Category: Stuff-Related

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Offline

Should check the records for accuracy, but looks like my DSL connection lasted like 6-7 years this time. It’s a new record! That was around the last time we changed ISP’s, IIRC. It’s still going, I’m just not using it. I suspect it was hacked, dunno. Time-wasting forensics foregone, I decided to re-architect things with Comcast. I had a couple ideas for better ways of doing this with some upgraded hardware anyway. Michelle’s Dexter® business needs carved out of my network nonsense. Centurylink® will be upstairs Internet, going forward.

Things arbitrarily stopped forwarding for some reason on or about 15 MAR, returning failed reset and configuration attempts for a few days. WiFi stayed online during troubleshooting, but Internet access eventually dropped, leading to a factory reset on the 18th, restoring connectivity. Not sure what’s going on with Centurylink®, but the service level dropped noticeably in the past year, with regularly expected congestion periods during evenings and weekends. Once again, a network change seemed called for.

New modem arrived two days later, but I waited until the following weekend for a full dynamic diagnosis with the DSL monkeys, so as not to interrupt Michelle with the swap-out. That Centurylink® reset really resonated, but their awful tech support disappoints. Now Comcast® has to deal with me for awhile again, and I have a network diagram update to do. First came a new switch upgrade, including all-new re-loads in everything live on the wire with a chip in it. Here’s one reason why I no longer trust any-body or any-thing.

Interesting 1st blush Comcast observation belies similarly brain-dead tech support, underlying a much bigger, faster network, with all the same ne’er-do-wells prowling around. Sticking my toes in gingerly, surprised to see upwards of 90% of traffic visits pulling 404’s pointing to the WordPress site. I thought online docs were the most popular, at least according to Google analytics. Looks like everything’s cached everywhere.

Sorry for focusing on the cybercrime while offline. I was one of the OG cybercops. The ongoing online list for why anybody gives a shyt about the Internet resumes here now.

Beautiful Dream -World Party

Better Off?

Cliff Dweller

New Mansions in the Neighborhood.

FSK Bridge from the Right-Wing Perspective

Chinese hackers running free.

Not-So-True People Search

Putin and his regime have weapons, but they can’t sit on them and they can’t eat them. They’re good for killing Ukrainians and jailing Russians, but they can’t save a regime from its fatal flaws.

Favorite toons saved here to mark Stuff’s offline time…

25 MAR
22 MAR
19 MAR
19 MAR
18 MAR
17 MAR
Starting around 15 MAR.

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Note to Stuff: HTTPS

Just to clarify, after receiving a number of inquiries: There is nothing for sale here and no transactions of any kind involving PII, financial or otherwise take place on this system. That goes double for the federales fishing for illusory crap. So there’s no need for transport layer security. Still probably the safest web site you’ll touch all year. That should be all you need to know about it in a perfectly social online world.

…Not to mention vulnerable, resource-intensive and really just totally superfluous. So there’s your answer. Those inquiries will reference this post, going forward. Some of you Russian fuckers ought to know this by now. You had the whole thing spider-ed for years.

Too bad we didn’t bake in security and model this more on brick-and-mortar from the git.

Not the Issue you might’ve been led to believe.
It’s all free, and all comers welcome. Just remember communication is a 2-way street – both corporeal and electronic.
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Traffic’s Up

Just passed a million for the first time ever. Must be an election year. Guess that’s one of the cool things about our politics: There’s always an election year coming…

The enclosed chair on wheels type, too. I don’t even enjoy driving much any more, too stressful.
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Security Costs

…both ways – whether you have it or not. The concept has finally fully migrated to the high tech domain. Solarwinds was a wake-up call to alot of people, myself included. Many in the cyber spook community would recoil at the carelessly audacious displays of my networking doo-doo here, but they might be overlooking something too obvious. It’s the same thing that sunk Solarwinds. It was true on day one and stands true today: The worst security vulnerability is the one you don’t know about.

