Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs
Sep 25 2025| blog.benjojo.co.uk
Ben's Blog| blog.benjojo.co.uk
The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) documents.| benjojo blog
Flexing the Windows RRAS BGP implementation At this point I am a bit of a BGP protocol implementation connoisseur thanks to| benjojo blog
Better IX network quality monitoring This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at the first NetUK. You can watch the talk on YouTube that was recorded by the wonderful AV team below if that’s your preferred medium:| benjojo blog
Sysadmin friendly high speed ethernet switching I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher| benjojo blog
Signed but not secure At the start of the year a very interesting (and some would say inevitable) event happened involving internet routing security, the first case study of a large-scale victim o| benjojo blog
Appreciation of automated IX Quarantine LAN testing Something that bgp.tools (my company) does a great deal is joining internet exchanges.| benjojo blog
The browsers biggest TLS mistake Much like a previous talk of mine at Chaos Computer Congress this blog post is a direct write-up of a talk, if you prefer to consume this kind| benjojo blog
Grave flaws in BGP Error handling Border Gateway Protocol is the de facto protocol that directs routing decisions between different ISP networks, and is generally known as the “glue”| benjojo blog
Driver adventures for a 1999 webcam We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frust| benjojo blog
Going multipath without Multipath TCP Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your compu| benjojo blog
LTO Tape data storage for Linux nerds Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long t| benjojo blog
Ghost in the ethernet optic A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of [SFP optic](https://en.wikiped| benjojo blog
One of these JPEGs is not like the other “JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file| benjojo blog
Imaging mounted disk volumes under duress Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infra| benjojo blog
Splitting the ping Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. It’s simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the f| benjojo blog
Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards This story, like another in the past, started as an eBay purchase that I wo| benjojo blog
Stressing the network when it’s already down [Impact by Eric Wienke, edits by Ben Cartwright-| benjojo blog
How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet Translations| benjojo blog
Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices Transl| benjojo blog
You cannot cURL under pressure cURL. The wonderful HTTP plumbing tool that powers both a lot of command line debugging and bash scripts, but also exists as a strong foundation in our applications in the form of libcurl.| benjojo blog
The year of RPKI on the control plane This post is a textual version of the talk I gave at NLNOG 2019, You can watch the recording of the talk on youtube below if that’s your preferred medium: <iframe width=“700” height=“328” src=“https://www.| benjojo blog
Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pac| benjojo blog
The speed of BGP network propagation| benjojo blog
What would a EvE online Internet look like? Translations a| benjojo blog
A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses Translations are available in: <a hre| benjojo blog
The state of RPKI: Q4 2018 In the fall I did a blog post and talk on RPKI about how the current methods of measuring RPKI deployment are broken because they do not take| benjojo blog
From VNC to reverse shell Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page| benjojo blog
Are BGPs security features working yet? Translations are a| benjojo blog
Building telemetry for tea aka Tealemetry As a British person, I admittedly conform to the stereotype of tea consumption, and giving I’ve been consuming tea for most of my life I have gained opinions on all kinds of tea based variables. The bigge| benjojo blog
The death of a TLD Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out. In the last week, ICANN removed the documentation| benjojo blog
Calling the world cup goals 5 seconds before they happen It’s that time again where once every 4 years people get very hyped over kicking a ball around a grass pitch, however this time my own country is actually doing pretty well! At the time of wr| benjojo blog
The ISPs sharing your DNS query data DNS is fundamental to how the web works, and for most of the population it’s completely transparent. Everything on the web is accessed by a DNS name. Since DNS is an old protocol ([November 1987 in fact](http| benjojo blog
x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (interactive) Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having cont| benjojo blog
Payments with less of the evil I hate card networks. Visa and MasterCard are a pair of companies that I feel definitely make the world a worse place to live in, due to the fact that they sit in front of a critical part of how modern society wo| benjojo blog
Playing battleships over BGP BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the| benjojo blog
Making art with SSH key randomart SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers. SSH| benjojo blog
Mapping the whole internet with Hilbert curves Translations are available in:| benjojo blog
Encoding data in dubstep drops [Warning: Those who can’t stand EDM/dubstep, oh boy do I have bad news for you in regards to this blog post] Dubstep songs are often criticized as sounding extremely computer generated and often just too aggressi| benjojo blog
Giving every Tor Hidden Service a IPv6 address Tor has a neat feature called Onion Services [(A)](https://web.archive.org/web/20180330000120/https://www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.h| benjojo blog
