mft_ 14 minutes ago

Very interesting!

Somewhat related, years ago I worked in an office that switched to hot-desking, and I spent a while trying to figure out whether was there was a way to automatically generate a map of who was in the office, and whereabouts. Identifying an individual laptop is okay, but figuring out which docking station the laptop was plugged into was a lot trickier without admin access to network hardware (which I def didn't have). This approach may have allowed an individual laptop to figure out where it was, and then update a central location database.

jackweirdy 4 hours ago

This couldn’t have been better timed for me.

I sit with a pile of raspberry Pis I throw into different rooms about the house and want to stick assorted tasks on them. My open question was how can I just image them, plug them in and centrally configure what runs on them with no more sd card or Mac detection shenanigans when I change their job.

I’ll be giving this a try!

jtchang 2 hours ago

What switches enterprise or consumer tend to support this LLDP? My guess is maybe almost none on the consumer side. I.e. Netgear, to link. Cisco probably does. How about ubiquti?

  • tcrenshaw 2 hours ago

    I know mikrotik supports this. On the higher end, most of the Dells switches I interacted with as well as Aruba had LLDP. Different manufacturers tend to report their interfaces slightly differently though

  • hackmiester an hour ago

    Almost any managed switch will support it. Netgear does. Ubiquiti definitely does, even their APs do.

bagels 4 hours ago

How fun, I solved a similar problem in a similar way. 90 identical devices, each with their own Ethernet cable and 128 Ethernet ports. The solution was to configure the switch to make DHCP assignments based on port number, then the device could just query its own IP address. Port 1 -> 192.168.1.101, 99 -> 192...199

jeffrallen 4 hours ago

LLDP: this is the way

But also, I was wondering if she was going to say, "these devices have cameras on them which are not used because they are pointed in random directions depending on how they are mounted". And then I was hoping to see an interesting image recognition task, "given this blurry, dim, random image, choose which location it probably came from".

I got nerd sniped to the power of 2.

  • Rygian 7 minutes ago

    Same could work with microphones. Every spot of the space would have a different resonant characteristic.

    Or microphone+speakers, where every device can self-assign an ID, echo it over speakers, and then everyone triangulates everyone else and themselves.