https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Nick_Benardini

James Nick Benardini is an American microbiologist who serves as the 8th and current Planetary Protection Officer for NASA since 2021.

https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection

Planetary Protection

Planetary Protection is the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other solar system bodies. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection promotes the responsible exploration of the solar system by implementing and developing efforts that protect the science, explored environments and Earth.

NASA’s Planetary Protection policies and requirements ensure safe and verifiable scientific exploration for extraterrestrial life. The main objectives are to

• Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists.
• Rigorously preclude backward contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial life or bioactive molecules in returned samples from habitable worlds in order to prevent potentially harmful consequences for humans and the Earth’s biosphere.

Context for the uninitiated: in video games in the Legend of Zelda series, there are chickens roaming around. One can normally attack them, and while it doesn’t kill them, they do act upset. However, if one keeps attacking long enough, a flock of chickens will fly in and start attacking the player’s character.

Not happening until after the next Elder Scrolls game is out.

Yup!

Yes this works when I’m having issues.

Okay, gotcha. In that case, my guess is that the most-likely issue is with the DNS daemon that OpenWRT is using, which is most-likely dnsmasq.

You could confirm that your DNS configuration on the LAN hosts is actually using OpenWRT as the DNS server if you wanted — I could walk through that, if you’re not sure. But from a test-when-it’s-happening situation, I’d probably:

• Install dig on the Mint box, if it’s not already installed. That’s a DNS diagnostic program that doesn’t use your system resolving mechanism, talks directly to DNS, so it cuts out any other factors. It’ll be in the bind9-dnsutils package.

    $ sudo apt install bind9-dnsutils
  

• Install dig on the OpenWRT box.

    $ opkg update
    $ opkg install bind-dig
  

• Confirm that you can successfully run it on both the OpenWrt box and your laptop when there are no problems (your router’s LAN address probably being something like 192.168.1.1):

    $ dig @your-router-LAN-address www.google.com
  

• Confirm that you can successfully run it on both the OpenWrt box and your laptop when there are no problems using whatever outside DNS server you have the OpenWrt box set to use (assuming 1.1.1.1 here):

    $ dig @1.1.1.1 www.google.com
  

• Next time you have problems, repeat the above. If both the dig on your OpenWrt box and on your laptop using the OpenWrt DNS server now fail, then it’s probably pretty safe to say that it’s the DNS server on the OpenWrt box at fault. If just the one on your laptop fails, then it’s going to be a communication issue between your LAN box and the OpenWrt DNS server.

Assuming that the problem is the OpenWrt DNS server, and assuming that it’s dnsmasq, to troubleshoot further, I might try looking at its logs, or installing tcpdump on the OpenWrt box and running that, something like $ tcpdump -nvvv -i any udp port domain. That should let you see both the incoming DNS queries going to the OpenWrt DNS server as well as the queries that it is sending upstream (the -n will prevent tcpdump from itself sending DNS queries to look up IP addresses, which would generate more noise, the -vvv to show all possible information about the packets, and the -i any to show all packets on all interfaces). That’ll let you see whether it’s getting flooded with DNS queries and to see what queries it’s sending to the upstream DNS server out on the Internet.

That won’t alone solve your problem, but it’d be the next step I’d try to narrow down what’s going on.

What if the cat is born on a Norwegian-flagged ship in Italian territorial waters?

I am still having a gaming rig here with rx6900xt as well but way too big to get it wife approved into the living room and have no man cave to run it 24/7.

It’s pretty trivial to make use of an LLM compute box remotely; in fact, most of the software out there is designed around doing this, since lots of people use cloud-based LLM compute machines. I use the Framework Desktop in this fashion — I leave it headless, just as an LLM compute node for whatever machine is running software that needs number-crunching done. So if your gaming machine is fine for you in terms of compute capability, you might want to just use it remotely from the living room with another machine being in the living room.

Another benefit of sticking the compute box elsewhere is that while my Framework Desktop is very quiet (single large fan, about 120W TDP, and is notable for being rather quieter than other AI Max-based systems), keeping my 7900 XTX loaded will spin up the fans. You may not want to have a heavy-duty number-crunching machine in the living room from a noise standpoint.

!locallama@sh.itjust.works.

@localllama@sh.itjust.works would be a user named “localllama” rather than a community named “localllama”.

I use a 128GB Framework Desktop. Back when I got it, it was $2,500 with 8TB of SSD storage, but the RAM shortage has driven prices up to substantially more. That system’s interesting in that you can tell Linux to use essentially all of the memory as video memory; it has an APU with unified memory, so the GPU can access all that memory.

That’ll get you 70B models like llama 3-based stuff at Q6_K with 128K of context window, which is the model max. Speeds with that level of model are okay for chatbot-like operation, but you won’t want to run code generation with that.

For some tasks, you may be better-off using a higher-bandwidth-but-less-memory video card and an MoE model; this doesn’t keep all of the model active and in video memory, only loading relevant expert models. I can’t suggest much there, as I’ve spent less time with that.

