Overcomplicated hardware
Jan. 11th, 2017 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcDevices these days are often feature-packed. For me this is often a disadvantage: there is more to go wrong. At the most basic level, the more complex the firmware is, the more buggy it probably is.
I recall a decade or so ago dealing with a D-Link ethernet router that, in doing its NAT and similar, weirdly broke DNS queries such that their latency was high. In general, reliability is an issue: even for simple devices such as a cheap unmanaged ethernet switch I have seen them fail in odd ways, e.g., to stop routing between certain pairs of hosts until power-cycled. I shudder to think of the failure modes of managed network hardware but I suspect that the low reliability of some institutions' IT infrastructure arises from not being composed of simple devices.
These days I am noticing that simple consumer network hardware no longer exists. It is hard to find a cheap DSL-to-ethernet modem or whatever, they have to come with all manner of higher-layer features with routing and whatnot that all need turning off. Such is the nature of progress. For higher-level networking my current preference is to use OpenBSD's pf and its kin.
It will be interesting when we next need to buy a television. British ones are probably full of Freeview decoders and whatnot. I may just have to find myself a large high-brightness computer monitor instead.
I recall a decade or so ago dealing with a D-Link ethernet router that, in doing its NAT and similar, weirdly broke DNS queries such that their latency was high. In general, reliability is an issue: even for simple devices such as a cheap unmanaged ethernet switch I have seen them fail in odd ways, e.g., to stop routing between certain pairs of hosts until power-cycled. I shudder to think of the failure modes of managed network hardware but I suspect that the low reliability of some institutions' IT infrastructure arises from not being composed of simple devices.
These days I am noticing that simple consumer network hardware no longer exists. It is hard to find a cheap DSL-to-ethernet modem or whatever, they have to come with all manner of higher-layer features with routing and whatnot that all need turning off. Such is the nature of progress. For higher-level networking my current preference is to use OpenBSD's pf and its kin.
It will be interesting when we next need to buy a television. British ones are probably full of Freeview decoders and whatnot. I may just have to find myself a large high-brightness computer monitor instead.
