BLOG

SCOTUS

We currently have one case scheduled for the January 10th conference. The other two cases have not been rescheduled yet. I do not know what we will see in the court filings before the 10th.

What does it mean to be conferenced?

When a party petitions the Supreme Court for a Writ of Certiorari, they are requesting that their case be heard by the court. If the petition is submitted through the standard channels, it is processed in the “standard” way.

If the request is submitted through the emergency docket, sometimes called the shadow docket, then a single Supreme Court Justice will evaluate the submission. They can then refer it to the court as a whole, or they can deny the request, or they can request more filings.

Regardless, emergency or regular, cases that are referred to the court will be examined. This happens in stages.

The first stage is the parties filing briefs on why the Court should grant cert or why they should deny cert. The parties can decline to file briefs, but they should file formal documents saying they are not filing.

When all the briefs have been filed, the case is “Fully briefed.”

Once the case is fully briefed, it is distributed for conference. This means that the briefs are provided to the justices for examination. The justices have their law clerks do law clerk things and provide reports. All of this is generally kept out of the public light. Nobody knows what the justices ask of their clerks, but former clerks have reported doing such things, in general terms.

After the case is distributed, it is scheduled for a conference. The conference happens on a Friday. During the conference, only the Justices are present. No clerks, no witnesses, no experts, just the justices.

They discuss the cases that were scheduled for conference. They can also discuss whatever else they want. They decide, not you, not I, not anybody else.

They can also talk to each other before the conference and make decisions outside the conference.

The conference is the formal event.

If the Justices want, they can reschedule a case, before they discuss the case in conference. This is what happened to Snope and Ocean State Tactical.

After the conference, the court will issue their orders. These orders will be “grant”, “deny”, or “relist”. If a petition is denied, it is over. If the petition is relisted, it means that the Justices will be discussing the petition again, in a future conference. If a petition is granted, then it is going down.

A case that has been relisted can be relisted for any reason. Some known reasons include having time to write a statement to attach to a denial of cert, sometimes it is because they need additional information. One of the common reasons in the Robert’s court is a “suitability” phase.

John Roberts likes to have a case relisted after the Justices have decided, internally, to grant cert. This is to give the law clerks time to thoroughly investigate the case to make sure there are no hidden issues or things that might moot the case.

We now have three Second Amendment cases that have been distributed for conference. One of which is currently scheduled for conference on the 10th.

Infrastructure

We have completed most of the network upgrade. There is still a server that requires a network interface upgrade. There is still a rack that requires a switch upgrade. Not to bad.

We need to finish running the redundant fiber network for backup purposes. Once we finish running the redundant fiber, we will upgrade the primary router and make sure everything understands multipath routing.

All the cluster entities have been placed on virtual networks. This means that they no longer need to worry about multipath nor the physical layout of the networks. A complete separation of tasks.

It turned out that I was having issues with my nodes having their clocks drift/skew relative to each other. This has been fixed, which leads me to want a Stratum-1 NTP server, again.

The last time around, I used a handheld GPS unit as my clock source. It worked wonderfully. This time I’m looking at something in an IoT idea.

I am currently researching NTP servers via Wi-Fi. If that gives good results, I might just do a Raspberry Pi Pico W and put the darn thing outside in a waterproof enclosure. I’m still investigating. I’m also attempting to avoid soldering as somebody broke my Weller soldering station.

Christmas

Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!

We hope you had a joyous Christmas.

Happy New Year!

And we wish you a happy new year! My your fortune be bright.

Question of the week?

Having had time to learn about what happened in western North Caroline after the hurricane, what changes in your prepping model have you made?

Continuing Resolution

DOGE has its first confirmed kill!

The continuing resolution is the legal device that the government has been using to avoid passing a budget. It has been nearly 30 years since Congress completed all its appropriation bills before the start of the new fiscal year.

The last time a budget was passed was in December 2020.

A continuing resolution is supposed to say, “We are going to keep going at the current rate.”

This was not a continuing resolution. This was a barge of pork barrels. Maybe three or four barges.

The last CR to be passed was around 29 pages. This thing was over 1500.

Elon posted a one sentence message to X with a picture of the printed CR. Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?

People decided to read the bill. And what they found was infuriating. In addition, people took to using Grok, X’s AI to look for pork in the bill.

This caused The People to light up the switchboard in Congress demanding that this monstrosity not be passed.

Not Budget Related

It appears there were items in the CR to limit the ability to investigate the J6 commission. To give Congress critters a $100,000/year raise.

It wasn’t just money pork, it was congress critters trying to save their asses.

