openSUSE Tumbleweed and Sony WF-1000XM5/WH-1000XM5 Bluetooth Headphones

 Posted on November 1, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  185 words  |  Neel Chauhan

After my old Sol Republic earbuds died, all the headphones I daily drive are or have been made by Sony. This includes the WF-1000XM5 earbuds for going out and the WH-1000XM5 headphones I use on my desk or for plane travel. While Sony headphones generally work well with Linux (I’m looking at you, Apple and Beats), I recently switched my Linux desktop and laptop back to openSUSE Tumbleweed from Fedora. [Read More]

Bypassing AT&T Fiber/Frontier/AU 802.1X with MikroTik and bridge interfaces

 Posted on September 17, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  393 words  |  Neel Chauhan

Although I now live primarily in Verizon territory, my family has a second home in Frontier-land at least for a few more months. Frontier in Connecticut inherited AT&T’s 802.1X setup so if you’re not on XGS-PON, you are required to use Frontier’s router, in my case an Arris NVG468MQ. However, if you’re using a MikroTik CCR2004-series router, you can use that connected to the ONT and bridge 802.1X from the Arris. [Read More]

Tech is a cyclical industry: booms and busts are normal

 Posted on September 16, 2024  |  3 minutes  |  482 words  |  Neel Chauhan

It’s no secret that the tech job market really sucks. Even for me who still has a job, I’m not exactly keen on my department, I have many reservations about my product, I wanted to move on. But even when I tried applying for jobs, why should they hire me instead of someone who’s so desperate they’ll work for less? This just happened to me last week. This made me realize, tech is a cyclical industry. [Read More]

Have an ASN and IPv6 space? Build your own IPv6 tunnel!

 Posted on September 3, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  761 words  |  Neel Chauhan

For many years, Hurricane Electric was the de-jure IPv6 tunneling platform. If you wanted Netflix, just force Netflix on IPv4. For people without native IPv6, HE.net was truly a godsend. Then HE.net tunnels became more problematic, now we have multiple streaming services and other services blocking HE.net tunnels under the “public proxy” blanket ban. I remember the pre-COVID and the early-COVID era when only Netflix blocked HE.net tunnels when I lacked native IPv6 until summer 2020. [Read More]

Building my own HPE SAS cable from Amazon because HPE won't sell me one

 Posted on August 7, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  368 words  |  Neel Chauhan

Remember when Reddit /r/sysadmin said HPE support blows? Well it does. I got an open box HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 as a NAS. This is my second whereas my first is a compute server. To my surprise, there was no SAS cables in the open box server. When sourcing the official sources, I was in back and forth conversations with HPE and their “part suppliers” to no avail. And no, I did not get the right SAS cable. [Read More]

Running ArchiveTeam Warrior in Podman on Rocky Linux 9

 Posted on July 31, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  244 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I don’t remember where I heard about ArchiveTeam from, but when I did learn about it I knew I wanted to join in. I have run Tor relays for over a decade now but always wanted to participate in other volunteer-run services as well. I always felt good when my home servers serve more people than just me. I run an I2P node too, but CPU-and-GPU-heavy tasks like Folding@Home are out usually due to excessive power consumption and noise. [Read More]

My High School banned Phones... in 2011!

 Posted on July 8, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  186 words  |  Neel Chauhan

Today I read that many schools from NYC to LA want to ban smartphones in school. Well, let me tell you that my high school, Somers High School of Somers, NY (an rural-ish but rich NYC exurb) did actually ban phones back in 2011, and when I graduated in 2015 they still did. When it comes to mobile tech, the early-to-mid-2010s were almost like the stone age. Whereas most of my peers had an iPhone on Verizon, my family chose to go with Samsung phones on Sprint. [Read More]

Taming Noise on HPE ProLiant ML-series Tower Servers

 Posted on June 13, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  156 words  |  Neel Chauhan

As mentioned earlier, my homelab server is a HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 which is a single-socket Intel Sapphire Rapids-based server. One problem with this server is how much noise it generates. I swear, the ML110 Gen10 was much quieter. It’s a big trouble especially since right now I’m “houseless” meaning I’m living with my brother and have my ML110 in a bedroom closet. However, with the default power settings it’s still very noisy especially when running a cluster of Tor relays. [Read More]

Bypassing Frontier Connecticut GPON 802.1X with MikroTik

 Posted on June 6, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  261 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I’ve made it back eastwards! Yay! While my family looks for NYC hosing, I’m living in Stamford, CT in my brother’s townhouse/condo. The condo has Frontier FiberOptic. But as Connecticut is a former AT&T market, unless you’re on XGS-PON which I’m not, GPON is based off AT&T Fiber with the infamous 802.1X requirement. Initially, I used a Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge but after having performance issues, I moved the Cat6 drops to near my equipment and “bypassed” the Frontier gateway. [Read More]

Enabling Path MTU Discovery in MikroTik, or why my PPPoE/6rd was slow

 Posted on February 29, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  233 words  |  Neel Chauhan

For many years, I’ve stuck with OPNsense, first initially since until a couple of years ago I was a die-hard FreeBSD user. But more importantly, by default Linux-based firealls play poorly with CenturyLink’s 6rd. I’ve been wanting to use a MikroTik as my core router instead of OPNsense for many years, but whenever I tried, 6rd browsing was just so slow for some reason. A few days ago, I got myself a MikroTik CCR2004-16G-2S+ and intially went IPv4-only. [Read More]