• Next Monday we will see Snope and Ocean State Tactical granted cert or relisted.

    Right now, there are 100s of lawyers writing briefs for these cases. I expect to see over a thousand pages submitted to the Supreme Court.

    Bruen was distributed for Conference on 4/1/2021, 4/16/2021, and 4/23/2021. Cert was granted 4/26/2021.

    The parties requested, and were granted, two extensions to file briefs on the merits.

    From the time of being granted certiorari, the petitioner has 45 days to file their initial brief. The opposing party has 30 days from then to respond. Extensions may be granted at the discretion of the Court.

    From there, the petitioner can file a reply brief. The opposing party can file a reply brief.

    About 100 days total, if everybody stays on schedule.

    The case was scheduled for oral arguments on 8/15/2021. The date for arguments was set for November 3rd, 2021.

    The case was argued on 11/3/2021.

    The court published their opinion on 6/23/2022 with the judgement being issued on 7/25/2022.

    Because the case was conferenced in April, the case wasn’t heard in the 2021 term. We are teed up to have the opinion issue for these cases in June 2025.

            

  • In the order list for 2025-01-13 we have information on our three Second Amendment Cases.

    Gray v. Jennings on how preliminary injunctions should be handled, DENIED.

    Given that they were denied, I expect that we will see the case GVR once our Second Amendment case is heard.

    Correction: They were denied Cert. It cannot then be GVR. This case will go back to the district court to move past the preliminary injunction stage.

    Snope Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban. Nothing in the orders. I wasn’t expecting this. I don’t know what it means.

    Ocean State Tactical Rhode Island’s “large capacity” magazine ban. Nothing in the orders.

    More: There is another reason that SCOTUS doesn’t put cases in the orders after conference. That is, if they have decided to deny cert, but there are one or more justices that want to write a statement regarding the denial.

    If this is the case, this is bad news for us.

    I hope that they will release more on the cases, in a favorable light to us, in the next day or so.

    YES!

    Both Snope and Ocean State Tactical are relisted for conference this Friday!

    This is it. We are off to the races!

            

  • “In all her life Laura had never tasted anything so good as that savory, fragrant, sea-tasting hot milk, with golden dots of melted cream and black specks of pepper on its top, and the little dark canned oysters at its bottom. She sipped slowly, slowly from her spoon, to keep that taste going over her tongue as long as she could.” — from By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder, pp 204

    Anyone who knows me, knows that I have an uncontrollable fascination with the Little House series. It was my introduction to Christianity, and the reason why I invited the minister to dinner when we moved to New England (Ma insisted it was right and proper, so therefore it was what I ought to do, yes?). I’ve been through the series so many times that I’ve had to buy new copies on several occasions, the older ones having worn out. I learned morals and ethics from them. For me, Laura and Ma and Pa and the other people there are just as real as you and me.

    Several years ago (several severals of years ago), I was living on the west coast and had managed to become unemployed and rather destitute. I was scraping by on unemployment insurance payments, but it was pretty dicey. My partner D and I were approaching the Christmas and Yule season with as much joy as we could muster. After all, we had a roof over our heads, heat, and each other. It was lean, but love fills a lot of gaps.

    Some kind soul had told the local fire department that we were living lean over the season, and a soft spoken gentleman brought us a hamper of food. I tried to protest, but he insisted that it was alright, we weren’t taking anything from someone else. I’ll admit, once he was gone, I tore into that box like … well, like it was Christmas morning. D and I went through the rice and pasta, a tiny canned ham, some fresh vegetables, and then at the very bottom we found the single precious can of smoked oysters.

    We could have eaten that can of oysters in two seconds. We’re both in love with them, their smoky flavor, savory and oily… But I looked at him and ran to the book shelf. I pulled out “By the Shores of Silver Lake” and went skimming through it to find the New Year’s Eve scene. There it was, Laura’s description of the oyster soup Ma had made for their guests. He and I started laughing, and we recreated that soup for Christmas Eve for ourselves. It was a wonderful meal.

    A while ago (before I couldn’t handle dairy anymore), I wanted to make the soup again. I remember how delicious it was way back when I was barely an adult. Tastes change, though, and I wondered if it would still be as magical. I picked up three cans of cheap smoked oysters and sacrificed some of my coffee half-and-half, and made the soup as a starter to our Yule meal last night.

