Arista serial number date code aaron.axvig Thu, 07/16/2026 - 13:41 There doesn't appear to be any information online about Arista serial numbers containing the date of manufacture. Extreme, Cisco, and APC are examples of ones I have seen well-discussed online. After analyzing a fleet of ~100 Arista switches I am reasonably certain that the date is in the serial number in a manner quite similar to…
The obscuring of Palo Alto firewall interface error counters aaron.axvig Thu, 04/09/2026 - 13:52 On some older Palo Alto firewalls such as a PA-3250, the command show counter interface ethernet1/13 will show over 100 "Detailed physical port counters read from MAC". I have firsthand experience that some of these counters will increment for cable issues while nothing shows up in the summary RX or TX…
The Stars, Like Dust by Isaac Asimov aaron.axvig Sun, 03/01/2026 - 21:51 Rating Enjoyed Completion status Complete Date completed 5 months 1 week ago Pretty good old-school sci-fi. Nice plot twists to wrap it up.
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells aaron.axvig Fri, 02/13/2026 - 20:28 Rating Enjoyed Completion status Complete Date completed 5 months 3 weeks ago Number two in the Murderbot series. I like the short format. I have been watching the TV show too and enjoying it--7 episodes into the first season.
LLM-assisted websites may be the next Microsoft Access aaron.axvig Tue, 02/03/2026 - 08:54 Microsoft Access was a great (in some ways) tool that allowed people to create CRUD apps. Very useful for business, and some computer aficionados even dabbled for their personal use. The use of Access faded over time for various reasons. Later versions tried to bridge the gap to web apps. Now we have LLM…
Archive tree Drupal module aaron.axvig Sat, 01/24/2026 - 21:05 It was nice to get my shiny new theme mostly figured out last week. The blog is more mine than it has ever been. The thing that I wanted next was a way to browse posts from the archive, by year and month. I recall trying this a few years back, finding it difficult, and giving up. I tried again for a few hours over a few days recently,…
Benchmarking this Drupal server aaron.axvig Wed, 01/21/2026 - 21:22 I wanted to see what my mostly stock Drupal server was capable of. For this first test I am starting with a simple homepage load. I used the ab tool (Apache Bench). It couldn't be simpler! But it only downloads the HTML, not the rest of the assets. Here is one page load: user@hostname:~/$ ab -n 1 -c 1 https://aaron.axvigs.com/…
All Systems Red by Martha Wells aaron.axvig Mon, 01/19/2026 - 22:15 Rating OK Completion status Complete Date completed 7 months 2 weeks ago Decent enough to get me to read the next one in the series. I would say more but I finished it about a month ago so the memories are fading. Also as usual I read it in 15 minute chunks as I was falling asleep.
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson aaron.axvig Mon, 01/19/2026 - 21:34 Rating Enjoyed Completion status Complete Date completed 6 months 4 weeks ago An enjoyable book with some interesting action. It is lacking in grand sci-fi concepts other than the sulfur stuff, which I thought for sure was going to be a cargo ship loaded with iron filings based on some commentary I had seen before reading.…
TT-RSS to FreshRSS aaron.axvig Wed, 01/14/2026 - 14:24 Since 2019 I have been running TT-RSS. I started with it on a small Digital Ocean node as I was living on a sailboat at the time. Once I had a house and ISP in 2021 it became one of ~10 VMs that I ran on an old laptop via Debian KVM/QEMU, and a couple years later when I started ramping up my Proxmox cluster and things moved over there. Also of…