The "Sasha" section brought back a load of memories from my childhood. As an Alex growing up in Western Europe with no connections to anything East it was just my Russophile father that used to call me Sandy or Sasha some of the time.
I'm waiting for 3 DACs and a few other bits to arrive today to move closer to 10G networking at home. Moving house soon and the new place will have 2.5Gbps FTTP (both up and down) so I wanted to be prepared for that. Given my existing broadband is only 500/75Mbps FTTP I was fine with a 1GbE internal network and Wifi-6 meshing. I could have planned to move to 2.5GbE but it may have been a bottleneck at some point, so may as well push straight on to 10G.
I have a USW-Aggregation with 8 SFP+ ports arriving today too. Just have to install Intel X520-DA2 cards in two of my servers (Proxmox host and a general Linux server), and the NAS also has a 10G SFP+ port, and then connect it all up.
Most of it second hand from eBay for half the usual retail price.
I really have to wonder what can you use 10G for? I have 500M down from my ISP, and it is faster than I can imagine ever needing, unless I get into data-hoarding 8k movies.
My homelab has a 10G fabric (switched) for NFS, iSCSI, NVMe-OF, etc. and a 25G fabric (a mix of back-to-back and switched) for clustering (Ceph, DRDB, ZFS replication, migrating VMs).
I spun up some iSCSI-backed SQL Server a few months ago and 10G couldn't keep up with the workload, so I dropped in a pair of 100G ConnectX-4 cards with iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) support for that particular use-case.
Just because your uplink is less than 10G doesn't mean the rest of your network can't be a bit more capable. :)
True, I don't really feel limited by my existing 500Mbps down, but knowing I'll be having 2500Mbps up/down soon means I want to have the infra to handle it.
Basing things on 2.5GbE would certainly have been cheaper but some things don't support it (they either do 1GbE or 10G SFP+) so settling on 10G where possible made more sense to me. My future ISP also has a 5Gbps up/down option, but even I can't justify that right now.
My wife and kid just want their phones/laptops to work, and to be able to stream stuff to watch, they don't care about the underlying speed.
Having a faster network may make some of my work related things run a bit quicker. A few times a day I'll need to pull something big down (either an ISO or a bunch of docker images) and that can take up to 2 minutes with 500Mbps down. Having those take a fifth of that time will make it seem less of a roadblock to doing work. 2 minutes meant I went and got a cup of coffee and often got more distracted, 30 seconds should keep me at my desk and focused on what I was doing. That's not a big enough reason to justify it on its own obviously.
I also want to do offsite backups with/for various family members, so something better than 75Mbps up is going to be a huge boost. Getting 1Gbps+ out will be huge (assuming whatever is at the other end can support that).
I don't do any kind of data hoarding, I think I've got something under 4TB of data that I actually care about, and most of that are family photos/videos.
Deep down it's mostly because I'm a networking geek so it's fun to play with some new kit and make blinkenlights.
Going for a cup of coffee means physical walk. Detaching from focussed mode means your mind gets in diffused mode. This is where/when creativity ensues.
One thing to remember is 2.5 gbit/sec uplink is shared between all clients. So if one client is on 1 gbit, and one client could saturate their 1 gbit while switch and router can handle better. An advantage of that is QoS isn't needed to be applied manually.
So, for example, it maybe worth it to have higher than 1 gbit uplink on switch to router, and maybe a server to switch, but devices such as your TV or WLAN clients do not need such.
75 mbit up is pretty good compared to DSL (I bet it is cable), and yes 1 gbit up is nice for off-site backups. But the upsell of going above 1 gbit symmetric IMO isn't there.
Cable providers know this. Which is why they sit below 1 gbit symmetric, at a level average subscribers are comfortable with.
> Going for a cup of coffee means physical walk. Detaching from focussed mode means your mind gets in diffused mode. This is where/when creativity ensues.
Sure, but I want to choose when I do it, not have it forced upon me.
> 75 mbit up is pretty good compared to DSL (I bet it is cable)
It is FTTP not DSL or cable. BT Fibre 500 in the UK. Almost all of the deals through the legacy/monopoly provider (BT/Openreach) are asymmetric like this.
The 2500/2500 at the new property is a different provider that has their own network and so isn't tied into reselling Openreach's GPON infra.