Too Many Nerd Postings

I have an issue where I need to get packets from here to there securely. Not only must it be secure, it must be fast. Add to this that there is a network routing issue that needs to be solved for multiple systems, the obvious choice is to move to an overlay network.

The overlay network methodology I picked was OVN.

OVN is well documented, if you want to use a OpenStack or Kubernetes. If you don’t need or want the overhead of OpenStack, then things are more complex.

Why am I avoiding K8S? It is too expensive in the cloud. Using a container-based system just makes more sense, for me.

After spending 10 to 12 hours researching and testing, it is difficult to be interested in the stuff going down in politics or the courts.

I wrote my first article on OVN yesterday. It is published but not yet linked. There will be more.

Court Cases

In 2022, we were anticipating the Supreme Court taking the first Second Amendment challenge since the 2010 McDonald case. The first case we were hoping for was New York Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. New York City.

The city and state of New York worked overtime to moot the case, and succeeded.

The Supreme Court instead took the Bruen case, which resulted in a new landscape of Second Amendment litigation.

It felt much like the giddy times after Heller. You might recall that there was a time, shortly after the Heller decision, when Washington, D.C. was a constitutional carry city. They changed that in a hurry.

The same thing happened after Bruen. A boat load of new cases were opened. We waited to see what would happen when the rogue, inferior, courts got involved.

We found that it was the same shit in a different color. The Seventh Circuit court still thinks they are better than the Supreme Court. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth circuit are still playing games to keep unconstitutional laws on the books.

We were hoping that the Supreme Court was going to stomp on those nasty, evil, duplicitous, lying inferior courts. Instead, the Supreme Court kept sending cases back down because they weren’t ripe yet.

Today we are at the same point as we were in 2022. Waiting to see which cases the Supreme Court decides to hear. There are three big ones lined up. My expectation is that they will take all three and consolidate them.

The consolidation will allow them to create a single opinion. This will keep the rogue inferior courts and the state from picking and choosing language from the three different opinions to create confusion.

Question of the Week

When did you hear about the CR? When did you find out it was a pork barrel of non-essential and frankly terrible bills stuffed into a must pass bill?

What is your opinion of Elon’s method of addressing the CR?

It’s 0430 and I’ve finally regained access to my admin account. The good news is none of the other clients seem to have been affected.

The short of it, three days ago I started draining one of my nodes. It completed Sunday.

This allowed me time to move it to its new home IP and network. In the course of doing the move, I found that I didn’t understand OSPF well enough. But that’s working.

What I did find is that my system is both complex and very resilient. The system was slowly losing contact with different nodes in the OVN cluster. But because I had configured it to be an HA system, it all just kept working.

Even when it stopped, the rest of the cluster kept on trucking. No changes could be made, but it just ran.

This gave me a few hours to make sure all the network configurations were “right”.

Then I found more places where the HA was just working because I had not updated configuration files.

It all seems good now. A little slow, but it’s working.

Networking, still

Major reconfigurations took place. Ceph is now running over OVN/OpenVSwitch. The choice was to determine how to have 5 different networks for the cluster network, or to make just one.

One method would have been to make the cluster network a larger network and then have each of the room networks a subnet of those. This would require some magic that I didn’t want to figure out.

The switch I purchased turned out to be a dud, for me. It only supports MTUs up to 1550 bytes. That is not going to work.

It also turns out that I’m becoming a Cisco router person. Seems that all of these routers I’ve been working with use the Cisco CLI and methods. Yeah.

IPsec

I’ve been using virtual private tunnels for a while now. I’ve been using OpenVPN for the most part. I’ve done a couple of other tunnels. Now I am learning VTI and XFRM tunneling over secure IP. It will be interesting.

Daniel Penny, found not Guilty

After deliberating for multiple days, the jury was hung on the charge of second degree manslaughter.

When the judge allowed the prosecution to drop that charge, leaving criminally negligent homicide, most people expected a guilty plea. That is the norm.

In a shocking turn of events, the jury returned a Not Guilty verdict after only a short deliberation. It appears that the jury was not happy with the judge nor with the event as a whole.

Snope (Bianchi) v. Brown (Frosh) rescheduled

Cases that are seeking a writ of certiorari go through different stages. One path is the emergency docket, the other is the regular docket. This case is on its third petition for writ of certiorari. The first was granted, the lower court’s opinion was vacated, and the case was remanded for further work in light of Bruen

The second time. The case was denied certiorari because the case was in an interlocutory state.

This case is in its final form. It is ready to be heard by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court was originally scheduled to discuss this case today. It has been rescheduled.

Those people who spend their lives reading the tea leaves of the Supreme Court all agree. They all agree they have different opinions and the other guys are all wrong.

