Holy fucking hell!
Who the fuck sets up a local network with an 255.255.0.0 subnet mask and then lets the dhcp-server distribute clients onto the 192.249.x.x., 192.2.x.x and the 192.22.x.x networks AT FUCKING RANDOM???
I need to SSH onto 40 routers distributed across the entire campus and have a WORKING internet connection while doing so and you make me spin the connect-disconnect-wheel. Fucking hell dude, don't give me that "Uh, it wasn't intended for this size"-bullshit. You have about 200 active devices. And in one subnet you have space for more than 60 000. Fuck you, dumbass! OH, YOUR FUCKING LIST IS FUCKING WRONG AND YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE IP OF THE ROUTERS? OH FUCK YOU EVEN HARDER!!!
Goddamn people why does legacy maintenance always suck so much?😭😭😭

so my isp assigned all of our devices WAN ip's instead of giving our router a WAN ip and letting us handle our own lan.

so our subnet is x.x.15.255

but when I subnet scan x.x.255.255 I get 1337 results, no joke 1337

so I can access windows servers, ip cameras, sure a lot of them are locked, I'm scanning 0.0.0.1 - 255.255.255.255 now to see what else there is.

wwyd?

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

"There is a problem in your selection of --ifconfig endpoints [local=10.8.0.40, remote=255.255.255.252]. The local and remote VPN endpoints must exist within the same 255.255.255.252 subnet. This is a limitation of --dev tun when used with the TAP-WIN32 driver."

WORKS PERFECTLY FINE ON MY ANDROID, AND ALL OF MY LINUX MACHINES!! Yet WanBLowS apparently needs special treatment again. AND WHAT FOR, HUH?!!! Motherfucking piece of fucking trash!!!

Just wrote a examn about IPs an totally fucked it up. I hate subnet masks. SERIOUSLY, FUCK THEM

AAAHHHH fuuuuuu

💔

Me as a sysadmin, and the devs approach with this:
hey "Linux", they network is stupid, the firewall is blocking the trafic from server1 to server2, pls fix.

The servers are on the same subnet with no firewall, so I log in to the servers and find out that their programs is not running.

This is something I deal with every day

What is it with networking guys refusing to do any kind of fault finding? Pretty much everywhere I've worked they seem to be overpaid address hogs who occasionally want everyone to be proud of them for installing a new switch.

Currently seeing a production issue that's clearly due to spikes in packet loss on a certain part of the network - but oh no, it's always "our tests are fine", "we can establish a route no problem", "this is an application level issue", etc.

No you morons, when a dozen unrelated applications hosted on different cloud services fail because none of them can contact anything in your particular subnet in your data center at the same time, it's a damn networking issue. Sort it out.

What does a computer engineer wear on a Halloween?

Ans:a bit mask or sometimes subnet masks

@netikras
not sure why, but you tend to appear on google search "devrant". i thought it was a random user each time when i first saw it... tried on different devices/ips... 80% of them, you showed up.

are you aware of this?
anyone else have similar, or totally different, insight on this?

though it was different IPs, i should mention that they were all on the same subnet... not local, public IPv4 /28 subnet

This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.

I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.

GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.

Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.

Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.

That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?

As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.

Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.

And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>

If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.

Soooooo, why is it that so often 'security' just means bloody mindedly getting in your way for no reason?

Coz I fail to see how whitelisting a subnet of private IPs that are already only accessible through company VPN presents any kind of security risk, especially since the blocking software is literally only on our company laptops and can be easily bypassed by being on the VPN on *any other device*. But nooooooo, we have to go to the this other company our umbrella company owns (who by the way are making every dev at our company redundant in six months) and beg them to change each individual IP address every time we create a service.

Really does feel like security often means either 'our parent company doesn't understand security so we just need to go through the motions and *look* like we are doing things properly' or 'we just want to get in your way enough that we win in the who gets made redundant fight because you can't actually get any work done and we can'.

Bonus points: on the website for the blocking software they use, it literally recommends using Internet Explorer for everything. I'm surprised they haven't tried to enforce that on us as well.

