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.
Background
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.
Ubiquiti has discontinued UniFi Video and I do
not endorse its replacement. More information may
be found in
this post.
It seems like the blog is turning into an alternating stream of screaming about things Apple is doing wrong and gushing about how great the UniFi line of products are from Ubiquiti... I have a back log of ideas for things to write about other than those it just seems like life keeps getting in the way and and out the other end either a rant or praise just naturally flows.
Edited: December 30, 2017 @14:10
Seriously, It Isn't a Problem
There has been a bunch of discussion around the 'revelation' that a software update to the iPhone was purposefully slowing older phones. While I believe that they should have been more transparent to users about what was happening, perhaps even adopting the UI from the MacBook for when the battery has aged and requires replacement (I had to do this about a year ago on my 2011 MacBook Pro, macOS will toss a little ! by the battery icon and of course System Report will give you further information).
Edited: September 30, 2019 @11:27
Ubiquiti has discontinued UniFi Video and I do
not endorse its replacement. More information may
be found in
this post.
I run UniFi to manage my various Ubiquiti access points, now across multiple sites and I try to setup everything with HTTPS only and with certificates signed by my internal CA. I followed for the instructions provided by Ubiquiti for UniFi back when I installed it.
Edited: December 13, 2017 @20:47
I'm not currently subscribed to Patreon largely because when money on the Internet is concerned I have a long wait and see what happens cool down. There are a lot of Internet start ups that come and go like a flash in the pan and a lot that get bought quickly and morphed into something else. If you are going to have some way to charge me money, I need some stability. I have no problem being an early adopter, as long as you don't have a link to my bank account or credit card (even through a third party).
Summary
A while back I posted an initial review of iOS 11 and a follow up along with a what I admit was a bit of a rant about a beta of iOS 11.2.
This morning the UPS guy greeted me with a new Ubiquiti UniFi access point destined for use at work. I have been using a Mikrotik RB951-2HnD as a router and access point but I'm wanting to take advantage of 802.11ac various reasons so I ordered a UAP-AC-IW to replace the built-in Mikrotik WiFi. I'm still going to use the Mikrotik as a router and switch.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the Internet is under attack, but if it does, or if you want to know what you can do about it read on.
Edited: November 14, 2017 @15:00
I feel like I should explain why this irks me so. Apple just made a change so
drastic in the functionality of their user interface (remember that Control
Center is supposed to provide you with quick access to common functions from
anywhere within the operating system) that they feel the need to present the
user with a modal pop-up dialog box explaining why the user's understanding of
the effect of the action that they just took is wrong.