    Everyone enjoyed it. I made enough that I assumed there would be much in the way of leftovers, but there wasn’t. Barely a drop was left in my soup tureen when we were done! It was just as Laura described it, with the oil and butter, the salty sea taste.
    (more…)

            

  • We are in the process of moving from the image above to the image below.
    Server room data center with rows of server racks. 3d illustration

    At least in terms of what the infrastructure looks like.

    Today I decommissioned an EdgeRouter 4 which features a “fanless router with a four-core, 1 GHz MIPS64 processor, 3 1Gbit RJ45 ports, and 1G SFP port.”

    When they say “MIPS64” you can think of it as being in the same class as an ARM processor. Not a problem for what it is.

    The issue was that there are only 1Gb interfaces. That and I’ve come to hate the configuration language.

    This has been replaced with a pfSense router running on a TopTon “thing.” I call it a thing because it is from China and intended to be rebranded. It doesn’t have a real SKU.

    It is based on an N100 with 4 cores and 8 threads. 2 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It can be upgraded and has multiple extras.

    Besides the hardware, this is an entirely different animal in terms of what it can do. It is first, and foremost, a firewall. Everything else it does is above and beyond.

    It is running NTP with a USB GPS unit attached. It runs DHCP, DNS, HAProxy, OSPF and a few other packages. The IDS/IPS system is running in notify mode at this time. That will be changed to full functionality very shortly.

    So what’s the issue? The issue is that everything changed.

    On the side, as I was replacing the router, I jiggled one of the Ceph servers. Jiggling it caused it to use just a few watts more, and the power supply gave out. It is a non-standard power supply, so it will be a day or two before the replacement arrives.

    When I went to plug the fiber in, the fiber was too short. This required moving slack from the other end of the fiber back towards the router to have enough length where it was needed.

    Having done this, plugging in the fiber gave me a dark result. I did a bit of diagnostic testing, isolated the issue to that one piece of fiber. I ran spare fiber to a different switch that was on the correct subnet, flashy lights.

    Turns out that I had to degrade the fiber from the other router to work with the EdgeRouter 4. Once I took that off, the port did light off. But that was a few steps down the road.

    Now the issue is that all the Wi-Fi access points have gone dark. Seems that they are not happy. This required reinstalling the control software and moving them from the old control software instance to the new one. Once that was done, I could see the error message from the access point complaining about a bad DHCP server.

    After fighting this for far too long, I finally figured out that the pseudo Cisco like router was not forwarding DHCP packets within the same VLAN. I could not make it work. So I disabled the DHCP server on the new router/firewall and moved it back to the Cisco like router. Finally, Wi-Fi for the phones and everything seems to be working.

    At which point I can’t log into the Vine of Liberty.

    I can see the pages, I can’t log into the admin side. It is timing out.

    3 hours later, I figured out that there was a bad DNS setting on the servers. The software reaches out to an external site for multiple reasons. The DNS lookup was taking so long that the connection was dropping.

    I think this is an issue that I have just resolved.

    But there’s more.

    Even after I got the DNS cleaned up, many servers couldn’t touch base with the external monitoring servers. Why?

    Routing all looked good, until things hit the firewall. Then it stopped.

    Checking the rules, everything looks good. Checking from my box, everything works. It is only these servers.

    Was it routing? Nope, that was working fine.

    That was one thing that just worked. When I turned down the old router, the new router distributed routing information correctly and took over instantly.

    So the issue is that pfSense “just works.” That is, there are default configurations that do the right thing out of the box.

    One of those things is outbound firewall rules.

    Anything on the LAN network is properly filtered and works.

    But what is the definition of the LAN network? It is the subnet directly connected to the LAN interface(s).

    Because I knew that I would need to be able to access the routers if routing goes wrong, my computer has a direct connection to the LAN Network attached to the routers. The Wi-Fi access points live in on the same subnet. So everything for my machine and the wireless devices “just worked”

    The rest of the servers are on isolating subnets. That are part of the building LAN but they are not part of the “LAN Network”.

    I know this, I defined an alias that contains all the building networks.

    Once I added that to the firewall rules, it just worked.

    Tomorrow’s tasks include more DHCP fights and moving away from Traefik. Which means making better use of the Ingress network.

            

  • Allyson is a published author. I am a published author. She works at writing. I was told to write, I did, they published it.

    When I decided to keep GunFreeZone.net alive, I tried to post multiple times per day. I quickly burned out. Today I have a schedule of once per day, with extras when it is important and not an echo.

    In the course of a normal day, I will read around 400 pages of text. Some of it I skim, some of it I have to read carefully, and some of it is for fun. I will also write 3000 to 5000 words, some of that is code, most of it is in English.