A follow up rant to my rant about "breaking the interwebs":

I fixed the interwebs and I also installed OpenVPN on one of my Raspberry Pis, it seems to be working just like I wanted it to work :3

When I signed up for my job as Senior DevOps, I didn't realize it was going to be 90% VPN and Subnet management. Time to brush off my Cisco books !

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

I have just slept for a minimum of 5 hours. It is 7:47 PM atm.
Why?
We have had a damn stressful day today.
We have had a programming test, but it really was rather an exam.
Normally, you get 30 minutes for a test and 45 minutes for an exam.

In this "test" we have had to explain what 'extends' does and name a few advantages of why one should use it.
Check.
Read 3 separate texts and write the program code on paper. It was about 1 super class and 1 sub class with a test class in Java.
Check.
Task 3: Create the UML diagram of the code from above. *internally: From above? He probably means my code since there is no other code there. *Checks time*. I have about 3 minutes left. Fuck my life.*
Draws the boxes. Put the class names in each of them. A private attribute for the super class.
Teacher: Last minute!
Draw the arrow starting starting from the sub class to the super class.
Put my name on each written paper. And mentally done for the day. Couldn't finish the last task. Task 3.
During this "test", I heard the frustrations of my classmates. Seemed like everyone was pretty much pissed.
After a short discussion with the teacher who also happens to be the physics professor of a university nearby.
[If you are reading this, I hope that something bad happens to you]
The next course was about computer systems. Remember my recent rant about DNS, dhcp, ftp, web server and samba on ubuntu?
We have had the task to do the screenshots of the consoles where you proof that you have dhcp activated on win7 machine etc. Seemed ok to me. I would have been done in 10 minutes, if I would be doing this relaxed. Now the teacher tells us to change the domain names to <surnameOfEachStudent>.edu.
I was like: That's fine.
Create a new user for the samba server. Read and write directories. Change the config.
Me: That should be easy.
Create new DNS entries in the configs.
Change the IPv6 address area to 192.168.x.100-200/24 only for the dhcp server.
Change the web server's default page. Write your own text into it.
You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes of time for it.
Dumbo -ANGRY-CLIENT-: Aye. Let us first start screenshotting the default page. Oh, it says that we should access it with the domain name. I don't have that much time. Let us be creative and fake it, legally.
Changes the title element so that it looks like it has been accessed via domain name. Deletes the url and writes the domain name without pressing Enter. Screenshot. Done. Ok, let us move to the next target.
Dhcp: Change lease time. Change IP address area. Subnet mask. Router. DNS. Broadcast. Optional domain name. Save.
Switches to win7.
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
Holy shit it does not work!
After changing the configs on ubuntu for a legit 30 minutes: Maybe I should change the ip of the ubuntu virtual machine itself. *me asking my old self: why did not you do that in the first place, ass hole?!*
Same previous commands on win7 console. Does not work. Hmmm...
Where could be the problem?
Check the IP of the ubuntu server once again. Fml. Ubuntu did not save when I clicked on the save button the first time I have changed it. Click on save button 10 times to make sure it really is saved now lol.
Same old procedure on win7.
Alright. Dhcp works. Screenshot.
Checks time. 40 minutes left.
DNS:It is your turn. Checks bind9 configs. sudo nano db.reverse.edu.
sudo nano db.<mysurname>.edu.
Alright. All set. It should work now.
Ping win7 from ubuntu and vice versa. Works. Ping domain name on windows 7 vm. Does not work.
Oh, I forgot to restart the bind9 server on ubuntu.
sudo service bind stop
" " " start
Check DNS server IP on win7. It looks fine.
It still doesn't work. Fuck it. I have only 20 minutes left. Samba. Let us do this!
10 minutes in. No result. I don't remember why. I already forgot why I have done for it. It was a very stressful day.
Let us try DNS again.
Oh shit. I forgot the resolver!
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
The previous edits are gone. Dumb me. It says it in the comments. Why did not I care about it. Fuck it.6 minutes left. Open a yt video real quick. Changes the config file. Saves it. Restarts DNS and dhcp. Closes the terminal and opens a new one. The changes do not affect them until you reopen them. That's why.
Change to win7.
Ping works. How about nsloopup.
Does not work.
Teacher: 2 minutes left!
Fuck it.
Saves the word document with the images in it. Export as pdf. Tries to access the directories of the school samba server. Does not work. It was not my fault tho. Our school server is in general very slow. It feels like they are not maintained and left alone like this in the dust from the 90s.
Friend gets the permission to put his document on a USB and give the USB to the teacher.
Sneaky me: Hey xyz, can you give me your USB real quick?
Him: sure.
Gets bombed with "do you want to format the USB?" pop-ups 10 times. Fml. Skips in a fast way.
Transfers the pdf. Plug it out. Give it back.
After this we have had to give a presentation in politics. I am done.

