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Post Schedules

The current scheduling is that I post once per day, unless Ally takes Tuesday Tunes.

Monday: Ally — Food
Tuesday: Chris — Tuesday Tunes
Wednesday: Ally — Politics, From Behind Enemy Lines
Thursday:
Friday: Chris — Friday Feedback, Ally — Prepping
Saturday:
Sunday:

I’m trying to do at least one Legal post per week. They take a long time to read, write and document. At times, it is overwhelming. A single case might have a few hundred pages per filing with hundreds of filings.

Court Progress

Some of the cases that I have been filing have started moving again. There is always the speed bump in the circuit courts after oral arguments and before they issue their opinion.

Prepping

Ally has been writing a series on how to prepare. If you would like to contribute an article, please send it to us as a LibreOffice, Google Doc, or a Microsoft Word document.

Bragging Rights/links

Ally wants to start a page of cross-links. If you make something that you want people to look at, send us the link where people can get it and a couple of paragraphs describing it along with a single image.

Smears

One of the things I noticed many years ago was that if a dogcatcher in bod ump boondocks makes a stupid remark, and they are a Republican or conservative, the media shoves a microphone into every well-known Republican demanding that they renounce said dogcatcher.

Some well-known Democrat does something outlandish or says something outlandish and there are crickets.

One of the things I think I am noticing is that conservatives are being smeared, in general, by the left searching out the little man, standing on a soapbox in front of 3 people spouting stupid stuff (and two are his mother and father, the third is the reporter). They take whatever this little man says and amplify it to an extreme.

This makes it seem like there is a loud call on the right to do the stupid things the little man talks about.

The other smear, of course, is directed at Trump. Some has-been model claims that he was hanging with Epstein, and while with Epstein touched her in a sexual manner without her consent.

Reminds me of the Borking of Judge Bork. The slander of Justice Thomas. The public lynching of Justice Kavanaugh.

Feedback

Have a fantastic weekend. We’d love to hear from you. Ask a question, send us on a topic hunt, share a news site of interest.

Indicators

We took my daughter’s care up to have work done on it. The auto shop is a local business doing great work. While there, we got into a discussion with a young lady.

She made the statement that she might be trading in her car sooner if the economy improves after the election. I.e., if Trump wins.

We got to talking politics. She asked if we are seeing more Trump signs this election.

This made me think about it. There are Trump signs in all the public places. As expected. There are a few more yard signs around, but still not many. It is as if people were worried about expressing their support for Trump. Go figure.

What I have noticed is that there are fewer Kamala/Walz signs. About half as many as I would expect.

Is this an indicator of how the election will go? I’m always unhappy when my state is shown as deep blue for the coming election. We were a red state. Then purple. Now dark blue.

The Interview

Ok, I didn’t watch it. I can’t stand to watch her talking, much less listen to her. X has been blowing up with just how badly she performed.

What was mind-boggling was the number of posts claiming she did well. Now if only the media would take off the kid gloves and interview Trump as aggressively as they did Kamala.

The ratio is beautiful. The question I had was, “why?” Why would they post something so ridiculous? Anybody who has half a brain knows that Trump is out there doing interviews, sometimes multiple interviews per day.

We have all seen just how biased the media is against him. It was on full display during the presidential debate.

The answer? In my opinion, the posts/tweets are not directed at The People. It is directed at the base.

The democrat base has been conditioned to treat anything that comes from the right as lies. Even though Fox has never been a “Right” media source, they were much more balanced than the other media sources. Thus, the left considers everything that Fox does as tainted, lies, misinformation.

That base is never going to watch the Fox interview of Kamala. What they will do is read these posts, have it confirmed by the rest of their bubble friends, and know that Kamala did a fantastic job in a hostile interview that got testy.

Document Library

I have copies of all of Gun Free Zone’s library. I will start putting them up. I’m also going to reach out to some of the other sites that have libraries to make copies to host here.

I have a fairly complete set of FMs that I downloaded from someplace. They will go up as well.

Technical Package

According to Ian, Gun Jesus, one of the reasons it is difficult to manufacture modern versions of older firearms is that we have lost the technical package.

If I understand it correctly, the Technical Package is the documents that give the directions on how to convert blueprints into actual objects.

As an example, it can be faster to drill a series of holes and then mill out the metal between the holes than to just mill a pocket. Those decisions are important.