    To be blunt, I spend more time reading and writing than just about anything else in my life.

    Writer’s block is an excuse for an amateur. If you are expected to write, you write, you don’t get to say, “I don’t feel it today.”

    If you are getting “writer’s block”, you are writing as a hobby. Allyson talks about this in her writing blogs and groups.

    The next part of writing is making sure you are writing for more than yourself. If you are writing for yourself, you should be writing for yourself six months from now.

    Every evening, I sit down, and I write for the blog. Occasionally, it is easy. Usually, it is work. Then there are days when it is just plain difficult.

    I want to babble about the cheap soldering station I just picked up. Claims to be good. Has a 4.5-star rating. I had to crank it to 800F before it would melt solder, and I’m not sure if I got good connections.

    Boring.

    I’m in the process of getting rid of Traefik, a “load balancer”. I would rather not have left Apache, I did. I went to nginx, I still don’t understand it as well as I do Apache, but it is my preferred web server. Nginx can work as a load balancer, but it isn’t really.

    So I have: Traefik, Nginx, Apache, HaProxy, and whatever it is that pfSense used for “load balancing”.

    It isn’t uncommon to have a path that hits firewall, HaProxy, Traefik, nginx or Apache. Boring.

    There are dozens of court cases that are interesting to me.

    If they are heard in a district court where they obey the rule of law and follow the instructions set for them, they will get yanked into the Circuit Court so fast your head won’t stop spinning. If the case is in the circuit court, then the argument will be a repeat of what has already been said.

    Boring.

    At this point, the only interesting cases are those that will be heard by the Supreme Court this year.

    Current events? By the time my article is published I’m already 12 hours behind of the news cycle.

    Still, I write about things. There is more than a little filler these days. There are articles where I go far too deep in technical babble.

    So to all of you that read our blog, thank you for hanging with us.

    If you have something you want to say, PLEASE submit it. It would give me a day off.

            

  • Senator Warren is using misleading language to make her base angry at the rich. Never mind that she has become wealth from being a Senator.

    Social Security is supposed to be “forced” savings. The government decided that we could not be trusted with our own retirement funds.

    Instead, they took money from us, during our earning years, put it in a big pot, where it would “earn” money over our lifetime of labor.

    Of course, that turned out to be a lie. The investment the social security fund made was in US Government Bonds. That is, the government “borrowed” the money, promising to pay it back with interest.

    To pay it back, they need to tax The People more. So the piggy bank is empty, but we pretend it holds massive assets.

    She then picked a DDS. Why? Because a DDS makes more than $176,000/year. Better stated, he has more than $176k taxable income.

    Why is that number important? That is the social security tax cap.

    Social Security was set up to take care of the “little” people. The wealthy were left to find for themselves.

    We all “know” that the amount we get back from Social Security is based on the amount we paid in. The more we paid, the more we get back.

    That means that the person who made $40k per year over the course of their labor should get back something “near” $40k per year. A person who earned an average of $100k? They should get back around $100k per year.

    The reality is that you get back less and the money you get back is worth less than when you put it in, and several other things. But that is the general idea.

    But, if you are making over $176k/year, the government doesn’t think you should be getting back that amount. Instead, it is up to you to plan your retirement.

    What she is saying is that she wants him to pay in much more than he will get out.

    One other thing to remember, US taxes are on income. If you have money sitting in the bank, you don’t pay taxes on it. Instead, you pay taxes on the money you take out.

    Elon paid over $11 Billion dollars in taxes for 2023. He’ll pay more this year. He has paid more in taxes than any other single human in the history of the world.

    And this fork – tongued devil wants him to pay more, so she can spend it.

            

  • We’ve used the term “grey man” a few times over the last couple of years. There’s been a bit of debate over what it is, how useful it is, and when to use it. I wanted to address a bit of that.

    For me at least, the “grey man” is the person who just blends in.  You don’t notice him. It isn’t that he dresses in grey, it’s that he’s dressed just like everyone else. He walks like everyone else. He talks like everyone else.

    This means that sometimes, the grey man has a gun on his hip (when it’s common and everyone else does), and sometimes it’s concealed. It means sometimes the grey man wears a camo jacket (my neighborhood, for instance, is rife with people who do this), and sometimes a golf shirt and boat shoes. Sometimes he has a “two on the top and one on the sides” and other times he has hair to his waist. It depends entirely on where you are at any given moment.

