| 17 Jun 2025 |
 Zhaofeng Li | well, they are cool and you can probably do some fancy filtering/rewriting even with a dumb switch | 15:57:03 |
 emily | I just don't know why you'd want mystery Linux running on a tiny little metal thing when you can run Linux on the thing it plugs into instead | 16:01:11 |
|  Autiboy joined the room. | 16:07:47 |
| Zhaofeng Li | so you can add some latency that mysteriously appears every other Saturday at 1am? 😈 apart from that, one actually useful thing I can think of is running tailscale on it to provide resilient OOB access to the switches/server IPMI/etc | 16:10:55 |
| Zhaofeng Li | there are some more ideas: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/smart-sfp-linux-inside | 16:11:08 |
| emily | it's an additional point of failure, right? I don't see how it's necessarily more resilient than what you'd run on the switch | 16:16:20 |
| Zhaofeng Li | well, not everyone has the luxury of having a Linux-capable (or Linux-accessible) switch | 16:19:32 |
| emily | a Linux-capable SFP+ is also its own even rarer luxury, right? :P | 16:20:30 |
| Zhaofeng Li | and the power situation is presumably better than a device plugged in separately? | 16:20:33 |
| Zhaofeng Li | well, rarer yes, but less expensive and disruptive to the existing infrastructure | 16:21:27 |
 raitobezarius | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
I just don't know why you'd want mystery Linux running on a tiny little metal thing when you can run Linux on the thing it plugs into instead coughs nefarious purposes | 16:35:17 |
 Charles | i'm reminded of this article i just saw like 10 minutes ago https://hackaday.com/2025/06/16/an-open-source-justification-for-usb-cable-paranoia/ | 17:07:14 |
| raitobezarius | In reply to @charles:computer.surgery
i'm reminded of this article i just saw like 10 minutes ago https://hackaday.com/2025/06/16/an-open-source-justification-for-usb-cable-paranoia/ https://shop.hak5.org/ | 18:02:30 |