Another example is documenting the order of operations. When machining an item, we need to determine the sequence that will be performed on the item. First op might be all the roughing operations. Second op would be the finishing operations. Third op would be the heat treat, and fourth op would be grinding to dimension.

Here is a different, simple instruction. The drawing for the AR15 lower receiver calls for a 0.376 +/- 0.001 hole for the selector switch. The easiest method to do this is to drill a 23/64 (0.3593) hole and then ream it to 0.376.

I do not believe I have ever seen a technical package for a firearm. I’d love to get one for the AR15/M4.

Homeowner Laments

Our house is one that “just grewed.” It was likely built as a summer cottage in the 40s. From there it was extended. Multiple times.

I’ve been able to piece out some of that growth. My office was likely a porch at some point, or mud room for people coming into the house. The reloading room, off the office and dining room, used to be a kitchen or bathroom. It still has a small sink in it.

The entrance to the basement was in the reloading room. At sometime in the past it was covered over. The stairs are still in the basement, leading up to a solid floor. Currently, the entrance to the basement is from the outside.

After expansion, the house had one full bath, between the master bedroom and a secondary bedroom. That is properly positioned for the water supply to the house and the sewage connection. The “new” kitchen is at the other end of the “old” part of the house. It was a separate extension.

The water from the kitchen sink used to go into a copper pipe that slanted across the width of the house and then down the length of the house to tie into the sewer line.

When they extended the house the last time, they added a second bathroom. This was at the opposite end of the house from the sewer connection. There was no way to get the waste from the second bathroom to the sewer connection by gravity alone.

This is not a problem. You use a sewage sump/ejector. This is a sealed tub that collects waste until the float valve turns on the ejector pump. The ejector pump then shoots the waste up the exhaust pipe to the ceiling of the basement where it can then travel, via gravity, to the sewer connection. All good.

We had an issue where the pooper shooter stopped shooting poop. This required my son and I to go through each clean out to make sure that nothing was stopping up the flow.

Nasty, yucky work. Finally, it required the plumber to come fix the pooper shooter proper. The issue? Grease from the kitchen sink had formed a dam at the bottom of the pooper shooter, keeping the pump from working.

So why is this an issue? Ever since that fix, we’ve had an off and on problem with horrible smells.

Today, I think I located the source.

One of those clean out plugs isn’t fully sealing. My fun for the weekend is to make sure that nobody flushes while I take the plug out, clean the threads, then replace the plug with sealer to keep the smell in the pipes.

Every so often, I wish I were a renter, again.

Question For You

If you were forced to travel in a hurry, to escape the zombie’s (democrat city dwellers) and were limited to one handgun and one rifle, what calibers would you choose?

I would love to have a carbine in .45 ACP. I don’t, so that puts the PC 9 and Glock right up there. On the other hand, I might take the Winchester Model ’94 in 30-30 with a 1911. Good stopping power without the scare factor.

The CETME in 7.62×51 sounds nice, but I’m not sure. M1 in 30-06?

Please let us know in the comments.

On desktops, the right side panel has a new item, navigation links. The first link is to the M4A1 design documents. These are the blueprints for the M4A1. As far as I can tell, they are a complete package.

These do not include tooling or how to documents, they are just the blueprints.

These prints are to pretty modern standards, but easy enough to read.

One fun thing I noticed was that they will often call out positions based on changing datum. A common datum is to consider the center of the front takedown pin to be 0,0. They do seem to use that as a starting point, but the trigger, selector and auto-seer holes are relative to the hammer pin hole.

This is because the relationship between those holes is critical, while their placement relative to the take-down bin is not.

For those on small screens, where the right-hand column is missing, scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find the link there.

M4A1 Design Documents

Nerd Babble

“Switch in the wrong direction…” oh my, that does sound bad.

We use VLANs for isolating network traffic. Our switches will happily forward all VLANs as on all ports. So a tagged VLAN on port 1 will be transmitted to port 2, if port two responds with an answer on the VLAN. It all just works.

The new switches are configured so that all the ports are in “access” mode. Access mode means that VLAN traffic does not move across the switch. All of our testing showed that the new switches would just work.

They did, for the primary, untagged network. Unfortunately, the new switch is “smarter” and refused to forward VLAN traffic.

