Hacker News: yabones

New comment by yabones in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

yabones — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:57:02 +0000

The folks that run the colo I keep our servers in would beat me to death with a shoe if I did either of these things:

- Mount something in a rack not firmly attached to brackets or a shelf

- Install anything with a battery larger than you'd find in a RAID card

Not to mention all the other ways this is sub-par in terms of airflow, density, serviceability, out-of-band management, etc.

I get the allure of it, but I wouldn't really want my gear anywhere near a bunch of laptops stuck in a cabinet.

New comment by yabones in "Top laptops to use with FreeBSD"

yabones — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:55:45 +0000

That kind of seems crazy to me, considering OpenBSD has worked perfectly fine with every wifi capable device I've tested it on. Granted, most of them were older machines.

Is this just an artifact of FreeBSD primarily focusing on server hardware rather than consumer/end-user stuff?

New comment by yabones in "Artemis II astronauts arrive at launch pad 39B in an astrovan"

yabones — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:35:11 +0000

Ah very true. It comes in third in terms of "cool" factor, looking more like something a local retirement home would take to bingo night than something deserving the astrovan name. But I respect it nonetheless.

New comment by yabones in "Artemis II astronauts arrive at launch pad 39B in an astrovan"

yabones — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:18:27 +0000

Astronaut Transfer Vehicle, aka THE astrovan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut_transfer_van

Notably, not the Chevy Astro / GMC Safari van.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Astro

Both are iconic, but one more than the other

New comment by yabones in "How to turn anything into a router"

yabones — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:06:49 +0000

A classic example is Docker inserting its firewall rules before everything else, causing any "published" ports to be wide open even if a firewall ruleset was configured. They might have fixed this, or doubled down on their design choice. Either way, that kind of complexity can really bite you if you're not careful.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/network/#published-ports

New comment by yabones in "How to turn anything into a router"

yabones — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:46:54 +0000

It would be something a bit like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/115721630079

Before Thunderbolt was common, people attempted to use external GPUs with this sort of expander, but it worked really poorly.

New comment by yabones in "How to turn anything into a router"

yabones — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:45:31 +0000

Hey, op here, this was almost a decade ago, but I'll try to describe what's going on here. It's kind of a crappy picture.

* WAN connection comes in by coax, into my cheapo cable modem (off screen), and then by Ethernet into the franken-NIC sitting on top of the laptop.

* The NIC on top is a normal PCIe card, but with the bracket missing. The ExpressCard riser [1] is connected by a mini-HDMI cable, the flat black cable, which curves up, around, and back in from the left side into the laptop

* Then, the blue cable on the side of the laptop is a VLAN trunk going into the Cisco switch on port 23/24, outside the picture.

* From there, another port on the switch is setup as an access/untagged port going into one of the LAN ports on the D-Link acting as the access switch

I don't think it was set up here, but at one point I also had a dock under the ThinkPad, with the serial adapter wired up to the switch's console port so I could manage everything by ssh'ing into the router.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/115721630079

Also note that all the cables were hand-crimped because I was too cheap to buy new patch cables at the time.

I was in college, and truly had more time than money back then. it's the kind of doohickey made by only somebody very young, very crazy, or a bit of both. ;)

How to turn anything into a router

yabones — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:28:54 +0000

Article URL: https://nbailey.ca/post/router/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574034

Points: 777

# Comments: 261

New comment by yabones in "Should QA exist?"

yabones — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:18:58 +0000

A good QA team will be the definitive experts on a piece of software. They have more complete and in-depth experience than sales, engineering, or anybody else. A single software engineer might know their specific piece, but your QA tester will know everything.

New comment by yabones in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

yabones — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:18:31 +0000

Even easier, just throw together some iptables rules & install dnsmasq. Obviously out of reach of most non-techy people but it's not much worse than most self-hosted things people build. I've even done it with USB-Ethernet dongles.

Maybe "whitebox" stuff will have a moment here. Buy a ARM based "computer" that just happens to have a built in switch and 802.11 radio, and separately purchase an SD card with the OS on it.

Or, perhaps this will be VyOS's time to shine... https://vyos.io/

Can't really see anything really happening in the consumer space, but maybe business/enterprise will move in one direction or another.

New comment by yabones in "America tells private firms to “hack back”"

yabones — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:01:46 +0000

Yeah, considering the number of corporate IT products that count anything from a port scan to requesting /wp-admin a "thwarted cyberattack" I can see this going very poorly when every cowboy IT manager gets their sheriff badge.

New comment by yabones in "Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence"

yabones — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:38:41 +0000

There have been plenty of inflection points like that throughout history. Famously, Jimmy Carter installed solar heating on the roof of the white house. Reagan took them down shortly after.

It seems like we never quite learn our lesson about energy security...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House...

New comment by yabones in "The strait of Hormuz blockade will strangle US defense industry"

yabones — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:54:49 +0000

It's kind of funny how the US military, the largest single consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, didn't consider that disrupting the largest source of fossil fuels would impact them.

New comment by yabones in "The 49MB web page"

yabones — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:47:23 +0000

I also love https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

They also compress the hell out of the images, so it all loads shockingly well on poor connections.

New comment by yabones in "DARPA’s new X-76"

yabones — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:51:17 +0000

The next generations of accidents are going to be even more looney-tunes in nature.

New comment by yabones in "The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph"

yabones — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:58:59 +0000

Maybe they should give the trucks a "turbo boost" button that lets them increase speed by something like 5 KM/hr for 120s every 30 minutes. Just enough to allow truck drivers to pass now and then without causing these types of log-jams on the highways, without causing safety problems. I'm sure there's a more correct combination of speeds and times than this.

Sort of like the silly "boost buttons" on the Honda CR-Z [1] or the Elantra N [2], but just lifting the speed limiter for a bit...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CR-Z#Powertrain

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Elantra#Elantra_N/Avan...

New comment by yabones in "Facebook is cooked"

yabones — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:15:07 +0000

I'm probably a bit younger than the gp, but I can confidently say that all socializing has moved almost entirely off "social media" and onto group chats. Most people have a dozen or more combinations of friends and families on multiple apps, all trying to replace what was once easy.

I'd love if somebody would make a site based on the ~2010 expectations (not reality) of facebook. Ban any commercial activity and make people pay for it. I just want to talk to my friends and say "happy birthday" to somebody I haven't seen in years, not look at ads and slop posts.

New comment by yabones in "DOGE Track"

yabones — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:54:30 +0000

Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.

New comment by yabones in "Ring owners are returning their cameras"

yabones — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:06:16 +0000

Frigate is very good: https://frigate.video/

Personally, I use Zoneminder: https://zoneminder.com/ Zoneminder is very "janky" but predictable.

I set mine up about three years ago, and it's been nice and boring since: https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr

New comment by yabones in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

yabones — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:37:39 +0000

IOS 26 has been a massive dissapointment. I was strong-armed into updating this week with the vulnerability they refused to patch in 18.x, and it's what I would describe as "Gen Z's Vista"