Lifelong Labour member, always fighting against the Tories and all those who’d prefer we lose.

Enterprise architect, Linux nerd, politico, street photographer, stationery dork. Opposed to the corporate web, deeply pessimistic about the future as democracy, diplomacy, and the rule of law decline, and perpetually cynical.

Sceptic with little tolerance for anti-scientific and anti-intellectual bullshit.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 6th, 2022

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  • @Lemjukes @Sunny It’s a KVM that you access over IP. It’s physically plugged into a machine’s HDMI and USB ports so, unlike software solutions, it can be used to access the BIOS/UEFI and system functions prior to hitting the desktop (like login managers and recovery consoles), and allows you to boot other operating systems and the like. It can also act as a PXE host for loading disk images, issue Wake On LAN to its connected machine, and likely a bunch of other convenience functions.



  • @Moneo @SigHunter Networking came to be when there were lots of different implementations of a ‘byte’. The PDP-10 was prevalent at the time the internet was being developed for example, which supported variable byte lengths of up to 36-bits per byte.

    Network protocols had to support every device regardless of its byte size, so protocol specifications settled on bits as the lowest common unit size, while referring to 8-bit fields as ‘octets’ before 8-bit became the de facto standard byte length.