The idea of a port in “access” mode is that you can plug an IoT item, think security camera, into a port. All traffic from that port is then forwarded as VLAN traffic, by configuration. This means that the IoT item doesn’t need to support VLANs nor do you have to configure it.

By changing the ports to the correct setting, things just started to work.

FEMA

“We are the government, and we are here to fuck things up.”

I’m getting some back channel reports that things have gone kinetic down in the disaster area. These are good ol’ boys and they understand the three S’s. Shoot, Shovel, Shut up.

My reports say that looters were hitting some communities. The looters have gone missing. SSS.

It is unclear if the looters in question had government ID.

The number of reports of the government messing things up down there is growing daily.

The latest story was of one of the helicopter teams having rescued an elderly couple attempted to get them checked into a local hotel, outside the disaster area. They were turned away because there were no vacancies.

The hotel was filled with government employees.

The pilot was talking about how they had been living out of their trucks so that there was room for those that needed it in the hotels.

Seems the government is not as thoughtful.

Pay careful attention to the words coming out of the puppet and his handlers.

They appear to have deployed 1000 men to the disaster area. They are claiming that these 1000 men are joining 6000 men already on the ground at work.

Yes, there are 6000 military men on the ground, getting the job done. They are volunteers there as citizens, not as government employees. They are not under the command of anybody in the government.

Don’t trust what the MSM says, don’t trust what the government says. Verify everything. Don’t trust my words, check for yourself.

Ally suggests TikTok. I’m using X.

Iran, the Target

Watching my feed blowup over the last 48 hours regarding Iran’s open attack on Israel has been mind-blowing. Hundreds of accounts showing the same footage of explosions in the distance while claiming huge victories for Iran.

Israel’s ability to wage war was not affected. We know because of the targeted strikes carried out Thursday night.

Query

Does anybody have firsthand knowledge of what’s going on down in the disaster area?

Personal

It has been difficult for me since my Father passed. It isn’t that I interacted with him that much, it is that the safety net is gone. In addition, it turns out that my brother is pretty darn evil.

This is as close as I’ve come to talking about his actions in public.

In the midst of this, a client I work with stepped up as a friend. The 30 minutes of dumping and ranting made things a little better.

Thank you my friend.

What you don’t know (Nerd)

I started doing network administration in 1985 time frame. We were using 10base2 and X.25. Most of our equipment communicated with the mainframes via 9600 baud connections.

Having blazing fast 5Mb connections was spectacular. We used NFS extensively.

Our long haul communications were done via a 56Kbit connection.

When I started work in Maryland, we were still using 10base2 with a few 10baseT hubs. It was “fast enough”.

Later, some of our machines started showing up with high-speed networking, 100baseT. With jumbo packets, we were starting to get there.

Still later, we started using Fiber, this got us up to around 155Mb. This meant, for the first time, our network was faster than our local drives. Using NFS was no longer a bottleneck, for those machines that were fiber attached to each other.

The house network has been a 1Gbit network for a few years. I found out in the last couple of weeks that my primary machine is actually 2.5Gbit. Unfortunately, all the switches and routers in the house top out at 1Gbit.

Today I installed my first 10Gbit switch. It has 4 2.5Gbit RJ45 ports and 2 10Gbit SFP+ ports. This has 3 ceph nodes plugged into it. Those nodes will get NIC upgrades in the future to take them up to 10Gibit speeds.

I have one SFP+ module, it is a 10Gbit RJ45 connector. This means that it connects back to the main house switch at 10Gbit. The main house switch only supports 1Gbit today.

So what is the plan? I will be deploying a dual network system in the house. The server boxes/nodes will have 10Gbit NICs in them, each with two ports. One will connect to the high-speed network, the other to the 1Gbit network.

The 10Gbit net will handle all the Ceph and Docker traffic. Locally mounted ceph file systems will use the loop back connection, or they will be attached to the 10Gbit network.

This will make the ceph file systems seem much faster.

This will be accomplished with 3 4+2 switches and one 8 SFP+ switch. It should all just work.

Except, I had to learn all about fiber. I’ve decided to connect these switches with fiber. After far too many pages of documentation, I’ve decided on LC to LC connectors on OM4 cables. Some cables will be rated for outdoor, underground. This is basically an armored cable. The others will be properly rated for the areas they are in.

