during the days of MFM/RLL/ESDI drives but became common with ATA drives especially as the market got flooded with cheap 504MB drives. While the bug was fixed somewhere between 4.2.10 and 4.2.14, the damage to Coherent's reputation was done.

New comment by ecksii in "Coherent OS"

ecksii — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:56:45 +0000

Coherent had Taylor UUCP. The most enthusiastic users were doing Usenet News delivered via UUCP. Coherent ran into big issues due to a nasty bug in the ATA disk driver. The users who got hit the worst were the ones running C news.

New comment by ecksii in "Coherent OS"

ecksii — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:51:54 +0000

The decision was before my time but it was based on a user survey. I have to admit that my vote was also for X11 rather than TCP/IP. I don't think people realized how tightly X11 was bound to networking. This blinded them to the the extra effort required to port X Windows to an OS without TCP/IP.

New comment by ecksii in "Queen of Darts"

ecksii — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 13:39:29 +0000

Almost certainly, the bigger factor is that the league darts, is totally dominated by large groups of partially-inebriated, sometimes hostile, men. A woman who sets off to become good enough at darts to play and win at the tournament level has to spend time in league darts learning strategy. During her time in league dart she will spend some time beating guys who react poorly to the thought of "losing to a girl".

New comment by ecksii in "Queen of Darts"

ecksii — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 17:20:16 +0000

Regarding competitive advantage, I don't think so but that's just an opinion without any backing in data. But that is an educated opinion, which I'll justify later. Regarding Mixed competitions, at least in the US, the answer is yes. There are traveling American Darts Organization (ADO) tournaments that feature mixed singles and teams events like the Witch City Open.

I played league darts for about twenty years in the U.S. I had the privilege of knowing the First and Second ranked woman darters in the U.S. ten years ago. Either of them could tell you about games where they frustrated a male opponent who thought he was "just playing a girl".

To reverse that opinion I'd have to meet a Female darter who practiced as much as the highly skilled Male darters I know and still had a lower point-per-dart average. But in the US, that's not likely because everyone starts in league darts. league darts can be a "boys only club" depending on your team so the nature of the lower levels can be a little off-putting for woman.