I am withholding my opinion until I find out when the case is rescheduled.

Question of the Week

Given all the gun laws on the books, both at a federal and state level. What changes that are pro-Second Amendment and achievable would you like to see in the next year?

By achievable, I mean that “total repeal of all gun laws” is not an achievable goal for 2025.

Filler

Depression has been making it difficult to focus. There are some Supreme Court cases I should look at. There are some other cases I need to check in on.

Networking and computer stuff is a normal fall back for me. They are subjects that I can talk about without research. I just know this stuff.

TDS

X is full of TDS. People make claims as to what Trump said, then attack what they think he meant. Often when he didn’t say the things they claim he said.

People make unfounded claims.

People asking for explanations or reasons. Calmly saying they are going to ignore anything offensive. Then being offensive to anything that isn’t anti-Trump.

It is draining.

The hits keep coming

In 1987, the Democrats set the tone for all forthcoming republican nominations to the Supreme Court. Ted Kennedy called Robert Bork, saying “Robert Bork’s America” [would be] a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

It only got worse for Justice Thomas.

Today, we are seeing the left wing rollout every standard accusation possible for every Trump nominee. It is disgusting.

Question of the Week

What government program or agency do you see as the most wasteful of taxpayer money?

Speak softly and carry a big stick

Trump might not talk softly, but he does have a big stick.

While the left is melting down and calling us stupid, Trump announced that he would impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada if certain conditions were not met.

The opposition party in Canada is yelling at the government to fix it fast, before January 20th.

The Mexican President turned back a migrant convoy before it reached the US border.

Turkey Leftovers

My son made it home from collage late Wednesday. So my wife made a turkey for him tonight. To go with the larger turkey, we will have for Friendsgiving on Saturday.

It was nice to have young muscles on call. I had him move the arbor press. I can now recover my table saw and work on some woodworking projects.

It was pleasant listening to him talk about classes. It was a bit sad that I knew much of the theory of what he was working on/learning.

He has decided he is going to get an internship to get some hands-on experience to go with his classroom and lab work.

I’m proud of him.

Nerding one: OVN networking

I thought I had a handle on OVN networking. My tests were showing good connectivity. It should have just worked.

I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around some concepts in OVN. One of them finally clicked, improving my life.

When you create a logical switch, nothing is connected. You can create logical switch ports which must be attached to a logical switch.

There are three types of ports I deal with, ports that are connected to virtual interfaces, such as a VM creates, ports that are attached to logical routers, and ports that are connected to the local network.

It was my understanding that if I wanted a high availability network, I would need to configure a distributed gateway.

When I did, I got dropped packets. If I reduced the HA gateway to a single node, no more dropped packets. Also, no HA.

An article appeared. It indicated that I needed a different logical switch to make everything work.

The issue was that the DMZ is a logical switch that is a part of the physical network. My logical router is attached to the DMZ, so attached to the physical network.

What I required was a second router to be that gateway. It exists on the physical network on multiple chassis, but it is connected to the JOIN logical switch, which is stable. This fixed all my issues with that part of the networking.

Another step in the right direction.

Nerding two: Moving machines

THE PSU for one set of machines is running near limits. I need to move at least one node to a different PSU.

The correct method to use is to create a new subnet for the new location, feed it back to the primary router, and start moving from an L2 network to an L3 network.

The issue is that Ceph wants all the data nodes to reside on the same network. The public side is also one network.

The fix was in my hands, see above about OVN.

I would move the OSD’s from the physical network to a logical network, and it all would just work. All testing showed it would work.

I started the process, and it appeared that the OSD’s did not like living on two nets at the same time. So I moved to a single network, the new network address range.

There were still some issues, so I moved all the hosts and the monitors to the new network.

And lost access to the cluster. It just stopped responding.

The indicated methods of bringing it back to life failed.

I ended up having to manually edit about 40 files to restore a working configuration.

Everything seems to be working now. But it is 0300 and I’ve been fighting this for 5 hours.

Conclusion

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

Question of the week

The Department of Education was created by an act of congress. The President can’t dissolve it with the stroke of a pen. That would require another act of congress.

What he can do is RIF the heck out of it, reducing the staff to a more manageable level.

My question for you is: What tasks, if any, should the DOE still perform?

Our Next AG?

You have to wonder if Matt knew how much push back there would be? Regardless, he functioned as a fabulous stalking horse.

Network Nerding

So when is a cluster not a cluster nor a cluster f___, nor a f___ing cluster?

When you are talking about OVN/OVS.

OVN provides for a clustered database. This is what is used to control the OVS network mesh. The clustered database should exist on 3 or 5 different nodes.

