Network engineers hate this one simple trick

Looks like I managed to reconfigure my router to be multi-homed, while logged in through SSH over the existing WAN connection, without screwing something up and locking myself out. Phew! 😅

Lazy vacation days 😊

#DogsOfMastodon

This is pretty spot on. At this stage, the problem with #climate change isn't that we don't know what the solutions are, it's that we are not applying them fast enough. But we could be, and doomism isn't helpful.

"The facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

#startup #business #tech #technology @technology

FFS, spent hours beating my head against a wall trying to figure out why this service was starting up and then randomly dying after a few seconds...

... Well, turns out it was because of a misconfigured firewall on the NFS server it was talking to, so some connections would just hang, causing IO stalls. Fix the firewall rule, and presto, everything is running perfectly!

At least it wasn't DNS! 😅

So apropos of nothing, how do y'all handle encryption at rest for your home server(s)?

I mean, I know how to setup full disk encryption, but how to provide the key? I'm talking about a headless setup on physical hardware, here.

My current solution is an initrd that spawns an SSH server and waits for me to manually login and supply the pass phrase on every boot. Which works, but it's kinda annoying, especially if there's a power failure while I'm somewhere I can't access SSH. Also, it kinda feels brittle (I keep fearing it won't come back up on the next reboot).

So does anyone have any better solutions?

#linux #security #encryption

New blog post: The XDP Traffic Generator

Explaining how (as of kernel 5.18) it is possible to use #XDP to implement a high-performance traffic generator, which is also part of the xdp-tools package.

https://blog.tohojo.dk/2023/05/the-xdp-traffic-generator.html

Starting out on my three-day trip by train from Denmark to Portugal. Off to a great start with the Copenhagen-Hamburg train being half an hour late before I even got on it, and also missing a carriage so the remaining ones are packed to the brim. Yay, adventure! 😂 #trains

First blog post (after restarting blogging) is out!

In which I explore the use of kprobes in the middle of a function and reveal that I am not, in fact, very good at reading assembly code... 😅

https://blog.tohojo.dk/2023/04/netfilter-packet-drop-attribution-using-bpf.html

I'm hereby announcing my intent to take up blogging again! 😀

https://blog.tohojo.dk/2023/04/its-not-dead-its-resting.html

Bugbot status update: it's now able to monitor lore lists and start tracking threads as bugs based on an arbitrary query. E.g. you can mention "bugbot engage" in a thread and the entire thread will be converted to a bugzilla bug (if the email of the person issuing this command matches a bugzilla account with "editbugs" group membership). Any subsequent messages in the thread will be automatically added to the bug as new comments. Any comments posted on the bug via bugzilla interface will be sent to original recipients.

Now working on the other direction -- bugs added in bugzilla will be converted to mailing list threads and sent to proper maintainers (based on certain conditions, e.g. a "bugbot" flag needs to be set to "on" and the cf_subsystem custom field needs to match the corresponding MAINTAINERS entry). Should be done tomorrow, at which point I'll be looking for early testers. :)

The recordings from last week's "Understanding latency" webinar are out. Featuring yours truly for a short bit on #BPF on the second day, and lots of great speakers for the rest of the event!

https://www.understandinglatency.com/recordings-2023

I'll be speaking at this webinar on latency on March 6-8:

https://www.understandinglatency.com/

The organisers were even kind enough to make me a fancy graphics to attach to this post! 😃

Released version 1.3.0 of xdp-tools today!

This release includes three new utilities (xdp-bench, xdp-monitor and xdp-trafficgen) as well as frags support for libxdp and refcounting for XSK sockets!

Get it while it's hot off the press! 😃 #linux #XDP #BPF

https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-tools/releases/tag/v1.3.0

Excellent coverage (as always) from @LWN of the discussions around #BPF API stability in the #Linux kernel

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/921088/1946095baf6289a7/

Because it has to be repeated again and again: We need to drastically reduce the number of cars to solve our problems.

Flent is featured in LWN! 😲🤩
https://lwn.net/Articles/920121/

I'm gonna keep posting this until one of you fucking boosts it

FACTS ABOUT MASTODON

If you are curious about leaving the cooked turkey site and going to the elephant site, here are some important tips:

1. It sucks. But then, so does every site.

2. You can still shitpost. Take great glee.

3. Picking your server instance is super important.

Ideally you should start at a large instance, and leave because it's full of white suburban NIMBY reactionaries who joined in November because they were promised 0 uncomfortable experiences in their lives and lash out whenever this turns out not to be the case.

Then you move to a smaller server where suddenly you can't talk to your friends because the admin of your instance is feuding with the admin of their instance. Then you wait a month before you can move again.

In this regard, the feudal structure of Mastodon instances is very like early 2000s message boards, whenever the admin got drunk and deleted the site.

4. You can work around the feudalism by running Mastodon yourself. It's the size of a mastodon and costs a fortune.

You can run Pleroma, which is smaller, and is also favoured by Nazis by unfortunate historical accident. Pleroma is perfectly good software that fulfils a need for something smaller than Mastodon, but also the devs are definitely not Nazis but are the other ten guys at the table.

There was a hilarious moment where the guy behind Spinster was so obnoxious he got kicked out of Pleroma and started his own fork called Soapbox/Rebased. He is now known as Soapbox Terf.

The nice people went to Pleroma fork Akkoma, which Soapbox Terf calls the "tr***y server", a review I understand they were delighted by. Try that.

There's also Misskey, which is a bit weird and Japanese, and supports cat ears right there in the protocol.

5. Any bozo who complains about your posts with assertions about the Fediverse that assume it all runs on the rules of mastodon.social is one of the suburban NIMBYs and invariably joined in November. Block and don't look back.

6. If anyone annoys you about your posting, you can improve their feed for them by blocking them from ever seeing your posts. The blocking tools are marvellous.

7. There are NO QUOTE TWEETS on Mastodon and anyone who wants QUOTE TWEETS is an invader, pollutant and corrupting influence despoiling the suburban vistas of Mastodon who only wants quote tweets so they can wreak EVIL.

So quote-tweeting is well supported in Akkoma and Misskey (and forks thereof), is in the Treehouse fork of Mastodon, and will be coming to more Fediverse software soon.

8. In Mastodon, Eugen Rochko has achieved the creation of something greater than himself. And he will *never forgive it*.

9. The Fediverse interprets Website Boy as damage and routes around him.

10. Mastodon is yet another demonstration that worse is better. So come onto Mastodon, and *be* that worse.
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EDIT: this post is attracting some very dumb reply guys. Consider *not* posting debate club fatuity.