Flawed routers flood University of Wisconsin internet time server (2003)

7 hours ago (pages.cs.wisc.edu)

  > Are incidents such as this a likely side-effect of ubiquitous, low-cost, perhaps even disposable Internet hosts?

The whole write-up is excellent. I was already impressed by the author, but the prescience of this comment... wow.

It struck me how much more useful information the graphs and diagrams here provide over their flashier counterparts you commonly see today.

The old-fashioned aesthetic almost feels like a cue what I'm looking at won't be slop.

  • Some of these charts are made using rrdtool:

    https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

    rrdtool is still used widely today by projects like Munin, LibreNMS and Collectd.

    • ISP operations/back-end systems perspective, there's indeed tons of RRA files out there still getting charts drawn based off them with rrdtool, but increasingly everyone is trying to store metrics in things like influxdb and draw them using grafana. Or similar. Even Cacti, a truly old and crufty thing that's been around for a long time has migrated to drawing charts as SVGs.

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  • Don't worry, I'm sure we can teach a slop generator how to emulate this style. LLMs already know how to use rrttool and mrtg! Coming soon to an Internet near you, faux-historical slop writeups.