The OVS network mesh is a collection of individual nodes, running a virtual switch, that are meshed via tunnels. This is not a cluster.

A network node requires OVS-switchd and a copy of the local OVSDB. That’s it.

If you want OVN over the top, you need to add ovn-controller to the node, which talks to the OVN database cluster and the OVSDB.

Once I got that through my dense head, this stuff started to make sense. I’m now to the point where I can bring up a 6 node system, 3 OVN controllers and 4 network nodes in just an hour or so. And it all just works. I’m busy finishing some documentation that I will publish.

50,000 Words

Ally has been going great guns on her next cookbook. November is national novel writing month.

The goal is to write a 50,000 word first draft or part of a first draft in the month of November. You can then edit, add to, or finish your novel over the coming months.

I’m proud of her. This will be the 5th year, I think I have that right, where she has made her 50,000+ words for the Month of November.

Lever Guns

I love my lever guns. Has anybody had hands on the new “modern” lever guns? By modern, I mean a lever gun firing a modern caliber out of a box magazine.

Introspection

This has been a long week of the left showing an enormous amount of introspection, looking at themselves to see why they lost the election…

Who am I kidding, the number who are actually looking at themselves appears to be so small compared to the complete melt down of why you are bad for voting for Trump.

Nerd Network Stuff

There are times when I feel so slow. I’ve been learning about OpenvSwitch and OVN. There are some great advantages to using it.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever easy.

I know how networks work. I’ve been in the trenches, bit fiddling on the wire, since the late 80s. This means I understand all these logical switches and logical routers that OVN uses.

Nope. I don’t.

The euphony that hit today? Open Virtual Networks use tables to describe logical devices. It translates those to code. That code is then “compiled” and handed to OpenvSwitch.

This is not “networking” this is “programming”. There are many things that “just work” in the networking world, which doesn’t translate to this programming perspective.

I’ve started reading the code, it is now starting to make more sense.

Fetterman

Or as he is better known, Lurch, has lurched to the right.

His race was seemingly pretty corrupt, and I knew he was going to be another Democrat rubber stamp.

He has turned out to be a bit better than expected:

Not a bad description of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for AG.

The left can’t keep up

I figure that by January, the left is going to have lost half of its people to heart attacks and strokes. Trump is announcing nomination after nomination.

He is announcing them so rapidly that the MSM can’t keep up and Trump is blowing the news cycle right out of the water.

I like winning

Conclusion

What has been your favorite nomination, so fart, and why?

Nerd Stuff

Had all the parts in hand. I opened up the case. Proceed to install the new NIC, another hard drive. Realize I need to go fetch a SATA cable. Go to plug in the power to the drive… Who the heck only puts one SATA power connector in a modern computer power supply!

ARGH.

The drive is still in the box, the correct adapters will be here shortly, and I will power up that drive and add it to the cluster.

Bloggers stepping over the line

Thursday, Allyson was shown a post by her BFF. The gist was, “if you voted for Trump, you are dead to me.” It wasn’t directed at Allyson, but Allyson was part of the target group.

Emotions are running high. For me, it is a joy and lightness I have not felt in years. I have taken delight in poking the leftists that have been melting down.

I have lived with the knowledge that the left will vandalize my property if I show support for the Republican Party. I’ve kept my mouth shut and just kept on keeping on.

Allyson has been on the left for so long, she didn’t believe my fears of being attacked for not toeing the Democrat party line.

Yesterday, she learned in a very personal way. And it hurt.

She wants compassion from the left. She wants them to be the good people she knew them to be. To have people she loved, and respected become unhinged broke her.

She will be posting. She has asked me to moderate her replies.

She broke the rule. She was a dick. She made person, if veiled, attacks on individuals. This will not and is not tolerated.

I’m sorry that it got to this point.

The Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy Dance

There are two Supreme Court Justices that have expressed an interest in leaving the court. Another is thinking about it. A fourth is in bad health.

Our guys will not Ruth it up. They will retire after the Snope opinion issues. That is my opinion. I think we might see another of our people retire.

It would be horrible if illness forced the last Justice to leave the court, but it would move another seat back to the constitution.

If this happens, we will have a majority of originalists on the Supreme court for the next 30 years, or more.

Trifecta

Not yet. We have the Senate. This allows us to put more constitutional originalists in the inferior courts. This is great. It means we can confirm Supreme Court nominees over the objections of the Democrats.

We have the Presidency. Even if they were to succeed in assassinating Trump, at this point, JD will become the president. He would become President four years earlier than I expect. Not particularly concerned — now. Monday, it was an issue.