One person can only do so much. This blog site is simple as they get and as close to the proverbial computer sealed in a vault at the bottom of the ocean as can be – except it’s connected to a network. Trying to do too much with too little is always a fool’s errand. Whether or not Timothy Brown actually did anything wrong at Solarwinds remains to be seen. Can’t wait to see what they have to show for it.

The actual mistake exposing the supply chain to exploit was a simple oversight by one or two individuals in the development department. But it’s all connected in some form or fashion. The cyber-security issues floating around in everything encompassed in the crypto/banking industry, social media, AI, propagandized political hate, miscellaneous web fuckery and the systems supporting them are way bigger than any one person or company.

This one was pretty expensive. Spending alot more time on the firewall nowadays.
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My Apologies to the Russians

I mean as a nation, just generally speaking. I get how your MAGA-type problem is orders of magnitude worse than what we’re dealing with here. Your networks seem to reflect society in that they’re also permeated with the digital n’ere-do-well types doing some of the most annoying web fuckery these days. Always have been actually, just that it’s more recently come to my attention again.

Still not sure what you been doing all year, but it’s starting to look like that game’s over now. Prolly see the write-up in Wired™ after a few months. So with the exception of the few who got picked off in real-time this morning, again, my apologies. Russia’s just off the net table, so stop complaining.

See ya after the war…

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Debian 12

Codename Bookworm. Kudos to the devs on this one. My servers aren’t cookie-cutter plain-vanilla-type stuff, so OS upgrades are typically non-trivial. In the almost two years since Bullseye hit the street, this one’s been reliable as a stone axe. I almost made the habitual mistake of re-building it from scratch when Bookworm rolled around, maybe a few hardware adjustments. It takes longer, but is a good way to re-familiarize and knock off some of the cruft. Instead, I went ahead and pleasantly surprised myself doing an in-place full-upgrade, just for shyts and grins. The basically 3-step process was 100% complete and successful in about an hour (as opposed to a day) after re-installing one app and one firmware package. Nice.

Pretty clear language that Red Hat is under new management.

Pay for less, or go Debian.

For my part, I miss Red Hat and the Hatter brand. It may have had its flaws and questionable motivations, but for all those problems it was a model for a successful corporation that was trying not to be so darn capitalistic. That’s something we could use these days.

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Full Stacks

Mine are much smaller than Elon’s, but never explode, intentionally or otherwise. They don’t even fly, except on the networks. The next system ops phase at 5712 finally began a few days ago after a month of racking my brains on the latest Chinese Chipmaker debacle to ruin my day. Live and learn. Premium hardware for bargain dollars + my labor is a theme for me in other endeavors as well, but it comes at an intangible cost.

The old workstation (top) is running a beta test for the Onion folks. The new workstation (bottom) is running an AMD 7700 with all the latest fancy electronic bells and whistles. I’ve started doing data backup locally over USB, so a network upgrade talked about years ago is still on hold. One gig isn’t enough bandwidth for my data on this net. But with USB3/c, local net capacity is an insignificant storage factor now.

Externally-facing production Stuff sits in the entertainment center. The operational Onion will eventually be replaced in that cabinet, soon as Onion3 is ready for Prime Time. That old Dell XPS in the lower-left was only the second vendor-built PC I ever acquired in the UK while we were there. It underwent several upgrades over the years and ran for the last time yesterday, coming up with a dead nic. I installed a new one, but that was the last time it would ever fire up. It’s an inactive display in the PC museum here now.

The holy piece of sheetmetal in the top left is the valve body separator from a Dodge truck transmission. I’m all over the map.
[table id=108 /]
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Building the Internet

It’s been almost a month since I started that new workstation build before coming back up on some new hardware. But it wasn’t what was pictured in that post. People at the local Amazon™ warehouse must hate me. I had at least two of everything here before sending most of it back while looking for the bad DIMM. Ended up being at least 3 bad DIMMs in 4 seperate packaged pairs before they were all returned after selecting a different model.

