since this type of interference is geographically relevant, it clearly has nothing to do with the war.

So, I’m not sure what the rationale is – it might be worrying about long-range drones, like those light aircraft, flying around Belarus, but I’ve definitely seen some sources say that they believe that the Kaliningrad jamming is a function of the war.

This article, from late May, has the Finnish government saying that they believe that it’s related to the war.

https://www.politico.eu/article/gps-jamming-is-a-side-effect-of-russian-military-activity-finnish-transport-agency-says/

Jamming GPS signals over the Baltic Sea is “most likely” a side effect of Russia’s anti-drone activities, Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, said today.

“The interference intensified when Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure began in January 2024,” Traficom said in a press release.

Estonia also blames Russia for the signal jamming, but the Finnish agency doesn’t agree with the Tallinn government in defining the interference as a hybrid attack.

“It is possible that the interference observed in aviation currently are most likely a side effect of Russia’s self-protection” that is used “to prevent the navigation and control of drones controlled by GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] or mobile frequencies,” Traficom said.

Well, as things stand, there’s no right in customary international law to a radio frequency. If Russia wants to produce disruption, Russia basically can. It’s going to annoy countries, but there isn’t really a lot that can be done aside from pressure, sanctions and such. Hell, even if there were such a right, it’d ultimately need to be backed up by ability and willingness to use force at some level, by someone. I’m not sure that countries are willing to wage war over radio broadcasts, no matter how disruptive.

In theory, a country could probably run a pretty powerful broadcast off a ship. So I don’t think that Kaliningrad is even all that special here – Russia could be doing the same even if it didn’t have a little enclave of territory and didn’t mind annoying whoever is using the signal.

My guess is that Russia will stop when the war ends. That is, my assumption is that Russia isn’t willing to do peacetime jamming for the purpose of just being obnoxious.

If it’s enough of a problem, it’d probably be possible to set up navigation systems that are more-limited, don’t have the degree of military utility of something like GPS. Maybe reactivate LORAN, say.

In the case of transatlantic aircraft, I’d assume that those normally have INS navigation systems; while limited in accuracy, those should be usable as a backup to GPS in most roles.

It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.

Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.

So it doesn’t sound that bad.

Nvidia is worth about $3 trillion at this point. France’s GDP is about that each year.

I did some time back. I don’t recall it being incredibly difficult to get running. What hardware are you trying to run it on?

Video of the accidental ascent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g

Apparently it’s an American English-British English difference.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale

1. (British, Australia) Available for purchase.

2. (US, Australia) Available for purchase at reduced prices.

That’s true, though IIRC there are two planes, and I think that one of them – and the more-numerous one – is a variant of some multirole fighter.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal

Launch platform

• MiG-31BM/K
• Tu-22M3M
• Su-34 (reportedly)
• Su‐57 (planned)

Looks like two confirmed, another possible, another eventually (though I can’t imagine using the rare, intended-for-another-purposes Su-57 if they could use the others).

Ah, okay, gotcha.

So, there are a couple issues:

• I’d guess that Russia is able to prevent a surface ship from approaching Russia in any ocean unless someone can fight an offensive air and naval war to get control of that ocean.

• I’m guessing (you said “container ship”) that the idea might be to use a concealed civilian vessel that then unloads some kind of surprise attack. While disguised military ships have been used to conduct armed warfare before, the last time I can think of an example was British Q-ships in World War I; I’m not sure that this is still legal.

• Turkey has closed the Turkish Straits to warships due to the conflict, so technically no warships are supposed to pass, from either side. I’m I believe that it violates the convention governing this to either tell Turkey that the warship isn’t actually a warship or if Turkey knows but preferentially lets warships through. That being said, I guess theoretically Ukraine could assemble such an attack using a ship somewhere far away from Ukraine.

• My guess is that if Ukraine had a lot of long-range cruise missiles, they’d probably be using them in their own theater of operations, as they’re pretty short on them.

• I don’t think that Russia is using strategic bombers for the glide bombing attacks, so whatever the benefits of hitting them, I’m not sure that it would be a counter to the glide bomb attacks. kagis Yeah, this has the (much more numerous) Su-34 being used:

  On or just before Thursday, an air force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber lobbed a single FAB-3000 bomb with pop-out wings and satellite guidance at a multi-story building Russian intelligence had identified as a staging base for Ukrainian troops in Lyptsi, 10 miles north of Kharkiv in northern Ukraine.

putty

I mean, Windows can do the thin client side fine. I’d personally somewhat-prefer to use Linux for that, but that’s not really my sticking point. I’m normally keeping my software, data, stuff like that on the server, and just running two remotely-connected terminals and a web browser on my client. Virtually all the software can run on the server. My problem is Windows on the server side; like, it’s just not reasonable to use a Windows machine remotely via a command-line for anything other than some very basic administrative tasks, and using a GUI remotely once latency goes up or bandwidth down is just painful.

I’m not saying that that’s an unreasonable policy for companies to have, but I will bet that only a very small portion of individuals normally do that for personal smartphones.

