Happy New Years
Welcome to 2025. This is the time of year when I used to write the wrong year on my checks. I’ve not written a check by hand in over 5 years. That’s what computers are for.
And we are getting older. It used to be that we would sit around the TV for a few hours waiting for the ball to drop.
This year we were all doing our thing. Then at 2345 the alarms went off. We stumbled into the living room. Went to YouTube to find a ball drop channel.
We did the toast to the new year, then stumbled to bed.
Firewalls
I am bringing up a server in a new infrastructure. Instead of using the half arse load balancers and firewalls provided by the vendor, I decided to use a micro/nano instance and install pfSense.
pfSense is based on FreeBSD. Wonderful. The issue is that the vendor does not support FreeBSD nor do they support pfSense. This led to 24 hours of frustration.
The issue? The installation went smoothly, as expected. Everything is done on the serial device. When booting into the newly installed OS, the screen would lock up right after it said it was loading.
The issue? The installation media runs the console on the serial port AND the video console. The default for the installed OS is to only use the video console.
I received a message to my help request shortly before I wrote that I had turned on serial devices and everything just worked.
Why is this important? For testing, I had the firewall locked way down. Fine. Everything works fine for me. I try and install a LetsEncrypt certificate and it failed.
It told me it was a firewall issue.
It took me another day before I figured out that I had locked out web access to the firewall. I was only allowing my server to connect.
Small Steps
There have been a couple of cases out of the circuit courts in the last few weeks that are positive wins for the Second Amendment.
My guess is that we have a few more judges that believe in doing what the Supreme Court told them to do. And I believe that everybody is waiting for the Supreme Court to put the hammer down on another set of Second Amendment cases.
Everything Is Relative
I have been so immersed in getting our data center up that I lost sight of client needs. I was just about to write to one of my clients to see if they had noticed the improvement in performance.
I woke up to a message of frustration. Nope, it wasn’t better. Was it better than it was? Yes. Was it good enough? No.
Fixing it.
Of Course It Is Illegal
I have a friend who is currently living in one of those shit states. One of those states where you can assume it is illegal unless it is specifically made legal. And that could change tomorrow.
At the homestead, varmint are taken care of with the right caliber. Those squirrels ransacking the birdfeeders? They be varmint needing .22LR, subsonic.
The possum and raccoons getting into garbage cans or attacking the chickens? .357 Magnum varmints.
Deer eating the crops? 30-30 varmints.
Bears getting into the beehives? 45–70 varmints.
Where he lives, he has bear coming up on to the back porch. He can’t do anything about it because it isn’t legal to shoot them. And the neighbors would complain.
I offered him an air rifle for the squirrels. He was concerned it would make too much noise and the neighbors would complain.
I gave him a “Wrist Rocket” slingshot for Christmas.
He can legally possess it. I can legally give it to him. He cannot legally buy a slingshot nor can he legally make a slingshot in his state.
I wish he would move to my state, he would enjoy more freedoms.
Question of The Week (2)
1) Are the security posts of interest? The explainers about things computer?
2) Are you excited that the Supreme Court is prepared to hear another Second Amendment case?
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