jeffrallen

Born on April 03, 2018•3079 Karma

13 hours ago

•on: What Is a Direct Attach Copper (DAC) Cable? (2021)

Nope. For production, you want to reduce risk and variation. DACs are already available in about 5 sizes up to the max 7m length, why would you terminate any other size in the field?

iso1631•

12 hours ago

I did spec a couple of 7m dacs a few months ago to run between two adjacent bays, but normally for more than 2m I'll just drop a SM sfp and run a preterminated fibre cable.

In the field its the armoured fibre on a reel, 100m, 200m, 500m etc, with opticon connectors, or some normal cat5 typically for APs

bobdvb•

11 hours ago

Some network guys I know prefer fibre even within the rack, just because they don't want the weight and the obstructions in the rack. Apparently more than once the weight of the DACs and the bulk of the cable bundle has caused a problem with NICs.

Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.

mwpmaybe•

10 hours ago

If you start doing bonded links with DACs or if you have a bunch of servers, the cable management situation gets ugly in a hurry, and the usual solutions like patch panels and keystones aren't applicable. Source: my basement

ragall•

42 minutes ago

> the usual solutions like patch panels and keystones aren't applicable

Why not ?

wmf•

4 hours ago

Support brackets would be 10x cheaper than fiber.

buildbot•

11 hours ago

Yep, I did this for my little DGx spark cluster because 100-200gb copper cables are very thick, heavy, and annoying.

jeffrallen•

13 hours ago

•on: What Is a Direct Attach Copper (DAC) Cable? (2021)

Too bad they didn't mention that while the cable is direct attach, the ends each have an EEPROM in them saying what the cable is. This EEPROM can be a source of immense frustration, if it's got the wrong data in it, or if both ends do not agree.

83•

12 hours ago

This should be higher up for anyone considering DACs for homelab use. I had a lot of issues due to this when mixing Aruba switches with Intel nics in my rack. Ended up going to fiber and SFPs.

jeffrallen•

16 hours ago

•on: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

I just told a colleague no to a new dashboard she was proposing. In the process of explaining why, we realized that the automated system had a new interesting edge case that we could program it to investigate automatically and report - the same thing she wanted the dashboard for.

A no that turns into a yes is the best kind of no.

jeffrallen•

2 days ago

•on: Magnifica Humanitas

It would be better on the original latin.

jeffrallen•

3 days ago

•on: Greg Brockman interview [video]

Or when sociopaths are in charge, and the board tries to fix that, but other sociopaths work together to overrule the board. (And wtf is that anyway, overriding the board? Why do we even have boards of directors if rich, powerful assholes can just do whatever they want?)

sumedh•

3 days ago

> and the board tries to fix that

The board didnt have the maturity to fix that.

jeffrallen•

3 days ago

•on: Time to talk about my writerdeck

Wonder if Lynx can connect to ChatGPT.

jeffrallen•

6 days ago

•on: BBEdit 16

Me neither. But I will speak evil of evil-mode. That's just plain evil.