APC Back-UPS 850.

I’d guess that those maybe don’t use the same protocol as an APC Easy UPS. There’s a (widely-used) Linux software package, Network UPS Tools, which can talk to the APC UPSes that I’ve seen in the past.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

It has Back-UPS devices listed in the hardware compatibility list as well as devices from many other manufacturers, but I don’t see any reference to an “Easy UPS”.

Right now when updates get applied to the NAS, if it gets powered off during the update window that would be really bad and inconvenient require manual intervention.

You sure? I mean, sure, it’s possible; there are devices out there that can’t deal with power loss during update. But others can: they’ll typically have space for two firmware versions, write out the new version into the inactive slot, and only when the new version is committed to persistent storage, atomically activate it.

Last device I worked on functioned that way.

you might lose data in flight if you’re not careful.

That’s the responsibility of the application if they rely on the data to be persistent at some point; they need to be written to deal with the fact that there may be in-flight data that doesn’t make it to the disk if they intend to take other actions that depend on that fact; they’ll need to call fsync() or whatever their OS has if they expect the data to be on-drive.

Normally, there will always a period where some data being written out is partial: the write() could complete after handing the data off to the OS’s buffer cache. The local drive could complete because data’s in its cache. The app could perform multiple write() calls, and the first could have completed without the second. With a NAS, the window might be a little bit longer than it otherwise would be, but something like a DBMS will do the fsync(); at any point, it’d be hypothetically possible for the OS to crash or power loss or something to happen.

The real problem, that I need an nas for, is not the loss of some data, it’s when the storms hit and there’s flooding, the power can go up and down and cycle quite rapidly. And that’s really bad for sensitive hardware like hard disks. So I want the NAS to shut off when the power starts getting bad, and not turn on for a really long time but still turn on automatically when things stabilize

Like I said in the above comment, you’ll get that even without a clean shutdown; you’ll actually get a bit more time if you don’t do a clean shutdown.

Because this device runs a bunch of VMs and containers

Ah, okay, it’s not just a file server? Fair enough – then that brings the case #2 back up again, which I didn’t expect to apply to the NAS itself.

I’d guess that those OSes may not permit arbitrary software without administrative privileges to initiate shutdowns. That’s the case on Linux.

I’m assuming that your goal here is automatic shutdown when the UPS battery gets low so you don’t actually have the NAS see unexpected power loss.

This isn’t an answer to your question, but stepping back and getting a big-picture view: do you actually need a clean, automatic shutdown on your Synology server if the power goes out?

I’d assume that the filesystems that the things are set up to run are power-loss safe.

I’d also assume that there isn’t server-side state that needs to be cleanly flushed prior to power loss.

Historically, UPSes providing a clean shutdown were important on personal computers for two reasons:

• Some filesystems couldn’t deal with power loss, could produce a corrupted filesystem. FAT, for example, or HFS on the Mac. That’s not much of an issue today, and I can’t imagine that a Synology NAS would be doing that unless you’re explicitly choosing to use an old filesystem.

• Some applications maintain state and when told to shut down, will dump it to disk. So maybe someone’s writing a document in Microsoft Word and hasn’t saved it for a long time, a few minutes will provide them time to save it (or the application to do an auto-save). Auto-save usually partially-mitigates this. I don’t have a Synology system, but AFAIK, they don’t run anything like that.

Like, I’d think that the NAS could probably survive a power loss just fine, even with an unclean shutdown.

If you have an attached desktop machine, maybe case #2 would apply, but I’d think that hooking the desktop up to the UPS and having it do a clean shutdown would address the issue – I mean, the NAS can’t force apps on computers using the NAS to dump state out to the NAS, so hooking the NAS up that way won’t solve case #2 for any attached computers.

If all you want is more time before the NAS goes down uncleanly, you can just leave the USB and RS-232 connection out of the picture and let the UPS run until the battery is exhausted and then have the NAS go down uncleanly. Hell, that’d be preferable to an automated shutdown, as you’d get a bit more runtime before the thing goes down.

northern ice sea…north of st petersburg.

The Baltic Sea?

and to remote in.

This is the approach I use with laptops domestically, and I think that there’s something to be said for it. Like, the laptop itself doesn’t store important information. A remote server does. The laptop is just a thin client. If the laptop gets lost or stolen – which I’ve had happen – I revoke the credentials. No important information is lost, and no important information is exposed.

Whole-disk laptop encryption has improved things too from an exposure standpoint (albeit not a loss standpoint), though I don’t use it myself (don’t want to spend any battery life on it). I assume that smartphones have some form of reasonably-secure storage hardware, but I don’t know if it involves encryption.

What I found irritating – and this is years back now – was an employer who didn’t care if I took a laptop in or out or what information I stored on it (as long as it was a work system), but who refused to provide remote access to the network, so I couldn’t just keep the important information on the work network. I mean, I get if they want to have some sort of isolated DMZ and require an externally-accessible server to live there, not provide VPN access in to the general network, but not having the ability to have remote network access to work systems at all is just incredibly obnoxious.

