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SCOTUS watch

There are two important Second Amendment cases being discussed by the Supreme Court today. Snope and Ocean State Tactical

The questions presented are assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. Both made up terms.

This is not the limit of what the opinion might cover.

This evening I’ll be checking for miscellaneous orders by the Supreme Court. I don’t expect anything. Later tonight or early tomorrow, I’ll see a video by Mark Smith telling me why I should panic.

Monday morning I’ll see the orders list issued by the Supreme Court. I expect to see the these cases granted cert. If not, I’ll find an update that evening on the dockets telling me they have been relisted.

My match suggests we have until about February 15 to have the grant in hand before I start to worry.

Trump is the President⁣

It is a joyous week. The wins keep happening. The left is melting down in so many ways.

The Games Democrats Play

The Democrats are delaying the confirmation of some of Trump’s cabinet picks. Just game playing. It means we are delayed a week before Pam Bondi(sp?) is confirmed.

They Want Us To Hurt

I come from a place of “leave me alone. Get off my Lawn”. The left seems to come from the place of “I’m in pain, you should hurt more.”

I’m sick of it. Ally is sick of it.

Given any opportunity, they will hurt you.

The big one is Elon’s “My heart goes out to you.” gesture. The left decided it was a NAZI salute. If you argue that it isn’t, then you are stupid.

In Ally’s case, when that didn’t work, they told her that a dead friend would be rolling over in his grave over her not believing that Elon is an evil NAZI.

AI For the win?

I’ve taken to reading the short AI results for many of my technical searches.

This works well. Occasionally, it is a little off, but the summary is often good. And the links to the articles that it is summarizing are right there.

The other night, I asked it, “how far is 1ms at the speed of light?” It gave me an answer that was off by 3 powers of 10.

Because I had come to “trust” most of its answers and the numbers felt right, I didn’t bother to verify the match.

This lead me to telling the story of the picosecond but calling it a nanosecond.

Trust, but verify.

Question of the week

What is the best thing you’ve seen since Trump took office, again?

Returning to Normal

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and new year. Here, we are slowly returning to normal. Once child has returned to school and the other is scheduled to head back on Sunday.

We haven’t gotten the tree down and put away, but it is on to-do list.

Almost all the junk food is gone. Which is good for me. Meals are back to normal.

You get what you pay for

I needed to solder a header onto a GPS board. No problem, I just dig out the Weller 921ZX. Oops, sometime in the past 10 years since I used it, it was dropped and the iron broke.

No problem, this is a serious brand, they will have replacement parts.

Except they don’t. This was a lower cost product when I purchased it. It has been discontinued. There are no replacement parts available.

So I bought a cheap version. And I got exactly what I paid for. The indicator light doesn’t indicate very well. When it was reporting 500F, it wouldn’t even tin the tip. I had to crank the thing to 800F before it started to perform reasonably.

It will do for now. I’ve put the project on hold until finances get a bit better.

Wow, this is spectacular, and bad

Years ago, my client was unhappy with the Wi-Fi in the office. He went to one of my co-workers, a programmer, not a system admin, not a network admin, a programmer, and asked if it was ok to buy a particular, expensive, router.

It arrived, he plugged it in, in place of the access point I had in place and the network died. They couldn’t get Wi-Fi to their MacBooks. The world was pretty bad.

Of course, this didn’t set off any alarms for me because I monitor the hardwired servers and such.

When I arrived the next day, they told me in a panic what was happening. I retrieved the login credentials for the new access point, discovered it was an “all in one” router, switch, access point. I got it mostly configured to work.

Boss complains about the Wi-Fi. I explain that they are in a building with multiple networks, all competing for the same frequencies. That I could fix it if he gave me the budget to do so. Having just spent all this money on a home gamer’s super router, he wasn’t interested.

He stumbles on somebody doing network mapping in the building. He pays this random dude to do network mapping for him.

Next time I’m in, he shows me the report that he paid for and explains that we are in a very crowded network area and that we had to fix it.

His answer was “more power”. I again offered to fix it.

He finally gave in, I installed Ubiquiti UFOs. These are their PoE Wi-Fi access points. Not routers, access points. They have a central management software. I installed 4 of them in the office. Told them to play nice with each other. Our Wi-Fi network issues went away.

These devices could overpower most routers, but they didn’t have to. They handled hand-offs seamlessly so they could use lower power and only cover the areas they were assigned to.

In other words, fantastic equipment at a reasonable cost.

I was also using their routers. Again, good quality at a good price.

Over the years, that love for Ubiquiti has faded. I still love their UFOs. It is their routers that are the issue.

The cost of their higher – end routers is a bit much for what you get. And their configuration method is based on VyOS.

It is time to replace those routers. I’ve done it twice with upgrading in the same product line. It is time to step away from their routers.

pfSense

pfSense is a firewall router that runs on FreeBSD on almost any equipment. The hardware requirements are trivial. Two network ports, that’s all.

This became viable because I found a dirt cheap “miniPC”. It uses an Intel n100, which is fast enough for what I need.

But what makes it truly remarkable is that it comes with 2 10G SFP+ ports, 2 2.5G Ethernet ports, 2 USB 3, 2 USB 2, 1 USB-C, another USB port, two HDMI ports, and more.

It has two comm ports on headers, and a large set of GPIO pins. It has an internal SATA port as well. 2 M.2 ports for SSD and 1 M.2 port for Wi-Fi. The entire thing comes in an extruded aluminum case with a fan. So far, I’ve been happy with it.

So what’s the issue? It’s made in China and there is no datasheet for the motherboard. This means I require a new skill, decoding pinouts.

Moreover, FreeBSD (the base OS of pfSense) doesn’t seem to expose the GPIO ports the same way as Linux would. This means I can’t use the GPIO for the PPS.

Convicted Felon

The saga continues. Trump has been certified as the winner of the 2024 election. A county judge out of New York wants to brand him a felon in an attempt to keep him from taking office.

To that end, he intends to sentence Trump before the inauguration.

What a crock.

The Excitement Builds

If you are reading this on Friday the 10th, the Supreme Court is or was in conference discussing cases they will accept. Three of those cases are Second Amendment Cases.

Orders will be released on Monday or Tuesday. As long as we do not see “denied”, we are looking good.

Question of the Week

Do you think that the Democrats are going to try anything on inauguration day? Either at the mob end of things or in the halls of Congress?

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?

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.