If you don’t care about speed — you probably do — you can run just about anything with llama.cpp using the CPU and main memory, as long as you have enough memory. That might be useful if you just want to evaluate the quality of a given model’s output, if you want to get a feel for what you can get out of a given model before buying hardware.

You might want to ask on !localllama@sh.itjust.works, as there’ll be more people familiar there (though I’m not on there myself).

EDIT: I also have a 24GB Radeon 7900 XTX, but for LLM stuff like llama.cpp, I found the lack of memory to be too constraining. It does have higher memory bandwidth, so for models that fit, it’s faster than the Framework Desktop. In my experience, discrete GPUs were more interesting for image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion — most open-weight image diffusion models are less-memory hungry – than LLM stuff. Though if you want to do Flux v2, I wasn’t able to fit it on that card. I could run it on the Framework Desktop, but at the resolutions I wanted to run it at, the poor ol’ Framework took about 6 or 7 minutes to generate an image.

EDIT2: I use all AMD hardware, though I agree with @anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz that Nvidia hardware is going to be easier to get working; a lot of the AMD software is much more bleeding edge, as Nvidia got on all this earlier. That being said, Nvidia also charges a premium because of that. I understand that a DGX Spark is something of an Nvidia analog to the Framework Desktop and similar AI Max-based systems, has unified memory, but you’ll pay for it, something like $4k.

Okay. It’s going to be a little harder to diagnose it since the problem isn’t immediately visible, but you’ve got all the Linux toolset there, so that’s helpful.

Is the DNS server you’re trying to use from the LAN machines running on the OpenWrt machine, or off somewhere on the Internet?

EDIT: Or on the LAN, I guess.

EDIT2: Oh, you answered that elsewhere.

I am using my routers DNS, and it’s reachable from my laptop.

Have you tried doing a DNS lookup from the router (pinging a host by name, say) when you were having the problems?

If so and it didn’t work, that’d suggest that the problem is the upstream DNS server. If that’s the problem, as IsoKiero suggests, you might set the OpenWrt box to use a different DNS server.

If so, and it worked, that’d suggest that the issue is the OpenWrt host’s DNS server serving names. It sounds like OpenWrt uses dnsmasq by default.

If not…that’d probably be what I’d try next time the issue comes up.

From my laptop I can ping outwards using IP, but not names (e.g. openwrt.org), but I can reach my DNS from my laptop

Okay, well, that’s a pretty good indication that marud’s guess is right and it’s DNS-related, if you can reach hosts by IP but not by name. Is the laptop Linux?

Ah, gotcha, cool. If it’s OpenWrt and you have shell access, that should make it easier to diagnose. When you are checking that you don’t have connectivity from your local LAN device, you tried pinging the same out-there-on-the-Internet host, and that failed?

Okay. So, I don’t know exactly what you’re doing to test that, but I’m going to assume, say, trying to go somewhere in a Web browser.

First off, I have occasionally seen problems myself where consumer broadband routers that have been on for a long time wind up briefly becoming unresponsive. Probably some sort of memory leak or something. So if you haven’t rebooted the thing and seen whether all your problems magically stop showing up, I’d probably try that. Quick and easy.

Okay. Say that doesn’t do it.

When you confirm that the router can reach the Internet during this period of outage, how are you doing that? Going to a management Web UI from a wired-LAN device and trying to ping some host on the Internet?

I’m not sure what you mean when you say that you’re seeing “periodic drops”. Like, you’re sending pings from a wired-LAN device to somewhere on the Internet and not getting a response? Inbound TCP connections from the Internet aren’t being forwarded to a device on the LAN?

“not retro enough?”

https://weatherstar3000.netbymatt.com/

That being said, I don’t think that he’s emulating the oldest format.

This was their launch video, May 2, 1982. This is July 17, 1982, so it was probably about as early as it gets:

https://youtu.be/ys1rGgm2dZA?t=9

It is a joke.

Shortage Likely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt

OpenWrt (from open wireless router) is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic.

OpenWrt can run on various types of devices, including CPE routers, residential gateways, smartphones, pocket computers (e.g., Ben NanoNote). It is also possible to run OpenWrt on personal computers and laptops.

OpenWrt also recommends choosing a device with a minimum of 16 MB of flash and 128 MB of RAM, preferably higher amounts.[77]

If you can install OpenWrt, you can probably get ahold of hardware that can run OpenWrt.

OpenWrt provides regular bug fixes and security updates even for devices that are no longer supported by their manufacturers.

You’ll probably also have a longer device lifetime.

I figured that this was going to be the wedding parable.

looks in Google Earth

They should put it on the farmland by the Moss Landing power plant instead.

That’s got nobody living there, it’ll have a high-capacity electricity link right there, and the power plant is already using seawater for cooling itself.

EDIT: Oh, wait. Monterey Park, CA, not Monterey, CA.

I mean, the EU could impose a 24-hour quarantine period on vehicles leaving the EU for Russia to see if any theft reports come in on vehicles that aren’t whitelisted on a freight-hauler vehicle list or something like that. That’d probably suck a lot more for Russia than it would for the EU.