According to my reading, these OM4 cables should be good to around 40Gbit with the right transceivers and switches.

It is all Trump’s Fault

I’m getting disgusted by leftist idiots thinking that everything is Trump’s fault. Somebody shoots Trump? It is his nasty words and tweets that are the cause. Somebody sets up an ambush for Trump? His fault for pointing out that illegal immigrants are eating pets.

Trump is doing a meet and greet at a grocery store. The lady checking out loses track of the total and goes over budget. Trump peels off some bills and hands it to the cashier to take care of that lady’s shortfall, as well as others in the store.

The left accuses him of buying votes.

The Supreme Court respects the law, the outcome-driven leftists on the court spit and sputter and the left screams that Trump, who is too stupid to tie his shoes, foresaw these cases and picked justices to rule in this way, per his bidding.

If Trump were to run into a burning building to save a child, the media, and the left would scream he was stealing jobs from hardworking Firefighters.

In the same vain, a group representing the immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have filed suit against Trump and Vance for defaming the poor hardworking immigrants.

Note, they are “legally” in Springfield because they entered the US via a port of entry and claimed asylum.

Take a look at —HVGIQ: Haiti, Human Varieties, (last visited Sep. 27, 2024) to see the probable quality of these immigrants.

Assassination Attempts

This is getting old. Trump is currently averaging two assassination attempts per month. This does count Iran posting a fantasy about how they are going to use their super high-tech equipment to kill Trump.

Skills

Ally was doing her look through Craig’s list and such when she noticed that somebody was giving away a floor loom.

We are now the proud owners of a 4 shaft, 6 treadle 40″ floor loom in excellent shape. We will need to replace the reed, get some shuttles, and make a raddle and then dress the loom.

I will need to dig up my weaving books and likely purchase a few. Ally wants to make some period dishrags and a Hudson Blanket. Both of those sound like fun projects.

It Wasn’t My Fault!

I’ve been fighting some new infrastructure and deployment things. In physical premises, we use physically different networking gear for isolation and redundancy. If we want to get fancy, we can set up VPCs and pretend that one physical network is multiple logical networks.

I’ve been using VLANs to accomplish the isolation I want.

On the cloud, I would like to use VPCs. The datacenter I use doesn’t support VPCs. They do offer VLANs. I choose to use them.

The magic of their VLAN is that you create them on the fly. In the GUI, you say “attach a VLAN to interface ETH1”. It then asks you to name the VLAN. All other nodes then use the same name, and they are added to the same VLAN.

The downside is that there is no explicit method to delete a VLAN. If all nodes that were using the VLAN detach the VLAN, then the VLAN is deleted.

For testing, I have a script that deletes all my nodes and all the volumes associated with those nodes. This only takes a few minutes to run.

After I verify that the nodes and volumes are gone, I can start the ansible script to provision the needed nodes, configure them, boot them, configure the OS, install ceph on 4 nodes, docker swarm on 3, and then install the database engines.

Pretty cool. The process of provisioning an instance includes saying that I want a VLAN with a particular tag.

When I ran the playbooks, everything worked correctly. Except that one of my nodes refused to talk to the other nodes on the VLAN.

After escalating, it turns out that some nodes were attached to the old VLAN, which was in the process of being deleted, and the others were in the new VLAN.

It is my belief this was cased by a race condition. Some nodes were assigned the old VLAN while the VLAN was being deleted. The other nodes requested the old VLAN and instead were granted a new one, with the same name as the old one.

*ARGH.* That was many wasted hours.

When was your last range day? What did you take with you

Wednesday was a good day, sort of. I was able to shut down my K8S cluster.

The amount of grief this new fangled thing has given me cannot be overstated.

Bluntly, most of the issues could have been resolved by throwing more money at the problem. K8S does work for large infrastructure solutions. The sort of infrastructure where you have 10+ nodes and each node has 32+ GB of memory.

What does this mean for Troglodite? We are moving sideways to a different type of infrastructure. This is built on more VMs but smaller.

“The” debate happened. It was the first presidential debate I’ve watched in years. I had to tune it out about 15 minutes in, when the referees tackled Trump for the second time. I.e., did a fact check and reported Trump lied when he had not.

It was the three on one that I had hoped not to see.

The number of manipulative things that were done to make Trump look bad.

His microphone was louder. This makes him sound more aggressive.

