Internet

I set up two Raspberry Pi SBCs with GPS boards as NTP servers earlier this year. I used an oscilloscope to see how far apart the “pulse per second” (PPS) pulses that the GPS boards output.

Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of

meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.

2025-11-29: Hacker News and Slashdot comparison for this post.

On Saturday, May 31, 2025 11:06:36 PM UTC, I submitted a link to the How often does my IP address change post on this blog to the famed “Hacker News” web site.

On Saturday, July 26, 2025 2:25:36 PM UTC, I submitted another link, this time to the 10 Lessons from Napoleon post on this blog to the same web site.

I signed up with Fathom Analytics for a few months to see what “web analytics” were, and how they are gathered.

My house has 2 CenturyLink fiber optic connections to The Internet. On July 5, 2025, the connections didn’t work for 3 periods of time.

I made two NTP servers using Raspberry Pi single-board computers and GPS receivers.

The resulting NTP servers seem to work well.

A couple of years ago, I made an attempt to create a NTP server using a GPS receiver. I failed.

I tried again in 2025, this time I succeeded.

In January 2025, I started monitoring my network with Smokeping.

I had previously noticed increased latency when a Velop router was connected via powerline ethernet. After upgrading it to OpenWrt, I put that particular Velop back on my network via a $20 TP-Link 8 port 1GbE router. I saw a much smaller increase in latency using the router versus a direct cabled connection.

Matt Sayar investigated how often his home’s IP address changed. I did the same, inspired by him. Thanks, Matt!

Install and configure LLDP on OpenWrt Linux