It just makes everything feel faster. I went from 500m to 2.5g thinking I would immediately go back (I really just wanted the upgrade to XGS-PON to run my own network) and then I couldn't go back. Its very much like using a higher refresh rate or a faster CPU...
I went from one dev machine to two at my desk so I connected them via 25GBe. With about 2.8GBps TCP throughput and RDMA available I don't have to think too much about task placement or cross-traffic. (specific hardware: Mellanox ConnectX 4 LX cards + a DAC cable).
It's less "what new thing can you do" and more "what things involve noticeably waiting, how long is the waiting, and what else is impacted". E.g. updating a game on Steam practically takes slightly under half the time for me (1.2 Gbps actual rate) and has absolutely 0 impact to any other traffic in the house. If it was 10x the price to get 10x the bandwidth I wouldn't bother but it was actually about the same as my old cable modem plan.
For most people, 500M is probably fine. But once you have a few family members, each streaming 4K movies to their devices, and a parent that needs a video call to work seamlessly, you start to see the benefits.
10G is probably overkill, but it's also future proofing. The way things are going, loading the NYtimes will require 10G just for the advertising alone...
The card is obviously 16-lane, but it also has two ports; 40Gb total. In a server that’s fine, but if you want 10G in a desktop you’ll have a problem.
I’m probably not telling you anything new. NICs using newer PCI generations are rare as hen’s teeth. It should be possible to do this with four lanes, but isn’t…
Unless you find a 25G dual-port card, in which case the single lane my secondary slots hand out does at least suffice for 10G one way.
PCIe is also a full duplex connection so 2x10G is still just 20G instead of 40G. For PCIe 2.0 an x8 connection should get you full bandwidth on both ports simultaneously while x4 will fall just short for simultaneously usage (but still higher than 1 port). Unless you're really hankering for that full 20G, in which case a 25G NIC is definitely the better pick, that means you can just slot it in an x4 slot off the chipset on even a standard desktop PC.
Funnily enough, if you want a dirt cheap PCIe 3.0 based card the MCX353A-QCBT and MCX354A-QCBT give 1/2 ports of 40G QSFP+. They support QSFP+ to SFP+ adapters, so you can plug a 10G SFP+ into the QSFP+ port, but they don't support 4x10G breakout unfortunately. I ended up using the 2 port variant in both of my NASes - one port is 40G between the 2 for dirt cheap fast backups and the other is adapted to 10G to connect to the rest of the home network.
I've started buying Intel E810s for most purposes, even for 10G links. (SFP28 ports are generally backward-compatible with SFP+ DACs and transceivers.) The ones you can get on eBay for cheap typically run Dell firmware but it's serviceable. An E810-XXVDA2 is Gen4 x8; as long as the host slot can physically accept the card connector you only need Gen4 x1 electrical for a single 10G link or Gen4 x2 for dual 10G or single 25G.
I'm only planning on using one of the SFP+ ports on each of the cards, the dual port cards were just more common and cheaper on eBay.
The specs say they require PCIe v2.1 x8 lane.
My Proxmox server is quite old and has a Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 mobo and has loads of spare PCI slots. One slot is taken up by a generic graphics card as the Mobo has no on-board graphics. (I think I went for this mobo because of the number of SATA ports, but it was over 10 years ago so not entirely sure.)
My general Linux server is newer and has an ASUS Prime H610M-A D4 mobo. Only two PCI slots (not used at the moment) and so the Intel X540-DA2 will use up the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot leaving just a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. But that's fine as this machine is just a CPU (i7-13700), 64GB RAM and a 2TB NVMe. Sticking a good graphics card in it for GPU related fun had been on my list for years but I never got around to it, now the prices are just insane so I'll ignore that for now or something second hand falls into my lap.
I did similar with the Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN and some surplus eBay gear. The nice thing is the NAS and my MacBook dock both have 10G and are connected - and it’s noticeable.
I had a big debate with myself whether to go Mikrotik or Unifi. Being EU based I really wanted to go Mikrotik but ended up with Unifi as I'd had more experience of it when helping out friends/neighbours.
Maybe my "last house" (i.e. the one we'll get to see us through to retirement and beyond) will be Mikrotik based. By then I'll probably want as little computing stuff as possible and will just sit in a comfy chair doing crosswords and sudoku with a pencil.
