Ben Cartwright-Cox

New Blog! There is lots of RFC1918 space out there, yet most people use the same 10 /24 subnets I ended up having my OOB LAN collide with someone's home network a few weeks ago, and decided to find a new subnet to use that won't collide backed up with actual usage data!

On May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered some surprisingly disruptive behaviours with two major BGP implementations make up a lot of the internet. In a new blog post, I will dissect what that message was, and my thoughts on how it happened: blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/bgp-att...

After sitting on the decision for quite a while, bgp.tools will be switching away from posting updates on X. Users can follow this account, or the fedi account @bgptools@bgp.tools instead

New blog post! Ever wondered about the process that grants RFC numbers for documents? Well, worry no more, introducing: -- The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/rfc-in-...

Much like sisyphus is forced to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, I am now getting payback for buying cheap QLC SSDs that I am seemingly vaporising at the moment

It has been 0 days since someones Apple webcam "Reaction Effects" have triggered on a serious biz call

I've published a text version of my #37C3 lightning talk! "The browsers biggest TLS mistake" https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/browsers-biggest-tls-mistake

Happy xmas, see some of you soon at #37c3 (Bonus cat pic)

F👀D

I've got a lightning talk/rant coming up at #37C3! Hope to see you there: https://pretalx.c3voc.de/37c3-lightningtalks/talk/XGML8T/

*bangs hands on table* DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DAT-

As far as I can tell where the Grindavík (Iceland) eruption has surfaced, is around 13km (as the crow flies) from one of the larger data centres in Iceland... Must be some good disaster response emails going around at the moment!

Looks like Hetzner (24940) typo'd a BGP prepend (2490) when doing traffic engineering towards CoreBackBone (33891). Woops. It makes it look like Raytheon are upstreams when they are not! https://bgp.tools/prefix/95.216.0.0/16#connectivity

Finally got Office XP working, Look at this! WordArt never got better than this

Say hi to datacenter car park fox who was taking a break from the rain.

I like big cables and I cannot lie

Hm, so a small DLR station takes "only" 25kW to run, based on this emergency generator readout

We are so close to 1.7B Unix epoch

For some reason the Ceph dashboard is like a fish tank, I literally just keep staring at it. Especially right now as it's doing a transfer from the old storage machine to the new setup (for bgp.tools)

Ooooh, the 0th longitude laser is very visible tonight in London

My NANOG 89 talk on the internal operations of bgp.tools is up on youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83NJllv0q9U

My NANOG 89 version of my "Discovering flaws in BGP error handling" talk is now up on youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_VBehyNwqg

Graph improvements to bgp.tools! On the bgp.tools BGP propagation graphs there are now names attached to the network boxes to help faster comprehension. In addition, font profiles for the graphs have been normalised between Linux/Windows/Mac

Google maps appears to think I can walk on water?

Finally a interface perfect for the gentoo users out there

"why do we even have those on an aircraft carrier" (Taken on the USS Midway)

ah yes, IPv4 prices are coming back down, nature is healing

Bought a 7$ fidget toy while trying to find a C13 cable in the US

Can somebody check in with the BBC sports people to see if they're all right?

MySpace server deployment circa 2008, lifted from a last remaining bits of the [InfoQ](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/MySpace-Dan-Farino/) page about a talk done with them

oh cool, I can blog from this NX-OS device?? They really can do everything :P

``` RP/0/RP0/CPU0:Oct 10 14:36:02.877 UTC: appmgr[365]: %INFRA-APPMGR-2-DOCKER_DAEMON_STOP_FAILED : Unable to stop Docker daemon. ``` *sobs* why? why does the router chassis run docker

There is something really pretty about long exposures of the beach at night, especially how the waves merge into a mist and how the offshore wind generation glows in the night

Some pictures from coastal adventures last night, some of those subsea cable markers look better than others

So @jonty@chaos.social yesterday gave me this BT pay phone card in passing. I've only just realised that it expired in 1998 and I don't know how long these things normally lasted, but this might mean the card is very close to my own age...

Micro tube map tile?

Looks like we are not going to laser today

Ok finally, I just crunched the numbers on my mbox and I been sending email like I've never before in the last year or so. The side effects of running bgp.tools semi-full time !

My NLNOG Day 2023 talk recording is up! Called `BGP Error “Handling”`, this has been one of the few talks where I have re-watched it and had as much fun watching it as I had giving it! A welcome change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wMXEiFiueM

Ah yes the high voltage telephone jack

Not really the conference swag I was expecting, but I got to award the creativity ( still more useful than a fidget spinner )

Must be your lucky day, we still don't have a deb repo or any kind of auto updater so you have to keep installing debs from our website!

Ok, I now have a dedicated "repost to bluesky" button on my fediverse software. So this means I will now repost things from my fedi/honk to here. But don't expect me to see the replies!

They grow up so fast

Hello new bluesky followers, you should know: A) I'm planning to use this account soon for some API tests, so prepare to be bombed with random stuff B) I'm still posting on the fediverse by default (@benjojo@benjojo.co.uk), since no text limits and no visible post metrics is better for me

New blog post (in over a year!) Where I refuse to accept that a webcam that I remember from my childhood won't work anymore for Google Meet, and write a user space USB driver to bring it back from the obsolete dead: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/quickcam-usb-userspace-driver