u/NotEvenNothing

After about a year of hell getting a couple products released, along with the regular grind, I had a day to catch up on house-keeping. This included updating our FreePBX server. That went like this:

Man, it has been a long time since I did this. That's strange. There are no updates to apply. That doesn't seem right. I wonder if I have to do a major update... Well, look at that. I missed the entire version 16 release. They are well onto 17 now.

In looking into this a bit, it seems like it is going to be a fun move. I get it. Backup. Set up FreePBX on a new server. Restore. But we are running FreePBX on a Vultr instance, which sort of makes me choose between keeping the IP address and blowing away my existing server, or creating a server with a new IP address and dealing with the consequences of restoring a backup to a server with a different IP address that my SIP provider knows nothing about.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the right way to go on this.

Looking at some of the comments about version 17 shortly after its release, at least it looks like I will have avoided its early release growing pains.

So I've been surprised how many folk come here to climate-deny of late. If anyone posts or comments anything pro-renewable, nuclear-critical, or fossil fuel critical, they get a comment to the contrary. Almost universally, those replies are from users that hide their posting and comment history.

Now, it is easy enough to use non-Reddit tools to see any user's Reddit history, and what I generally see is one of three patterns:

1. A tightly focussed pattern of anti-renewable, pro-nuclear, or fossil fuel positive comments.
2. A mixture of low-effort posts all over the place, in all kinds of sub-Reddits, in addition to 1.
3. The user is clearly promoting a particular company in a particular industry, sometimes in the green sector.

It seems like AIs, paid actors, and zealotry are involved. Zealots are pretty easy to clock, as are the paid actors, but the AIs are getting harder. And even if you can categorize the user, what do you do with that other than call them out and ignore them?

I'd like to support the moderators in their efforts to keep this sub relevant and useful, but it seems like AI is going to make their job nearly impossible in a hurry.

Anyways, I'm just curious what others are thinking, and fully expect a lot of comments from those that clearly aren't capable of thought.

So we periodically poke around our network just to see if there is anything interesting going on. This morning, I thought I would look at what the counts for Tx Drop were on a few interfaces connected to known workstations. I started clicking interfaces for designated ports at random and the few that I looked at had 0 for Tx Drop. That was good to see.

There is this one guy who's workstation, a couple of weeks ago, behaved like someone yanked the Ethernet cord for five seconds then plugged it in. I look up his MAC address, look up the port he's on in the bridge, and open up the interface. He has a 1691 for Tx Drop.

That doesn't seem good.

Then I check out this one fellow that is constantly streaming music from his home computer. His Tx Drop is around 80 million. I check out the interface that my workstation uses. Tx Drop is around 700k.

So now I'm not sure what any of this means.

I would think that Tx Drop is only impacted if a packet is dropped between my workstation and the router, not between the router and wherever on the greater internet.

Am I wrong?

What can I conclude from a large and/or growing value for Tx Drop on an interface?