I use UniFi for most of my home network so It Just Works™, but I've thought about mixing in Mikrotik for e.g. the compute rack so I can play around with 100G+ links and more esoteric stuff like VXLAN.
If one wants to play around with the shell and other administrative tools, one can download a bootable x86 install image from [0] that works fine in qemu. I assume it'll work fine on any other major VM that can boot Linux and provide virtual NICs that work with in-tree drivers.
It's documented (but -IMO- poorly) that the default username is "admin" and the default password is the empty string. The brand-new-as-of-today docs site is at [1], the "older" docs site is at [2], and -as documented on the older docs site- you can get a PDF of the docs at [3].
If you ever find yourself with an entirely spare hour or two, fire up the VM just to play around with the interactive shell that they have built. I may not have worked with enough Enterprise Devices to have an informed opinion... but once I understood what the shell was telling me, I found its use of color to be helpful both when attempting to learn the basic syntax of the shell and as a reminder of what tokens are valid in which contexts. I've never worked with another interactive shell that has such nice syntax-and-data validity hinting.
I've started buying E810s even for 10G links. PCIe Gen4, lower power draw, RDMA support, generally backward-compatible with SFP+ DACs and transceivers, and relatively inexpensive. Not nearly as dirt-cheap as the X520s but not crazy expensive (last I looked, at least). As I gradually replace switches over the next few years I can start taking advantage of 25G.
I just went through the same process over the last few months. I had a USW agg and ran out of ports so now I have the big dog 24-port version. Mainly wanted L3 routing capability but it’s nice having more ports to lagg connections.
The limiting factor for me is that I'm renting so I can't put my own cabling in to the property. And with the new place there's no existing cabling, nor any conduits to run anything in, and chasing things into the walls/etc is going to be prohibited by the landlord or just too expensive if I'm only in this place for a year or two.
The spools of bend insensitive fibre are pretty cheap and very discreet so I'll probably have a couple of those running along skirting boards/etc in order to connect disparate areas of the house. (The ONT is ~15m away from where the majority of the equipment will live, that's the main bit I have to bridge.)
> The spools of bend insensitive fibre are pretty cheap...
For the benefit of other folks reading, I'll note that even regular, boring OM4 bends okay. I have mine running along the outside of preexisting molding and baseboards. My runs get down to a 1/4" bend radius in places and it seems to work just fine. Bend-insensitive fiber is definitely useful, but it may not be required for the run one is planning.
Though, one thing that regular OM4 is not is discreet. That two-strand cabling in its aqua-colored jacket is quite distinctive.
I used to sneak cabling around the basement and pop it out of AC register vents when I was renting. I had one cable coming out the access panel to a bathtub which was conveniently in my office as I was next to the bathroom.
Edwardian houses in the UK rarely have that level of access. No basement at all and I can't lift the carpets and floorboards to get to where I might be able to pass things through/around. No AC ducts. No coax to be able to use MoCA either.
But, yes, that video is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind for the bend insensitive fibre.
It all depends how I set things up (and I can't tell that until I've had more access to the property). The ONT and the rack with the USW-Aggregation switch are 10 yards apart, in terms of absolute distance, but probably 20 yards if you follow the walls/skirting-boards/etc.
The FTTP is presented as 2.5GbE Ethernet (apparently) so I can either:
However this will be sub-optimal in terms of Wifi and I'll probably need extra APs to cover all three floors and out into the back yard.
b) put my Unifi Express 7 in the hallway in the middle of the house (which should give me full Wifi coverage with no extra APs). This would mean a short (2m) DAC to connect it to the USW-Aggregation nearby, and I can use a 20m long flat/flexible Cat-6 Ethernet cable to go between the ONT and the Unifi Express 7.
(Hint: No, he's not replying with AI. Two hyphens are not an em dash. Even then there's no hint of it being an AI response. Also the person is actually the CEO of Dropbox, the very person this thread is all about. You only have to click his username to see his posting history to see he's not an AI bot posting endlessly, his last posts (prior to today) were in 2024.)
Some companies pay more if people are paged. It can create a perverse incentive not to fix problems or, in extreme cases, to watch things going wrong, waiting for the page, and then being ready to fix it straight away.