    The best grey man is the one who can switch his look to match his surroundings. We see this in movies, as people like Tom Cruise drop wigs and fake mustaches into trash cans, and turn jackets inside out. In reality, it’s a lot less dramatic. It means taking off your patches when going into big cities, for instance. Wear a plain jacket instead of a camo one. Slip your side carry into your waistband carrier and out of site, rather than having it under am arm or in plain view on your hip.

    The big thing that I see right now is the desire to be grey man combating with the desire to just be ourselves and fuck the Left. I think there’s something in the middle, and that it’s important to find that central position. It allows you to swing both ways, to coin a phrase. I like the jacket that Chris has, which has velcro spots for patches. They come on and off easily, and you can simply add the correct camouflage to your outfit, be that a 2A patch, an American flag, or a rainbow.

    Only you know what your area is like. I can’t judge that. No one but you and your family can, honestly. I know that in my neighborhood, it’s perfectly okay to be a firearms owner, to enjoy shooting and hunting, and to engage in a variety of household preps like gardening and such. No one gives us a second glance. In Chicago, I would not do a quarter of what I do here in New Hampshire. You have to look around you, and judge how to blend in based on who you are and what you do, and where you live.

     

            

  • 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?

            

  • This is the type of case we want the Supreme Court to slap down.

    The district judge’s analysis is based on a twisted view of Heller as affirmed by Bruen.

    In Heller, the Court said that weapons that are most useful in military service, or at least that’s how the district court quoted it.

    It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M–16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the concep­tion of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. …
    —District of Columbia v. Heller, 467 U.S. 837, 627 (2008)

    Ok, a bit more context, but how did the district court interpret this?

    Heller specifically contemplated that weapons most useful in military service fall outside of Second Amendment protection.

    This is good wordsmithing. That word “contemplated” doesn’t say that weapons most useful to military services are outside or inside the protections of the Second Amendment. It just means they discussed it. Factually, this is the only place they mention “useful” to the military or in military service.

    In other words, the court gave far too much weight to what was not said.

    But why is this even a question?

    It is because the inferior courts can’t stop messing things up. Of going rogue.

    The question is if the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated. The district court even agrees that it is.

    The district court slaps down the state for claiming that magazines are not arms as defined for purposes of the Second Amendment.

    Having equivalently answered the question “Is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated?”, the district court then goes on to claim that is not the first part of Heller.

    Instead, the district court argues that the plaintiffs (good guys) have to prove that they are in common use for lawful purposes of self-defense AND that they are not most useful for military service.

    If the Supreme Court issues an opinion in Ocean State Tactical, then this is a done deal. Magazine bans are gone. This case will evaporate.

    If the Supreme Court doesn’t issue an opinion in Ocean State Tactical, then we can hope they strike down Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban in Snope.

    Regardless, I still get upset when I read the twisted arguments of these rogue inferior courts.

            


  • Call for submissions!

    The Turning Leaf Tavern is a way-station for people traveling throughout the fantasy realms. Here, you can find Hobbits and Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Half-feet, and representatives of a hundred different races and fictional worlds. They find themselves at the tavern’s door when need calls, and within its walls they find succor and good cheer. The tavern itself is in its own universe, designed by M. Allyson Szabo, and has its own stories to tell.

    Tales from the Turning Leaf Tavern will not be just about the tavern, though. The stories within its pages will come from you, the writers of the world. The anthology will be comprised of somewhere between 15 and 25 stories, each with a recipe or four at the end, so that readers may share in the glory of the story’s victuals. That said, Allyson has decided to provide some preliminary tales about the tavern and its denizens for writers to riff off of. You, the authors, have permission to use the Turning Leaf Tavern and its people in your writing, though M. Allyson Szabo retains the copyright to the tavern itself and the characters she created to go with it. Your stories, even the ones with Turning Leaf and the folk within, belong to you, the original authors.

    This anthology will be comprised of fantasy stories that are original and unique, paired with recipes that go along with the tales that are told. If you have a story that is set in a fantasy world, is between 2500 and 6000 words, and that involves a tavern and its food in some way, then we would love to read it!

    Submissions opened on January 1st, 2025, and will close on March 31, 2025. The exact number of stories has not been set, and will depend upon the submissions made to the anthology. Please note that submission does not equal acceptance. We will contact everyone who has submitted a story and recipe by April 30, 2025 to inform them of the status of their submission.

    For full information about the proposed anthology and the world of the Turning Leaf Tavern, you can read here: https://mallysonszabo.weebly.com/turning-leaf-tavern.html