Never found them intermittently bad like that before. It helps to have at least a midrange mobo with post lights. There really is a 1st time for everything – especially with all the junk coming out of China these days. This was the 3rd mobo. I kinda liked the looks of the AsRock model before it better, but oh well…

This tech refresh basically involves what we used to call a forklift migration to Rocky Linux, with a new workstation now online and Onion3 coming…

It’s all gaming in the DIY builder market now. I don’t have time to do the work, much less game.

Late Update: Latest replacement DIMM pair lasted 2 days before they quit. At least I can run it half populated. Longest PC build ever.

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Stuff Access: Note to the Readers

I’ve received a couple of legitimate complaints/inquiries this year. The nature of this little blog WRT Internet-facing ops calls for a blunt instrument security approach. You might lose access on one net, say for example a PC somewhere, but still see the site on another endpoint like maybe your phone. If that happens, you can assume your local network neighborhood has a higher-than-average amount of ne’re-do-wells on it.

If that is inconvenient or unacceptable in any way, please submit a by-IP whitelist request. Otherwise, perhaps talk to your ISP about cleaning up their act.

Der Komissar -Falco (After the Fire version) 3 formats, 3 different versions -to start with. Audio track lyrics tell the story. Kinda like malware protocol analysis.
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Bye-Bye Scott

Like Clapton, and some others, the heat got too high and those cooks are out of my kitchen. Still debating whether or not I’m gonna pull that Albert Hall Badge off the site. It’s one of my favorites. Anybody *ANYBODY* who makes a statement *ANY STATEMENT* pigeonholing an entire race of humans into *ANYTHING* can suck my dick and choke on it.

Another one of my favorite things ruined by a fuckwit. Public figures can expect to see the backlash here, from now on, as long as I’m around. 😉

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, poses for a portrait with the Dilbert character in his studio in Dublin, Calif., Oct. 26, 2006. Several prominent media publishers across the U.S. are dropping the Dilbert comic strip after Adams, its creator, described people who are Black as members of “a racist hate group” during an online video show. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

7 toons about cancelling Dilbert.

Colleagues lay it out.

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Blog Premise

It’s all you got online, when you’re not doing marketing, cult, entertainment or charity work. Politics is marketing for mind control.

Alternatively, I DO take questions.

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Stonekettle Station

Just a friend’s incoming re-posted to start the day. All corporate media, both social and broadcast cannot be trusted. Independent sources are the only people to be taken seriously.

Read on…
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Editorial Note

Please allow me to clarify, in an attempt to avoid any possible confusion in some of the colorful terminology I use around here.

1 Button, 1 Lever, 1 Valve

That’s the only readily-available operating instructions for the car lift in my garage. It’s a pretty simple machine. The Button makes it go up, the Lever makes it go down, and the Valve stops it from going down. Gravity stops it from going up, for the fuckwits in the audience.

It’s also probably one of the the most dangerous pieces of equipment I use. You almost have to try to screw it up, but people do all the time. So, FUCKWIT is my term for those I perceive to posses a truly malevolent form of intelligence. Active ignorance is one of it’s forms.

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System Update

We lost a few day’s worth of content since the last backup while I re-built the server. Maybe a “planned” upgrade will avoid that next time. After some glitch rendered Radeon functionality compromised, I decided there were too many “gotchas” involved with upgrading the OS along with some touchy applications, so I rebuilt it from scratch – but not before forgetting to grab a Word[press snapshot 1st. Last week’s posts will start popping up again as I manually recover it. We’re now on Bullseye all around – the latest Debian Linux, version 11.

Ironically, one of the backup apps I use for most data, Unison, long ago presented an irreconcilable (to me) conflict between Bullseye and the earlier Debian Buster. The way to backport newer apps to the old Buster server is not straightforward. I elected to downgrade Unison on the new Bullseye workstation by holding the old version there for compatibility purposes. Software interoperability issues can be fun (not!) to manage.

WordPress migrated much better, but still left a few holes to patch. Initial observation this time around suggested certain images got their URLs borked by a value of “-1.” Had to re-insert a passel of carriage returns again, as well. Sometimes I think they do this stuff on purpose, just to piss people off or push them to buy paid support. Still, with close-matching versions, noticeably fewer issues than last time.