Interesting subject - but I found myself pretty quickly lost in the technica terms. I do not even know what an NTP server is.
I do agree the article could have been much improved by adding a sentence that defined what an NTP server was upfront.
The Internet of Unprofitable Things
31–40 of 129 posts
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#32Good a place as any to mention my short story
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=49308245
possibly the only work of fiction ever inspired by NTP, IoT and cryptographic protocols.
This struggle with embedded ip address seems to echo this part of my story, "These hastily made things flooded the market and soon replaced other well-documented things. At times something failed and its inventors could not say why, they just assembled a new one or went bankrupt."
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#33Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
... There were gifs?? I guess I'm so used to useless ads and graphics in blog posts, I honestly, scout's honour, did not notice and have no recollection whatsoever! A damning statement on the Internet of today perhaps, but it neither enhanced nor detrimented my reading of the article ️
Same here, I don’t even remember there being any images!
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#34Good on the author for playing nice with them. Hardcoding IPs for any purpose is a bad idea, this is literally the reason DNS exists.
I don't think that was really the main problem in this case. Hardcoding any address (DNS or IP) that you do not control is always a horrible idea.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#351. 70 GBP/hr seemed like a low rate for a consultant (what’s an electrician or a plumber cost on a subscription contract?). I’m glad author doubled it. What happened to NetThing’s customers after they ceased trading? Who took over the lighting management of the car parks etc. ?
Presumably the customers were SoL. That’s the problem with everything being run “in the cloud.”
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#36Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
The writing style, yes. The gifs, not really.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#37Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
The writing was good, but I honestly found the gifs as irritating as ads. They were just irrelevant meme content, and were just extra crap to scroll past.
Keep writing, it was an excellent post, but only include pictures if they are relevant.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#38Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort.
As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux IoT devices, including open source / non-paying users.
We've built the open source balenaOS[1] and the (newly) open sourced openBalena[2][3] management server that anyone can use without paying us a penny. If you're about to manufacture a fleet of linux devices, and are about to put them out there, and don't want to pay for a service (so you're not using balenaCloud) but also don't want to solve problems we've spent years already finetuning, (such as ntp, dns, cellular modem support, read-only filesystem, host updates, etc etc) use the above projects and save yourself a mountain of pain in the ensuing years.
I hate being alarmist, but working with device fleets over the last 7 years, I've seen things you wouldn't believe. I've seen devices catch on fire, drown in storms, launch DDoS attacks, and everything in between. It's incredibly hard to underestimate how bad things can get when you put your devices out there with no ability to find them and update them if push comes to shove.
[1] balenaOS: https://www.balena.io/os/ [2] openBalena: https://www.balena.io/open/ [3] openBalena github: https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#39Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
I found that the gifs added to the article’s entertainment value. I’d find them annoying if used in a more serious article, though.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#40Interesting subject - but I found myself pretty quickly lost in the technica terms. I do not even know what an NTP server is.
You don't actually need to know what NTP is to enjoy this story. I knew I had heard of NTP but had forgotten about it. But it ends in P so it must be some protocol or other, right? Just create a variable in your mind called $protocol and keep reading. It could just as easily be Zuqwatny Protocol at that point for all I care.
That said, I went and looked it up after. Because that's what you do.