I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Well good news. Because ipv6 has a thing called privacy extensions which has been switched on by default on every device I’ve used.

    That generates random ipv6 addresses (which are regularly rotated) that are used for outgoing connections. Your router should block incoming connections to those ips but the os will too. The proper permanent ip address isn’t used for outgoing connections and the address space allocated to each user makes a brute force scan more prohibitive than scanning the whole Ipv4 Internet.

    So I’m going to say that using routable ipv6 addresses with privacy extensions is more secure than a single Ipv4 Nat address with dnat.



  • I think people’s experience with PLE will always be subjective. In the old flat we were in, where I needed it. It would drop connection all the time, it was unusable.

    But I’ve had them run totally fine in other places. Noisy power supplies that aren’t even in your place can cause problems. Any kind of impulse noise (bad contacts on an old style thermostat for example) and all kinds of other things can and will interfere with it.

    Wifi is always a compromise too. But, I guess if wiring direct is not an option, the OP needs to choose their compromise.



  • OK, one possibility I can think of. At some point, files may have been created where there is currently a mount point which is hiding folders that are still there, on the root partition.

    You can remount just the root partition elsewhere by doing something like

    mkdir /mnt/rootonly
    mount -o bind / /mnt/rootonly
    
    

    Then use du or similar to see if the numbers more closely resemble the values seen in df. I’m not sure if that graphical tool you used that views the filesystem can see those files hidden this way. So, it’s probably worth checking just to rule it out.

    Anyway, if you see bigger numbers in /mnt/rootonly, then check the mount points (like /mnt/rootonly/home and /mnt/rootonly/boot/efi). They should be empty, if not those are likely files/folders that are being hidden by the mounts.

    When finished you can unmount the bound folder with

    umount /mnt/rootonly

    Just an idea that might be worth checking.




  • I think most people that were gaming held onto their CRTs as long as possible. The main reason being, the first generation of LCD panels took the analogue RGB input, and had to present that onto the digital panel. They were generally ONLY 60hz, and you often had to reset their settings when you changed resolution. Even then, the picture was generally worse than a comparable, good quality CRT.

    People upgraded mainly because of the reduced space usage and that they looked aesthetically better. Where I worked, we only had an LCD panel on the reception desk, for example. Everyone else kept using CRTs for some years.

    CRTs on the other hand often had much better refresh rates available, especially at lower resolutions. This is why it was very common for competitive FPS players to use resolutions like 800x600 when their monitor supported up to 1280x960 or similar. The 800x600 resolution would often allow 120 or 150hz refresh.

    When LCD screens with a fully digital interface became common, even though they were pretty much all 60hz locked, they started to offer higher resolutions and in general comparable or better picture quality in a smaller form factor. So people moved over to the LCD screens.

    Fast-forward to today, and now we have LCD (LED/OLED/Whatever) screens that are capable of 120/144/240/360/Whatever refresh rates. And all the age-old discussions about our eyes/brain not being able to use more than x refresh rate have resurfaced.

    It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.




  • But this is another interesting thing. Dynamic IP addresses made sense, when we were dialling up for internet, and the internet wasn’t the utility it is now.

    Back then we’d dial up for a few hours in the evening or weekend. Businesses that didn’t have a permanent presence would connect in the day to send/receive emails etc. So, you could have 500 IP addresses to around 1500 users and re-use them successfully.

    But now, what is the real point in a dynamic IP? Everyone has a router switched on 24/7 sitting on an IP. What is the real difference, in cost in giving a static IP over a dynamic one? Sure, CGNAT saved them IP addresses. But, with always on dynamic just doesn’t make sense. Except, that you can charge for a static IP. The traffic added by the few people that want to run services is usually running against the tide of their normal traffic. So, that shouldn’t really be an extra cost to them either.

    If everyone that ran a website did the extra work (which is miniscule) to also operate on IPv6, and every ISP did the (admittedly more) work to provide IPv6 prefixes and ensure their supplied routers were configured for it, and that they had instructions to configure it on third party routers, IPv4 would become the minority pretty soon. It seems like it’s just commercial opportunity that’s holding us back now.


  • But new IPv4 allocations have run out. I’ve seen ISPs that won the lottery in the 90s/2000s (when the various agencies controlling IP allocations just tossed them around like they were nothing) selling large blocks for big money.

    Many ISPs offer only CGNAT, require signing up to the higher speed/more expensive packages to get a real IP, or charge extra on top of the standard package for one. I fully expect this trend to continue.

    The non-move to IPv6 is laziness, incompetence, or the sheer fact they can monetize the finite resource of IPv4 addresses and pass the costs onto the consumer. I wonder which it is.