My friend and me sit next to each other in the class.
One day, he tell me about his family. they have code equivalent of most common English words.

when the COVID-19 pandemic occur in our country, his father warn everyone in the house by saying

stay.at("127.0.0.1")
wear("255.255.255.0")

everyone start to

search(mask)
return tohome;

========================================

127.0.0.1 is a loopback address. aka localhost
IP masking is a way to hide your real IP.
255.255.255.0 is an example of subnet mask for IP

we used Ruby in this story.

Fuck you Windows 10!
Trying to help a sales guy setup his adapter to work on a manual network setup (not DHCP). It shows familiar IPV4 settings and then I see this:
"IPV4 Subnet Prefix Length" I decided it was related to netmask "255.255.255.0" or whatever. Tried the number 3. Worked fine. Talked to a colleague and he said it should be the bits of the netmask. So 24.

So WHY THE FUCK does Windows 10 on an update change the way we setup manual networks that has been in use for 40 years?! I realize you can still do the netmask version via Control Panel. I get that. However, the last time I helped this sales person it asked for netmask using the exact method for setting up manual network setting. So why change this on an update?

I like Windows 10 mostly, but this kind of fuckery is stupid. Stop changing shit just to change shit!

Wish i could broadcast sigkill on to the subnet of idiots

Just setup an IPsec tunnel and route 192.168.50.0/24 to 192.168.0.0/16 over that tunnel on phase2. We will be able to see 192.168.50.6 machine from 192.168.0.0/16 remote subnet.

Do it.

Why we cannot send ICMP echo from local subnet machine to another machine in same subnet??? Also remote subnet hits only the BSD machine it does not go further. Whyy

I know I should have not done it but SDM and my manager insisted to do so... And now they expect me to fix time outs when remote subnet belongs to different company.

Holy fucking shit, I hate ubuntu SO much.

So what it happened..
I was tryin to set up an Ubuntu server on my machine using virtual box, and I know what you are thinking, "VirtualBox?" yeah its the only machine I had lying around and it had windows and I didn't wanna re-format its hard drive.
So Here how it goes...
Install went fine.. But when I was trying to manage multiple network interfaces, it was Terrible & pain in the ASS 😡...
So initially I needed 2 network interfaces, one for NAT adapter and another Host-only interface for SSH and stuff.. so I made changes in virtualbox settings and rebooted the VM. and it stuck on "a start job is running for wait for network to be configured" I was like okayy and removed host-only adapter and rebooted, it booted fine :/ then I tried combo of bridged adapter with my Ethernet and a host-only adapter, and what? it booted finally! but this wasn't an optimal solution because it had and IP address within subnet of other devices with my router and half the bandwidth (like 50mbps or something).. I reverted back to NAT network & I checked with ifconfig and it STILL didn't had an IP address assigned to it for Host-only adapter!! FFS I deleted the VM and reinstalled the whole thing again but this time both interfaces attached..
after installing it stuck on same shit again :'(
"a start job is running for wait for network to be configured"... FUCK!
after about an hour of troubleshooting and trying different configurations, I still couldn't get it to work.. I never had such problems with centOS.

Fuck you ubuntu.. fuck you in the ass