I have been looking for reasons to try Docker on
one of the random stack of un-used Raspberry Pis
that I have laying around and thought it might be fun to build a little
travel router. Somehow that morphed into lets get
Tor working on here and then well if I can
get a client, and a relay, why not an onion service?
I was making some firewall changes last weekend and while watching the logs I discovered that every now and then some host would try to connect to 169.254.169.254 on port 80. This was peculiar since I don't use the IPv4 link local addresses anywhere in my network. It seemed to be happening randomly from all of my Linux hosts, both physical and virtual.
I installed one of the Mojave public betas last week on the Mac Mini I have in the office. I used it as an excuse to finally tweak a script I wrote for customizing macOS out of the box.
For a while now I've used a Yubikey Neo as a PIV card to authenticate to my public facing hosts. This is fairly straightforward but requires a host with OpenSC on it. In my .profile I have a function called add_smartcard which will add the PIV driver to the ssh-agent. This means I actually authenticate with the key that was generated in the Yubikey and not my password.
So, I mentioned a while back that I watch Acquisitions Inc on the yubtubs. Well through there I also started watching Dice, Camera, Action. During the Stream of Many Eyes event there was a DCA episode featuring Travis McElroy and that reminded me of the fact that I have had The Adventure Zone languishing away on my iPhone for a while now, un-listened to. Now I'm pretty terrible about keeping up with podcasts (there is so much good stuff out there to listen to and watch these days) so I just wanted to toss out a few words about what happened next.
Recently I had a rental VW with the fancy new radio in it and I figured I'd give CarPlay a shot.
I've been stewing about this for a while and have not yet found an
alternative so this is part rant part dear lazyweb plea.
This post has been superseded by
this post.
For a long time now the core of my ad blocking strategy has been squid and privoxy running on my OpenBSD routers. Mobile devices VPN into the network and receive a proxy.pac which routes all traffic to these proxies which reject connections to known ad hosts. With the growing adoption of HTTPS (thankfully) privoxy is becoming less and less useful so I have been trying to find better ways to block ads at the networking level.
I know I'm not 'average' when it comes to my opinions about technology.
I imagine this has to do with growing up with technology that was much
more simplistic than it is today. Compared to modern software and
hardware the NEC PowerMate 286 running DOS 6.0 that I learned to program
on was extremely simple. Not that it wasn't powerful, but it didn't have
any designs to hide things from you. You had access to the hardware
directly, and all the memory, and all the peripheral I/O space. You were
able to completely control the system, and even understand exactly what was
going on.
Ubiquiti has discontinued UniFi Video and I do
not endorse its replacement. More information may
be found in
this post.
Since I installed the first bits of the
Ubiquiti UniFi family of products in my network
I have been impressed. They have never failed to meet my expectations.
I have written several articles about some rather advanced configuration
and implementation details:
A couple days ago I wrote a bit about setting up a new Ubiquiti UniFi Security Gateway, and after living with it for a bit I have a few additional notes.
I have several physical locations linked together with VPN tunnels. The
central VPN server runs OpenBSD with iked(8). I also have several
roaming clients (iOS and macOS) that terminate client access tunnels to
this system so I am loathe to make breaking changes to it. The site to
site tunnels run a gif(8) tunnel in IP-over-IP mode to provide a
layer 3 routable interface on top of the IKEv2 tunnel. My internal tunnels
run ospfd(8) and ospf6d(8) to exchange routes and my
external site to site tunnels run bgpd(8). Most of my internal
sites use OpenBSD as endpoints so configuration is painfully simple,
however in my office at work I have been using a MikroTik RouterBoard
RB951-2HnD. This has worked well enough but lately it has been showing
its age, randomly requiring manual intervention to re-establish tunnels and
flirting with periods of unexplainable high latency.
I enabled HTTPS on this website just under a year ago. If you follow my blog you know that this is a static website, and since there appears to be a bit of an uproar in the web community over HTTPS right now I figured I'd simply weigh in.
I had occasion today to install some updates on one of my macOS systems and found myself inconvenienced by a number of applications adding a pile of dock icons without asking. I don't keep much in the dock on my systems preferring to use clover+space to launch applications and I don't think I have touched the dock layout in literally years at this point so I went searching for a solution.
I spent a few hours this week taking a break from Surviving Mars (which is scratching the same itch that Sim City / Sim Tower seems to scratch for me) and finally got around to playing VA-11 HALL-A. I really like this kind of game, a mechanically simplistic story driven world with interesting characters and design.