One team can't troubleshoot AND FIX every possible subsystem, so you just end up with lots (growing to hundreds) of people "on-call" anyway.
As others have said, follow-the-sun type models do exist, usually staffed by people in their normal working hours (EMEA, Americas, APAC) but this means you've still got to cover the weekend and public holidays (which there are a lot of when you factor in plenty of different countries).
Where you need a quick response you can have a core ops/noc team that looks at things with lower thresholds and shorter windows, and their job is to do the initial triage and then page the appropriate team earlier than they would have been alerted by their own alert thresholds/monitoring.
Actually clicking the button to change the status on a public status page is a whole different topic that becomes very political in certain companies.
Github measures/reports the SLA of the individual services.
The external page linked above goes the other extreme and considers it a bad status whenever any individual service is degraded.
In reality the majority of people only use 3 or 4 of the core services the majority of the time but since there's no "core services" SLA/uptime the usability of github for the majority of people is slightly obfuscated.
> But many years ago I gave up Scrum completely in my teams. What’s more, over time I almost stopped coming across startups where Scrum is used in its classic form at all. Many distributed teams are gradually moving toward an async approach ...
It is my personal opinion that Scrum/Agile is just a rather dramatic/over-the-top system for fixing dysfunctional teams that have fallen into poor or absent communication anti-patterns.
(I also think the general trend towards async among distributed teams is that more people have gone through this and have picked up the "better" communication habits.)
After you've done it for a while you start to find that many of the individuals are talking to each other without the various contrivances.
Planning poker isn't really about project sizing, it's about surfacing issues that the team members might not find out about if they don't talk to each other. I've been on teams where someone has spent 2 months working on something only to find that someone else had 90% of the work done in a private branch.
After the third of fourth time during planning poker that someone is reminded that they need to consider the testing/docs aspect they start to factor that in without being prompted.
The daily standup is similar. "I'm going to frobnicate the foobar today" and someone will say "Ah, have you spoken to Alice in that other team as she did the same thing with Bob's team last week, she's got a load of scripts that should save you a load of time."
Retrospectives are about acknowledging people who did good work, what worked well within the team, and also raising the things that held people back. If you have a good team leader they should be wondering why on Earth this is the first time they're hearing about any of this stuff. (A bad team leader will continue to blunder on not learning anything and being blissfully unaware that they're missing the really big neon signs, or they'll find some other way to dismiss the concerns/findings.)
Eventually you may get to a point where there is very little face to face communication required because the team starts to use the async communication systems properly, they communicate freely between team members and also upwards. But this is often a precarious situation, it doesn't take much for the boat to be rocked, new people coming in, trusted people leaving, new projects, new directions, unrealistic deadlines, etc. Every so often it requires more communication than before to get things back on track.
Once you're over the "scrum/agile solves all" hill people tend to pick/choose what continues to add value, and they discard the rest. (For the teams I've worked on in the past it was the "don't interrupt or change course mid sprint" rule that worked best for us - so many times the urgency had disappeared once we had got to the end of the sprint and we'd been saved from ultimately unnecessary distractions.)
Back to the management style in the article, even though I could work somewhere with little or no regular verbal communication I know I would quickly find I absolutely despised it.
I've done long solo projects in the past with no real colleagues or technical leadership/reporting. I found it far less rewarding than being part of a team (although it was often more financially rewarding). I get that some people thrive on this kind of thing and I'm happy for them. Every so often I like to go deep on something but how long I can tolerate this for is becoming shorter and shorter as I get older. There's a big difference between going a full day or so in focus/flow mode to extending this for days/weeks/longer.
I used to seek out 1:1s with random people in the company. I'd join the "watercooler" video call a few times a week to just chat random stuff with random people. As for async comms, although we were all good at starting off with well thought out full initial message/question on Slack (not just a "hello" and then silence) many of these were better off resolved via a quick video call once it was clear that async wasn't the most efficient method. Pretending or hoping that everyone is so eloquent, clear and exact with their language that you can do everything async is just fantasy in my experience. If the question was raised in a channel (rather than a DM) then someone would go back and provide a brief summary so that anyone finding the initial conversation by search didn't just hit a "let's jump on a call" cliffhanger with no resolution. (Then the company grows big enough that Slack retention policies become a limiting factor.)
