Reubachi
Born on March 05, 2020•498 Karma
The amount of time required to terminate a copper cable in the field is seconds, and felt a bit like art. Something about the way it reliably reacted was magical and felt "strong."
Terminating or splicing a fibre cable felt like wrestling a snake covered in melted crayons, and the failure rate was significantly higher across the board. And it wasn't just workmanship, but quality of product, terminating environment, available equipment, misuse by future operators etc.
That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned. Though, maybe part of our willingness to push fibre came from knowing that most purchasers would in 1-2 years call us back in to replace the rack terminations with copper :)
First there is the BASE-T RJ45 stuff, which it sounds like you might have been working with. At 10G or higher speeds this get relatively power hungry and is not really an advantage over fiber unless you are also delivering PoE or are trying to reuse existing cabling.
This type (DAC) is a special type of pre-made cable assembly which eschews much of the advanced signalling/conversion logic. The upside is the power usage is low (often even lower than fiber) and the cost is dirt cheap. The downside is the lengths are much more limited and it's intended to be preterminated SFP-to-SFP (or the like) cable assemblies instead of modular patching/custom built.
There is indeed a latency difference, usually DAC < fiber < BASE-T, but they are all within a few microseconds (not milliseconds) of each other so you really have to be pressed to care about it (to the point you're looking at specialized low latency switches and paying extra to lay things out in a way which minimizes the number of L2 hops rather than the cost).
I wonder why nobody's making field-terminatable DACs for custom lengths. If you've torn one down, they're not exactly complicated inside.
If they existed, would people buy them?
DAC cables have a limited length range. It's not like 10GBASE-T where you can run the cable hundreds of feet and then put a connector on exactly where you need it. The cables only work at short distances so it's easy to stock the cable sizes close enough to everyone's needs.
For passive DACs the range of lengths is so low you can just get away with having 2 or 3 different lengths on hand and never need to worry about it. Active DACs start to be too much to bother with again.
Fiber it's possible, but again really only because you can go kilometers with it rather than because people want to make short patch cables themselves.
In the field its the armoured fibre on a reel, 100m, 200m, 500m etc, with opticon connectors, or some normal cat5 typically for APs
Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.
Why not ?
This article is about Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables which are not something you can field terminate. They use twinax copper and have special modules on the end.
You are thinking about standard RJ45 terminated cabling for 1GBASE-T or 10GBASE-T, which is a different.
> That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned.
Direct Attach Copper has slightly lower latency than fiber, but the difference is negligible. Both have significantly better latency than 10GBASE-T through twisted pair cabling.
I had IT company recommend to me a bunch of fiber cables for a cleanup I was doing. They had about 20 or 30 laser modules we would need, and however much fiber.
When they asked why I planned on doing copper, I told him because each run is three fucking feet.
I’m not sure if they just didn’t realize that’s not what fiber is for or they didn’t know that DAC existed.
1. The copper cables discussed in the article are not field terminable. And if they were, they'd be a pain in the ass.
2. Terminating fiber used to be a pain, but is now pretty easy with the right tools, fuser, and someone with basic training. Even cheap fusers do the job with very low failure rates. They now have so-called "knuckle draggers" terminating fiber.
Copper bundles get real thick, real fast: I ran an OneFS cluster for many years, and we had >50 nodes, and all the cables (each node dual-connected) ran to two central switches for backend replications. Rat's nest.
I was very happy when Isilon started officially supporting active optical cable (AOC) on the backend. Really helped with airflow and keeping things tidy.
I have never heard of the possibility to field-assemble DAC cables. Usually that's when you switch to fiber
The American economy and larger global investment market/rigging is ...speculative and a sham. And it's no longer the 80's/90s, the US is falling behind in most emerging fields of science, standards of living, political freedom etc.
Worse, we all take part in it with employment, 401k etc.
So....who better to distract everyone from that stark reality, than a reality TV criminal! He's perfectly equipped to stir up tension over....erm...greenland....to distract from the obvious (multiple) crashes coming.
There are currently 180 million and change active issued passport to US citizens.
Which of course isn't an antithesis to the lack of snow in the west, and likely is literally the flip side of the "same problem". but interesting
"2002" New York Times, everyone.
Props to afroman for his perfect demeanor/attitude during all this.
If you can spot a typo in the first few seconds of reading a piece, so can the editor and sub-editor before it's published.
I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."
Sometimes this results in radical changes to a piece within hours of publication - yesterday for instance the BBC ran a piece headlined something like “I watched my father murder my mother”, and six hours later in slides an editorial correction saying “she did not, in fact, see her father murder her mother. She was asleep in another room at the time.”
Wether insurance went after those people for the claims or police, it certainly helped me there.
Same is said for dash cameras. It is in 99 percent of scenarios for "set and forget" not for some malicious anti-neighbor behavior
What do you feel is the benefit to the community for this that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions?
I ask not out of malice, I ask because 2 reasons: 1. I imagine spending time on this/it's working well required you to see the value/benefit to it. 2. We must assume all hacker news commenting follows the rules, IE; good faith comment with relevant experience when required. This seems like a way to promote getting around that.
I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
There is no “native blocking” on HN. You cannot block a user or hide their comments and submissions in perpetuity. You can only hide on a per-story basis.
working in dry extreme cold is infinitely worse than balmy 35f. One because in both scenarios moving snow/moisute out is required regardless of temps for working safety, and two because dexterity is gone at the lower temps/layering becomes inhibitive to work.
Ie; I'd rather work in a rain/snowcoat and be able to use my hands to get back inside quicker, than to work 8 hours outside in the "Clear/dry" extreme cold.
Not useful for snow as you'll quickly be swimming and out of propane