DGentry

"Alpha particles are so large that they tend not to penetrate well, so the packages of nearby chips will protect them from alpha particles emitted elsewhere within the room. Beta particles (electrons) and cosmic rays can penetrate the package of chips, but those are from the solar wind not radioactive decay of anything local. I'm not sure that a radiation counter will detect alpha particles from the packaging materials. The situation I've seen is with the bonding agent emitting alpha particles, which is a "goo" inside the package which cushions the die and the wires between the silicon die and the pins on the package. The particles which hit the silicon die can cause errors, while the plastic of the package surrounding the goo would tend to absorb the rest." - DGentry

"I don't know of a good reference for SMART access, though there is existing code which does so (like smartctl) which could be examined." - DGentry

"I don't doubt that its bad, and that having to deal with nasty people attacking your infrastructure takes time away from more positive work. However it seems like the fundamental problem is that there is a DDoS at all, not so much the padding. If the attacker were trying to overwhelm the link capacity, they'd send larger frames. Sending minimum sized frames means they're trying to overwhelm the receiving machine's ability to process the incoming packets. If the packets were not padded, there would be even more of them." - DGentry

"Most likely. Since publishing this, I've learned not to foreshadow future writing." - DGentry

"Nice one!" - DGentry

"Incumbent IP providers lobbied heavily against it in the IETF. They don't want to enable new competitors." - DGentry

Dear Google, letting me export my Waves in PDF format … er, nevermind. - Amit Patel

"How did I find the names of __cyg_profile_func_enter and __cyg_profile_func_exit? I think I Googled for information about creating a profiler, and found descriptions of how to use this mechanism. I am definitely not the first person to write about it." - DGentry

"I've used IP_PKTINFO for this. There is also an IP6_PKTINFO which I have not personally used, but looks similar. You set IP_PKTINFO in the flags passed to recvmsg. The control block will contain an ip_pktinfo structure indicating the ingress interface. This is from memory, but some searching should turn up more specific information." - DGentry

"I'm glad you enjoyed it. If I may suggest: http://codingrelic.geekhold.co..." - DGentry

"Sure, go ahead. (BTW, our kids thought the hotdogtopi were funny but wouldn't eat them. Too creepy.)" - DGentry

"Simply that Python isn't generally the language one reaches for to write SCSI or ATA commands to hardware devices. Python can be made to work, but the existence of the system header files with all needed structures defined strongly encourages use of C/C++ for this purpose." - DGentry

"In software development sometimes you spend time on an implementation which you are unreasonably proud of, but ultimately decide not to use in the product. This is one such story." - Amit Patel

Reading the title, I first thought of modem commands, where ATA was “answer”… - Amit Patel

+++ATH - DGentry