TheMuffinMan

I actually totally agree with this; I just think the solution is holding these companies to account rather than forcing all users to submit very personal identification.

I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.

I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.

When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.

They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.

Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.

In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.

I grew up with the Internet of the noughties and saw some screwed up stuff. That should have been on my parents, but I turned out okay anyway.

Canada’s just the latest to join the mass surveillance club.

What is the purpose of counting channels? A handful of servers I’m in have one.

However, triggering multiple cameras at once at the exact same time was a similar experiences with additional trigger lines and multiple discussions with the manufacturers application engineers.

100% this; synchronisation challenges are the bane of my existence. There are also a lot of cases when it would have been really helpful if data output from a device were timestamped (even with something incomplete like “number of milliseconds past the minute”), rather than having to timestamp it on receipt and make some iffy assumptions about latency.

Depending on the command the byte order also had to be swapped which was not documented at all and I had to find it by trial and error.

“Determining endianness is left as an exercise for the reader” type logic, honestly lol.

So I’m not sure if it’s the military grade that makes it such an experience. Industrial grade seems like a similar experience.

It’s quite plausible (and disappointing to hear) that it’s a broader issue with industrial grade hardware; my own experience is limited to products specifically aimed for military/defence applications.

I guess a lot of consumer devices also do shit like that under the hood but hide it in firmware and drivers.

Yep, but I think there’s also a broader point about work that is niche or “cutting edge” versus industry standard. The example that comes to mind is the quality of code written in academia versus in industry, the former often being significantly worse. I think part of it is that code quality is far less emphasised compared to the higher level technical concept it’s used to demonstrate. I honestly believe that a sizeable chunk of the professors and lecturers from my university would struggle to produce work that is “up to standard” in a regular software eng role, at least initially.

Allow me to explain with a practical example: you have a camera on the network, and you want to automate taking snapshots in response to some arbitrary trigger (e.g. every minute, or whenever a separate motion sensor is activated). There are standards and conventions for type of integration, but military grade hardware often wants you to do things from first principles.

Typical consumer/IP camera: the camera has a REST API for its command set, so you can formulate a HTTP request like GET http://my-camera-ip/command/snap?stream=0 and the server will respond with image data. You can knock this out in maybe < 30 mins and < 100 lines of code. If you’re a bit crafty, you can add support for multiple different camera models, which may vary in URI formation and authentication.

On the other hand, trying to do this with a military grade camera, the experience is usually something like this: The camera comes with proprietary client software that is closed source. In UI you can click a ‘snap’ button to take an image, but no viable route for automation. You try to reverse engineer it with WireShark, but it appears to be a WebSocket connection with constant data transfer, which makes dissecting the ‘snap’ command difficult.

You check the manual, and the only mention of how to directly command the camera is via a serial line. That’s the first problem: you don’t want to run a long cable from the server running your automation, to the camera itself. So you buy a small serial device server, and run a serial cable between it and the camera. It will forward any byte sequence that is sent to it over your LAN, to the camera’s serial input.

The manual references a separate document that explains the communication protocol, which should explain what byte sequence to send to ‘snap’ an image. You hunt down this document, and. Uh-oh. It’s 344 pages long. Ctrl+F, you look for “snap” and find it’s in section 17. It references some earlier sections about sync bytes, message headers, and checksums. You finally work out that the full byte sequence you need to send to trigger a snapshot is00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A. You write code that sends that sequence over TCP to the serial device server. But there’s a problem: you’re not receiving any bytes back. Where is the resultant image?

You go back to the manual and it mentions that “snapshots and recordings are stored on the internal SD card” and “SD card contents are available via FTP”. It doesn’t give a spec, or even a filesystem, for the SD card. After trying a bunch of different ones, the camera finally detects your SDXC card formatted as exFAT: the magic combo.

There is no explanation of the FTP functionality in the manual, so you try the default FTP port, and make some educated guesses for the right username/password combo. None of them work, so you contact the manufacturers for help. 2 weeks later, they respond with the credentials. Finally, you’re in, and you’re seeing new image files showing up whenever you send the byte sequence. Success! Now, your code does something like this:

1. Send 00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A via TCP to serial device server
2. Wait a moment
3. Connect to camera FTP server and download image file from SD card

A week later, your boss walks in and says that a new competitor, manufacturer B, has cameras with much more impressive IR sensors for nighttime surveillance. The existing cameras will be replaced starting next week. None of what you have built is reusable for manufacturer B cameras; it’s time for a new adventure.

It’s mind-boggling. It’s like the manufacturers’ engineers have not spoken to anyone who has written any software in the last 20 years.

Having additional virtual network interfaces on VMs is completely normal, ens18 does indeed sound like the right one you should be looking at.

Seconding the other commenter who mentioned the possibility of a second DHCP server.

Is your Proxmox host wired via ethernet to the pfsense? Or are there WiFi APs in the mix anywhere

As someone who works in defence & surveillance as a systems engineer (so by every measure a civilian), I’m still the one on the right… military grade hardware is a fucking nightmare to integrate into larger systems.

He is being childish, but if I am completely honest, it sounds like you are a little too. Not in how bothered you are by the situation (understandable), but more how you perceive it.

I totally understand wanting to just do the work and cut the meaningless chatter, but the reality is a job usually has more abstract requirements outside of specific job tasks. One of these is getting your manager to like you. Social cohesion is one of the things workplaces tend to look for.

Not every manager cares about small talk perhaps as much as yours does, but that’s the situation you are in.

My advice would be to decide on one of the following 1) work elsewhere where you can thrive without this obstacle, 2) develop the skill of faking being interested, or 3) do nothing but get frustrated and possibly miss out on promotions or similar.

Wishing you the best, from a socially inept person with autism who relates to that dread, haha.

I’m bi and hooking up with myself would be the absolute dream lmao

I’m also very insecure in general, so I don’t think it’s an ego thing - more that any sense of vulnerability would likely disappear.

Struggled to read this - lots of words and not enough Subway Surfers.

Happy to help 😅

FWIW, I’m bi and find other bald(ing) men who embrace it attractive :)

I just wish other people were less demeaning about it; rude comments about bald men (mostly from women unfortunately) were the biggest barrier to acceptance for me.

Just putting it out there, because I have been silenced every time I have tried to talk about my negative experiences with minoxidil:

I was on a 10% topical formulation (so 2x the strength of regular Regaine/Rogaine) and the stuff destroyed my skin on a permanent basis. About a month or 2 in I started noticing lines and wrinkles where I previously had none, my eyes were really puffy, and I started to look like the ‘after’ photo in those PSAs about doing drugs. I had to come off the stuff and take collagen supplements daily to even slightly reverse that. I’m not back to baseline and likely never will be; that shit aged me by about 8 years in the span of 6 months. It was honestly much worse than hair loss itself.

Before I came off it, when I told the ““clinic”” that prescribed me what I was experiencing, they said it was placebo. Meanwhile, other hair loss sufferers online told me that I was making it up because I was jealous of other men’s gains (???)

I am by no means saying this will necessarily happen if you take minox, but it wasn’t even a reported side effect on the leaflet (where it lists common/uncommon/rare/very rare side effects), and I was genuinely trying to get it on there so people could be aware that this is a risk.

I would be super cautious of oral administration. When I was on the topical, it was only in contact with my scalp and any part of my body that would touch my pillow while sleeping I guess. Can’t imagine what it would have done going through the digestive system instead.

Sincerely, fuck the hair restoration industry and the way it preys on desperate people.

Sorry that this isn’t necessarily super on-topic (or uplifting), but seeing/hearing about minoxidil brings up a really bad experience.