We do not, yet, control the house. As of 2000, Thursday, we had 210 seats in the House. There are 27 seats still to be called. Some races are very close. We need 218.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Friends and Family

I lost my Mother and my Father this year. They passed. I lost my brother when he exposed his evil side. I hope I gained family in The Cousins.

My parents were Republicans until they drifted in to the propaganda of CNN. I never felt that I would be disowned for still being conservative when they no longer were.

Many of us have had to deal with friends and family that cannot tolerate those on the right. They have removed us from their lives.

If you have had an experience where a friend or family member who has expressed that you are still loved or still a friend, regardless of your politics, please share those positive stories.

I really need some positive stories about people on the left.

Please have a great weekend

Networking

This week has had a few successes. I was able to upgrade one node to 10 Gbit/second and to hand it some more disk. Everything seems to be working. More upgrades are slowly happening.

Physical, OpenVSwitch, OVN, Oh My.

Physical networking has many different levels. The easiest, which most people deal with, is Level2 or L2. At L2, you plug cables in, and it just works. It really is that simple.

There are some exceptions, the L2 switch might not support the speed that you want, or you might need power on that port, but by and large, it is simple.

Level 3 devices start to get a bit more complicated. Cisco has made an entire business model out of making Level 3 devices.

The difference is that a L3 device provides routing. Modern L3 devices also provide services, such as DHCP or SNMP. It also should have some routing protocols implemented, but this is not required. There are so many features that it gets complicated fast.

OpenVSwitch was designed to provide both virtual and physical packet switching. Instead of using cables, it uses programming, called logical flows. The cool thing is that these logical flows can be pushed down into the network interface to run below the kernel.

OVN or Open Virtual Network is layered on top of OpenVSwitch, but does not require OpenVSwitch. As long as all you are doing is building and looking at switch and router configurations, there is no requirement to actually interact with OpenVSwitch

OVN has a “north” and a “south” side. On the north side, you define logical devices and how those devices are interconnected. A process is tasked to convert those logical devices and interconnections into datapaths and logical flows on the south side.

Another process then converts those datapaths and logical flows into open flow. These are what do the real work.

Now the fun part. All of these pieces need to talk to each other and all the communications paths are configured.

I have something working. Maybe it is right? It is closer to right than I expected.

But how do we get there from here?

Which takes us into the world of routing. I’m learning about OSPF. Which caused me to have to relearn about multicasting. Which isn’t working for me yet.

Regardless, my network knowledge is better and getting better.

Monitoring

I wondered through one of the node areas yesterday and noticed that one of the KVM’s had been left active on a node. Normally, I want them turned off so I don’t get screen burn in.

On the screen were some disk errors. This is a not good thing. These leads to going back to the monitoring game.

I’ve been studiously ignoring Prometheus for years now. I took the plunge, and it isn’t as bad as I first thought it was. Now to figure out how to use Grafana. It is powerful, but I don’t have the insight I need to know how to do things. That’s next week’s learning task.

Piles of Garbage

If the left didn’t have double standards, they would have no standards at all.

The latest example of this is that a comedian, who’s routine is to insult people, made a joke about Puerto Rico. It didn’t go over well with the audience. Part of that is a lack of context.

It appears that a few years ago a hurricane went through and blew tons and tons of garbage into the sea. Since that time, it has been washing up on the shores. The people have to clean up the beaches constantly, leading them to have a running joke about living on an island of garbage. Note: This is a second hand story.

That’s not important. What is important is that the left seized on this to claim that every person associated with Trump, like you and me, is racist and hates Puerto Ricans.

Never mind the name-calling that comes out of their people, every single day. They have attempted to label us with every vile label they can come up with. Nazi comes to mind.

The hit pieces had just come up to speed when Joe stepped into it with both clown sized feet. He was recorded as calling Trump supporters “garbage”.

Yeah, that really happened.

The short videos have been laugh-out-loud funny. In addition, people have taken to wearing garbage bags to vote. It can’t be a political statement because the media and the White House are claiming that Joe didn’t say what he is on video saying.

In an epic troll, Trump arrived at his rally in a white garbage truck with “Trump” on the side. He wore an orange hi-vis vest into the rally and proceeded to poke fun at himself.

Tuesday is your last day to Vote!

Go VOTE!

The Trumpet Calls of Battle

The left is prepared to do violence if Trump wins. The Right is in FAFO mode. The magazines have been topped off. The firearms cleaned and put away.

It could get spicy out there, people. Keep your head on a swivel.

Have you spotted anything hinky?

People acting like poll workers that aren’t? Cops obeying pseudo poll workers? People being told to leave the lines to vote?

Hundreds of reports of that sort of thing happening in PA.