December 21st marked the winter solstice: the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Then as spring arrives, we reach equilibrium again. Summer follows bringing its own shift towards the longest day of the year before autumn brings it back to equilibrium. And the cycle continues. I think we can find something profound in something as granted as the stable cycle of the seasons. Understanding cycles can be more than just poetic contemplation. ...
Setting up a lab for Network Traffic Analysis is one of those projects that has been floating around my list of things to do. It feels like such a useful and genuinely insightful look into the connections that a computer interacts with throughout every day. Being able to log, analyze, raise alerts and subsequently automate analysis and even take informed proactive action on a system based on the data; these are skills that feel infinitely valuable for any system exposed to the Internet or a Local Area Network. ...
I bought a new NVMe drive and decided this was as good a time as any to actually understand what I was doing instead of just copying commands from Stack Overflow until something worked. Here鈥檚 what I learned about block devices, partition tables, and why everyone still pretends sectors are 512 bytes when they haven鈥檛 been for years. Finding the Drive First step: figure out where the hell the new drive actually is. ...