Our hacker [Andrew Zonenberg] reports in on his open-source high-speed Ethernet switch. He hasn’t finished yet, but progress has been made. If you were wondering what might be involved in a high-speed Ethernet switch implementation look no further. He’s been working on this project, on and off, since 2012. His design now includes a dizzying […]
Sometimes you need random numbers — and properly random ones, at that. [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that, tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT. [Sean] tells us he’s been “designing various quantum TRNGs for nearly 15 years as part of an elaborate practical joke” without further explanation. We won’t […]
What do you do when you need to choose an OS at boot but aren’t physically near your machine? [Dakhnod]’s inventive solution is a mix of GRUB, Wake-on-LAN (WOL), and a lightweight ESP8266 running a simple HTTP server. In the past, [dakhnod] already enlightened us with another smart ESP hack. This one’s a clever combination […]
At the recent 38C3 conference in Germany, someone gave a talk about sending TOSLINK digital audio over fiber optic networks rather than the very low-end short distance fibre you’ll find behind hour CD player. This gave [Manawyrm] some ideas, so of course the IP-over TOSLINK network was born. TOSLINK is in effect I2S digital audio […]
If you’ve owned a CD player or other piece of consumer digital audio gear manufactured since the 1980s, the chances are it has a TOSLINK port on the back. This is a fairly simple interface that sends I2S digital audio data down a short length of optical fibre, and it’s designed to run between something […]
We all take Ethernet and its ubiquitous RJ-45 connector for granted these days. But Ethernet didn’t start with twisted pair cable. [Mark] and [Ben] at The Serial Port YouTube channel are taking a deep dive into the twisted history of Ethernet on twisted pair wiring. The earliest forms of Ethernet used RG-8 style coaxial cable. […]
A joke in networking circles is that the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 is always a few years away. Although IPv6 was introduced in the early 90s as a result of the feared imminent IPv4 address drought courtesy of the blossoming Internet. Many decades later, [Geoff Huston] in an article on the APNIC blog looks […]
Raw network sockets are a curious beasts, as unless you have a strong urge to implement your own low-level network protocol, it’s a topic that is probably best left to the (well-paid) experts. That said, you can totally use raw sockets in virtually every operating system, but one should be aware of a few things, […]
OpenWRT is a powerful piece of open-source software that can turn plenty of computers into highly configurable and capable routers. That amount of versatility comes at a cost, though; OpenWRT can be difficult to configure outside of the most generic use cases. [Paul] generally agrees with this sentiment and his latest project seeks to solve […]