I've definitely worked with people who can work with little or no interaction but even in workplaces with a greater than average concentration of introverts and neuro-divergence such people (who can work like that) are in the great minority (again, IMHO). Most people work better with direct access to empathy, reassurance and even just someone to listen to them ranting. The trick is to find the right balance as too much communication can be stifling, but I'd rather be in that situation and working on dialing it back.
I think most people constantly try to adapt their setups based on every changing work/life requirements, plus also phases/trends of "lots of monitors" <-> "single big monitor", etc. There are random attempts to declutter or go minimalist. Less is more. But then more stuff comes (and maybe goes). Seasons bring extra lighting, a desk fan, a heater, etc.
I've worked in a variety of setups in both offices and at home.
Working for a startup I spent 18 months with 3 of us crammed into 2 normal desk widths. I think I had not much more than 60cm of desk for the whole of this time. The front portion of my desk was the keyboard and mouse and the back part of the desk was the desktop PC with monitor on top of it and a desk phone (2-4 hours a day spent on the phone to customers) to the right of that. Just enough space for a water bottle and/or coffee mug between the mouse and desk phone. I was disproportionately happy for the times when one or both of my colleagues either side of me went on PTO.
At some points I had a 90 minute commute (each way) by train and used that time to bash away at things on a Linux laptop. No chance of network connectivity on the move, this was the late 90s, the huge laptop (Toshiba Satellite things that were 50mm thick) could barely last the 90 minutes anyway. You made sure it was fully charged and that you'd downloaded everything you needed for the journey before you left home or the office. And you still took a book (or pen/paper) for the inevitable times you hadn't.
Other than this necessity it takes a lot for me to get into any kind of a flow if I'm not sat at a desk. I can't take my laptop and just sit on the sofa and do things, it just doesn't feel like "work". I'm hoping to get better at this though as I do envy people who are happy doing this.
For 18 months I worked in a classic cube farm in a corporate HQ in the US. Reasonably big cube with 6' high walls and U-shaped desk, so there was an easy way to have different zones for "laptop work", "paper work", and "other" (usually lunch _al desko_). It was nice having a little locker for hanging coats/etc, and a place for the internal/external mail to be delivered. The nearest window was probably 30 yards away from me and even then you really couldn't tell whether it was night or day. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was alone on our part of the floor or whether the other ~150 people were there.
My favourite office setup was back in the UK with a big L-shaped desk in an area with lots of glass partitions and windows. There were about 5 of us in the space that would usually be occupied by about 40 if they were trying to pack them in, but we were left to get on with things. It was deathly quiet too, which I loved. I had a view across South London and could see plenty of sky, buildings, trees and people.
My home offices have been OK but far from perfect. Too warm in the summer months given no aircon (I've got the sun beating down on my back right now), never too cold though. But never enough space. They've also always been a work in progress and never "right, that's all sorted" but I hope to get a bit closer to that with the next move.
I have GEB, TAoCP, Stevens, Crandall/Pomerance, Tannenbaum, Aho/Sethi/Ullman, Schneier, K&R and a bunch of other books on my shelves next to me. About 1000mm worth in total but I could probably trim it down to about 600mm if I stripped out the random extras related to old projects (Rails/JavaScript/Mysql/etc) or stuff you just don't need a book about (Git).
Putting them anywhere else in the house would either be more "showoff" or just less practical. It's true that I rarely ever pick them up but the few times I do I'm glad they're right next to my work desk.
I'm moving house soon. Still yet to work out the home office plans.
There's an area on the middle floor landing that could make an ideal little desk area.
It's something like 150cm wide (my existing desk is 140cm) and deep enough for my 70cm deep desk and existing chair. There is a window directly ahead. The only problem is isolation, there's no door to close things off (noise or distractions), but I may be able to make do with a heavy curtain and my existing noise cancelling headphones.
This would mean that the spare bedroom (which would usually be the home office) could be an alternative home office for myself or my wife, and more of a spare bedroom for visitors. Right now our existing spare bedroom is a dedicated office.
I'm going to use the article as inspiration for the spare bedroom and not just putting the desk up against the wall as I would usually do, but the planning depends on what size bed we can get in this room as well as a desk.
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