Category: Fun Stuff

Only a portion of the “172” and the “192” address ranges are designated for private use. The remaining addresses are “public,” and routable on the global Internet.

From: https://www.arin.net/knowledge/address_filters.html

In August 2012, ARIN began allocating “172” address space to internet service, wireless and content providers. There have been reports from the community that many network operators are denying access to devices having IP addresses from within the entire  172 /8 range. As a result, any device with a 172.x.x.x IP address may have difficulty reaching some sites on the global Internet. The only way to solve this problem is for those operators to reconfigure their router or firewall access control and filter only address space from the 172.16.0.0 /12 range.

 

Google released some pictures of inside their datacenters. We found two things interesting from this:

• They’re using tapes for backup. A lot of them: large robotic libraries with what appears to be LTO tapes. Our LTO autoloader is only 8-slots. They work the same though, but you can walk inside of theirs.

• Fire suppression is “highly-pressurized water” that’s been cleaned and treated in case it ever has to be used. In the past some datacenters started trending towards alternative forms of fire suppression such as CO2 or clean agents like Novec, FM200, Sapphire, etc. However, this trend is reversing with many modern datacenters favoring traditional fire sprinklers. Interlocking systems all but eliminate accidents, and unlike in the movies real world glass bulb sprinkler heads trigger individually. If we had to guess it’s because the cost to benefit – including maintenance – wasn’t worth it. Clean agent systems to cover the large spaces as shown are extremely expensive.

Check out the pictures at google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/ if you haven’t seen them yet.

UPDATE: it turns out at least one of these pictures was faked for whatever reason; others are possibly not as accurate as they claim to be.

Congratulations to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team for a successful landing of the rover “Curiosity” on Mars.

The left image is the front hazcam with the shadow of the rover on the surface of Mars, while the right image is the rear hazcam with a wheel and the horizon the distance.

The weather camera was moved to a more south-east facing direction. The original intent was to be able to see Mt. Rose, but we were tired of basically staring at the trees across the street. With this adjustment the camera is now looking across the approach for runways 34 R/L at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport (RNO) so you my occasionally get to see an airplane or C-130 from the 152d Airlift Wing, if you’re in to that sort of thing.