| 1 Jun 2025 |
 emily | I wonder if I can write to the EEPROM or something. | 13:04:26 |
 K900 | You usually can yes | 13:05:07 |
| K900 | As in they usually don't bother write protecting it | 13:05:16 |
| emily | "run a command", or "opening up the damn thing and attaching wires"? | 13:05:57 |
| emily | https://www.hitoha.moe/read-sfp-i2c-via-ch341a-programmer/ apparently "buy an off-the-shelf programmer and hook it up to the external interface" level of easy | 13:10:07 |
| emily | that's not so bad. | 13:10:10 |
| emily | so wait, is the idea of the Realtek "rollball" thing that you still use the MAC that's on the transceiver but the kernel gets to talk to it directly? | 13:13:17 |
| emily | which is different from a 2500BASE-X thing where you don't even use the transceiver's MAC and your SoC's MAC just talks to the PHY directly? | 13:13:32 |
| K900 | You can directly poke the i2c bus from Linux | 13:31:47 |
| emily | okay cool | 13:32:10 |
| emily | and I guess it can't brick the thing since I can always just restore? | 13:32:15 |
| K900 | Yes | 13:47:38 |
| emily | that seems promising then. | 13:49:12 |
 magic_rb | @emilazy:matrix.org once you figure this out ill actually be curious too, wanna get a openwrt switch so ill need smth i can put in it and 2.5 is a good speed for most things | 14:08:16 |
| K900 | OK great | 14:50:47 |
| K900 | I found more cursed knowledge | 14:50:52 |
| K900 | Turns out the Realtek kernel will spin up the SFP link in whatever way you have it configured | 14:51:29 |
| K900 | And if it doesn't get a link set up in a short enough time, it'll just try every other one | 14:51:44 |
| K900 | Until it finds one that works. | 14:51:49 |
| K900 | Which is probably a good idea | 14:52:00 |
| K900 | Except when you're trying to hack the OTHER END | 14:52:12 |
 50^2 | Oh wow what a magic discussion of low level programming. Something like this can't be found in AI🤪
I was having the idea the other day and I wanted to ask your opinion on it's feasibility and impact.
The proof of concept is to turn a smartphone into a crypto wallet, but for managing secrets in general.
Managing secrets is every programmer's headache, we could develop tooling for promoting secure workflows.
Would you find such a device useful in your practice? | 15:09:10 |
| 50^2 | * Oh wow what a magic discussion of low level programming. Something like this can't be found in AI🤪
I was having the idea the other day and I wanted to ask your opinion on it's feasibility and impact.
The proof of concept is to turn a smartphone into a crypto wallet, but for managing secrets in general.
Managing secrets is every programmer's headache, we could develop tooling for promoting secure workflows. A workflow would be "connect the device to the computer for singing (like git commits for example), store decide in a secure location when not needed"
Would you find such a device useful in your practice? | 15:12:02 |
| 50^2 | * Oh wow what a magic discussion of low level programming. Something like this can't be found in AI🤪
I was having the idea the other day and I wanted to ask your opinion on it's feasibility and impact.
The proof of concept is to turn a smartphone into a crypto wallet, but for managing secrets in general.
Managing secrets is every programmer's headache, we could develop tooling for promoting secure workflows. A workflow would be "connect the device to the computer for singing (like git commits for example), store the device in a secure location when not needed"
Would you find such a device useful in your practice? | 15:12:19 |
| magic_rb | Its called a yubikey | 15:24:35 |
| magic_rb | I wouldnt trust a smartphone with my secrets | 15:24:40 |
 ElvishJerricco | I warned you so many times lol | 15:37:43 |
 Hugo | I have been thinking about doing something similar with a Raspberry Pi. I am not sure whether a smartphone would make the wired communication between the two devices convenient.
My idea was a device to use for:
- password management, one-time-passwords, emulating a keyboard on the host PC
- SSH authentication (could be used as a "proxyjump")
- sign/decrypt files
Yubikeys are great, but the absence of display is a security trade-off.
| 15:35:50 |
| emily | well, AFAICT it's easier to find stuff that will eat 2.5GBASE-T and act as a 10G module | 15:37:56 |
| Hugo | You may also want to look into Ledger.com devices, they are designed for blockchain wallets but also support GPG and SSH, and have a built-in display in a small form factor. I tested using one for these purposes, and it worked fine. | 15:37:00 |