I think that some of it is that Windows is not phenomenal to use remotely. Yeah, there are solutions, but they aren’t great if you’re on a high-latency, low-reliability, or low-bandwidth link. I try to use console Linux for as much of my stuff as possible. That whole ecosystem was designed around thin-client, remote use.

I don’t think that there’s any realistic chance that Ukraine can make use of ships in the Black Sea. Russia built their military to contest the US in the Pacific – they’ve got a lot of long-range anti-ship weapons. That surplus capacity is why they’ve been blowing anti-ship missiles on land attack. I’d be pretty confident that Russia can keep a Ukrainian warship from surviving in the Black Sea. Where Ukraine’s pulling off naval attacks, it’s using either small, very-low-profile boats or even-lower-profile, mostly-submerged USVs. Russia apparently doesn’t have the sensor capability to reliably pick those up (and I imagine that Ukrainian strikes on radars probably also complicate that).

I have wondered about maybe Ukraine using larger UUVs that surface to launch a weapon. Such a UUV would have to be something that could be transported on a trailer, so there are some size limitations. But it might permit for a more-capable platform than the small USVs that are currently being used.

I don’t know what kind of anti-submarine-warfare tools Russia has available in the Black Sea, but if they aren’t able to detect the existing USVs, I would assume that they aren’t going to be doing better with UUVs.

EDIT: There’s a reference to a Ukrainian UUV project in progress here; it says that Russia is improving their ability to detect the existing Ukrainian USVs, so UUVs are becoming more important.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a post on Telegram, said Russia had used more than 800 glide bombs on Ukrainian targets in the past week. He issued a fresh plea in his nightly video address for better weapons systems. “The sooner the world helps us deal with the Russian combat aircraft launching these bombs, the sooner we can strike – justifiably strike – Russian military infrastructure … and the closer we will be to peace,” he said.

Well, I don’t know what kind of counter he’s aiming for. There are basically two that I can think of:

Long-range SAMs with sufficient range (and maybe mobility) to strike an aircraft launching glide bombs without being placed at risk. Ukraine’s has had some old long-range Warsaw Pact SAMs, but I don’t think that we’ve got more stores or production capacity. There are Patriots, but those are the only anti-ballistic-missile counter Ukraine presently has; using them as a counter for aircraft will cut into that. I suggested earlier that the SAMP/T systems that France sent, firing Aster missiles – which theoretically have an ABM capability, but at least earlier in the conflict, apparently weren’t intercepting them – might work, if the range is long enough.

Aircraft armed with long-range air-to-air missiles.

Russia’s newest glide bombs, according to this article, probably reach about 90 km.

To use it to directly support the front, that’s about how close they’re going to have to get. Maybe closer if they want to strike behind the front.

The US has the AIM-120. The latest version reaches 160–180 km according to WP. We have other long-range air-to-air missiles in development, but not in production today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Range_Engagement_Weapon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-260_JATM

Europe has the Meteor:

Maximum range: 200 km (110 nmi)+[4] No Escape Zone: 60 km (32 nmi)+[5]

A Ukrainian aircraft firing those will need to do so at high altitude to leverage high range, use the aircraft’s fuel rather than the missile’s. That height will make it visible to Russian air defense, and the aircraft has to avoid getting hit by Russian SAMs.

The longest-range SAM that I’m aware of that Russia has is an S-400 variant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system

That can reach out 400 km with the right missile according to WP.

Now, there are a number of ways one might measure range (from what height? Are these “minimum maximum” ranges or the actual limit? Is this a no-escape range or the furthest the missile can travel? What altitude can it reach at that point?) So I can’t say “this is the range that Ukraine’s going to need” exactly. But if Russia can legitimately reach out about twice as far as any air-to-air missile, it seems to me that that’s going to be a problem for air-to-air missile use unless countermeasures or stealth or similar can prevent Russia from making use of SAMs.

Ukraine has been hitting S-400s with ATACMS, so those are, in turn, under threat.

EDIT: Another twist is that Russia also has long-range air-to-air missiles, and any Ukrainian aircraft trying to hit a Russian attack aircraft with an air-to-air missile is going to have to worry about those coming back the other direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-37_(missile)

150–400 km (93–249 mi) [1] Up to 200 kilometres (120 mi) (RVV-BD)

Given that the longest-range variant there can reach out 400 km, that’s a pretty big buffer for Russia to work with. I believe that those missiles are intended more for hitting “large” aircraft, like bombers or the like, so a fighter might be a little better off, but I’d assume that something like an F-16 remains vulnerable.

In a “Russia versus NATO” scenario, there are stealthy F-35s that that missile probably won’t do much good against. But Ukraine’s not using stealthy aircraft.

I think that the problem is that the entire article, other than that sentence, consists of a list of bullet points. It’s conventional for articles to sometimes include a list of bullet points with an “executive summary” at the top, and then have the real article below, but this just omits that latter text.