They were keeping his microphone muted after Kamala stopped talking, he started talking into a dead mic. A second or so later, his mic goes live, but it makes it sound like he is talking over Kamala when he is not.

They asked him questions that were phrased in the negative, they asked her questions phrased in the positive.

The fallout on the debate was surprising. Immediately after the debate, there were all the cheerleaders claiming that Kamala won and talking about how bad Trump was. Many claiming that the fact checking proved that Trump does nothing but lie.

This filled my X feed. More leftist noise than I normally see in a month, all in that first 5 hours.

But, the discussion has morphed into “How bad was ABC? Can we give them a -5 on a scale of 1 to 10?”.

Not just on the right, but CNN is holding up the ABC debate as proof they aren’t leftist. When you lose CNN, you are really messing things up.

Social media, thank you to all of those that are following Follow @vineofliberty.

It is sad, I check the number of followers I have a few times a day, looking for those triple digit follows.

More federal judges are twisting the words of the Supreme Court to get the outcomes they want. Most of those are ending up in court, and losing. Even the Ninth Circus is putting up (temporary) wins for The People.

Have a fantastic weekend!

This week has given me closure on several small projects, all working together to get the right results.

In the old days, each device on the Internet had its individual IP address, today, most devices share their IP address with thousands of other devices. Instead, entire locations hide behind a single IP address.

This is performed with the magic of Network Address Translation (NAT).

To make everything work, I had to have external DNS servers provide the address of a firewall that just happens to perform NAT as well.

That firewall had to be configured to forward allowed ports to a load balancer (HAProxy). Each port of interest being properly configured in the load balancer. The load balancer forwards the traffic to a reverse proxy (Traefik) running a docker swarm over a ceph file system.

Each service within the swarm must be configured within the swarm. The swarm just be configured for networking.

All of this is supposed to “just work”.

It is all working now. Not because it just works. The magic was to start inside a docker container, close to the service, verify that service, then move outward.

Along the way, the local DNS server had to provide overrides so that the firewall didn’t have to do hairpin configurations for each port.

For testing purposes, we had to set up an internal ACME server, which is working wonderfully.

The Vine of Liberty now lives on this new infrastructure. There are only a few more pieces to move, and I will be done with k8s.

My father passed on Wednesday, September 4th, 2024. He joins my mother, who passed earlier this year.

Even though I am over 60, this is hitting me hard. My entire life, I have felt able to reach for my dreams, to risk so much because I knew my parents were there as a safety net.

It appears that my parents created a financial safety net for their grandchildren and children, we are working through the family trauma to make sure everything works out “right”.

We are still looking for somebody to do engagement farming on X/Twitter. If you are interested, please contact me.

It has taken me a while to realize that this is my site now. In the past, I left the politics to Miguel and J.Kb. I have decided to post a few more political articles.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Today my father passed. He was missing his wife, Prue, of 64 years. For the last 4 months, since her passing, he has been asking everybody that talks to him if they have seen Prue.

I believe he is in a better place, with his wife, young and joyful, once again.

The blog has now been moved to a temporary server. I hope that it will be more stable. I have to move the citation server. Once that is moved, GFZ and Vine Of Liberty will be free of K8S.

I have a few other websites to move, but I am making great progress.

In the Supreme Court of Mass acutes, we had a Second Amendment win. They found that knives are arms under the plain text of the Second Amendment. As such, it was the government’s burden to show that the current regulation, a ban on switch-blade knives, was consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulations.

The state did not meet their burden, the law is facially unconstitutional.

There have been a few more wins at the district court level.

In many circuits, the district judges are applying Bruen faithfully. This led to a cascade of wins for the Second Amendment.

It is at the circuit court level where most of the clown show exists. The Fourth, Ninth, Seventh, and Second come to mind.

Answering the question of the fastest way from sheep to cap, socks or tunic. The answer is to knit them. It is but a short time to get from clean fleece to yarn suitable for knitting with.

The comments are of course open.

These are people you should know about. They are often the people to put together the NPC videos of all the MSM saying the same thing of the same scripts.

They are also the people who provide the positive vs. negative percentages for MSM.

Biden Lashes Out After Judge Pauses His Executive Order Rewarding Long-Term Illegal Aliens with Path to Citizenship https://t.co/8Tha4Bzny3

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 29, 2024