DNSFS. Store your files in others DNS resolver caches A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their m| benjojo blog
A surprising amount of people want to be in North Korea While the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea were/are currently beefing on Twitter about who should destroy the world first, North Korea was also causing me some pers| benjojo blog
Email delivery is stuck on IPv4 Generally speaking there is nothing that people want to talk about less than email delivery and for good reason, Email is continuously seen as one of those archaic protocols that everyone wants to improve but unfortu| benjojo blog
Traceroute Haiku’s Sometimes I like to think that I do “serious” blog posts like “The strange case of ICMP Type 69 on Linux” or [“Anycast possibly done better”](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post| benjojo blog
IP over AX.25 over 802.11 with ESP8266 I love obscure protocols, and while most of the world’s legacy X.25 equipment is slowly being shut down. It’s amateur radio derivative AX.25 is getting along pretty wel| benjojo blog
IPv6 anycast possibly done better Anycasting IP space has become quite a meme in the networking world in the last few years, with it being used sparsely in the past for UDP based services like DNS. Now it’s being used for TCP based services too,| benjojo blog
Building a legacy search engine for a legacy protocol Translations are availa| benjojo blog
Just how long do DNS resolvers cache last? I’m sure this has been done before, but you do hear stories from time to time where someone will either drop or increase their DNS TTL’s and either see a massive difference, or none at all. A lot of pro| benjojo blog
Monitoring SNMP less devices with ease In the consumer world you will likely encounter networking devices that don’t have a easy way to poll for their network stats, or in some cases you hate <abbr style=“border-bottom: 1px dotted green;” title=“S| benjojo blog
Ludicrously cheap HDMI capture for Linux Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as o| benjojo blog
TOTP SSH port fluxing Some people change their SSH port on their servers so that it is slightly harder to find for bots or other nasties and while that is generally viewed as an action of [security through obscurity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S| benjojo blog
I may be the only evil (bit) user on the internet Almost every year a joke RFC is made on April 1st (these have caught on so well, that it’s now common to see more than one of these every year| benjojo blog
The strange case of ICMP Type 69 on Linux I run collectd stats on many of my servers and one thing I enable on some (but not all) of the| benjojo blog
robots.txt usage over the Alexa million If you ever had to deal with bots while running a site you will have at least at some point looked into robots.txt, a system that isn’t rea| benjojo blog
Propagation slow? Sound the alarms! This is a blog post that I had written for my employer CloudFlare You can find the full link here CloudFlare operates a| benjojo blog
YAMware Old Malware can still be fun! (Side note, this blog post was written and then forgotten about quite a while ago, So I’ve finished it off, it was halfway done.) While on holiday in the evenings with downtime to spare, I had realised that| benjojo blog
Detecting anycast addresses and more Anycast networks are a pretty interesting way to fix quite a few issues with networked services that involve needing global spread. One of the interesting things is that a computer cannot really tell (unless it| benjojo blog
A peek into the USM format A game that I really liked the visuals off, Crysis 3 uses a video file format called USM, This is a rather odd to me, since when I am used to pulling games apart for their assets, I am used to BINK video being used for th| benjojo blog
Reverse Proxy + Cache for Minecraft One of the things that I like to play from time to time is Minecraft, however one of things ( at least with me this is ) is that Minecraft is best played with other people, This however means you have to go throu| benjojo blog
MITM’ing TLS/SSL for debugging purposes From time to time you may want to debug TLS, Now this is not as easy as you might think, Because of the nature of TLS, you don’t really want to have anyone (even if they technically may have the key on the se| benjojo blog
Thoughts on GitHub streaking Thought it might be a good idea to brain dump on my thoughts of “Write Code Everyday” and more to the point the [github challenge](http://ryanseys.com/blog/177-days-of-gith| benjojo blog
Mumble: A referral was returned from the server. You may get A referral was returned from the server. when launching Digitally signed applications like Mumble on windows. This is normally caused by the Digital Signature expiring. You can check| benjojo blog
Lessons from APL, a “lost” language A few weeks back the forum that I go on often held a obfuscation challenge, and people joked around about submitting a entry that was coded in APL. APL (A Programming Language) is a programming language that w| benjojo blog
NPM build error NPM has a bunch of useful stuff on it, however you could in life while using NPM get this: stack Error: "pre" versions of node cannot be installed, use the --node dir flag instead This error basically says “Give me the node| benjojo blog
Dealing with MySQL resource shortage You may in life while working with mysql get the following errors: ERROR 1016 (HY000) at line 1: Can't open file: './blah/table.frm' (errno: 24) or ``` SQL Error (23): Out of resources when o| benjojo blog
Super Easy Twitter Bots I often get really quite mad ideas on writing twitter bots, But I often get pretty bored of doing all of the boiler plate that is required when wanting to achieve these things. The typical process to making a twitter bot| benjojo blog
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