Another deranged asshole killed children at a school. 2 dead, 17 wounded. Nationwide headlines. The blood vultures leap to blame me for a shooting that took place more than a 1000 miles awy.

Meanwhile, CBS News is running a headline on August 28, 2025: “6 dead, 27 hurt in Chicago weekend shootings, police say.”
6 dead, 27 hurt in Chicago weekend shootings, police say

I would rather not deal with it today.

OpenStack

Over the last month, I’ve been dealing with somebody who has not kept up with the technology he is using. It shows. I like to learn new things.

For the last two years I’ve been working with two major technologies. Ceph and Open Virtual Networks. Ceph I feel I have a working handle on. Right now my Ceph cluster is down because of network issues, which I did to myself. OVN is another issue entirely.

A group of people smarter than I looked at networking and decided that instead of doing table lookups and then making decisions based on tables, they would create a language for manipulating the flow of packets, called “OpenFlow.”

This language could be implemented on hardware, creating very fast network devices. Since OpenFlow is a language, you can write routing functions as well as switching functions into the flows. You can also use it to create virtual devices.

The two types of virtual devices are “bridges” and “ports.” Ports are attached to bridges. OpenFlow processes a packet received on a port, called ingress, to move the packet to the egress port. There is lots going on in the process, but that is the gist.

The process isn’t impossible to do manually, but it isn’t simple, and it isn’t easy to visualize.

OVN adds virtual devices to the mix, allowing for simpler definitions and more familiar operations.

With OVN you create switches, routers, and ports. A port is created on a switch or router, then attached to something else. That something else can be virtual machines, physical machines, or the other side of a switch-router pair.

This is handled in the Northbound (NB) database. You modify the NB DB, which is then translated into a more robust flow language, which is stored in the Southbound (SB) database. This is done with the “ovn-north” process. This process keeps the two databases in sync with each other. Modifications to the NB DB are propagated into the SB DB and vice versa.

All of this does nothing for your actual networking. It is trivial to build all of this and have it “work.”

The thing that has to happen is that the SB database has to connect to the OpenvSwitch (OVS) database. This is accomplished via ovn-controller.

When you introduce changes to the OVS database, they are propagated into the SB database. In the same way, changes to the SB database cause changes to the OVS database.

When the OVS database is modified, new OpenFlow programs are created, changing the processing of packets.

To centralize the process, you can add the address of a remote OVN database server to the OVS database. The OVN processes read this and self-configure. From the configuration, they can talk to the remote database to create the proper OVS changes.

I had this working until one of the OVN control nodes took a dump. It took a dump for reasons, most of which revolved around my stupidity.

Because the cluster is designed to be self-healing and resilient, I had not noticed when two of the three OVN database servers stopped doing their thing. When I took that last node down, my configuration was stopped.

I could bring it back to life, but I’m not sure whether it is worth the time.

Now here’s the thing: everything I just explained comes from two or three very out-of-date web pages that haven’t been updated in many years. They were written to others with some understanding of the OVS/OVN systems. And they make assumptions and simplifications.

The rest of the information comes from digging things out of OpenStack’s networking component, Neutron.

I have a choice: I can continue down the path I am currently using, or I can learn OpenStack.

I choose to learn OpenStack.

First, it is powerful. With great power comes an even greater chance to mess things up. There are configuration files that are hundreds of lines long.

There are four components that I think I understand. The identity manager, Keystone. This is where you create and store user credentials and roles. The next is the storage component, Glance. This is where your disk images and volumes are accessed. Then there is the compute component, named Nova, which handles building and configuring virtual machines. Finally there is the networking component, called neutron.

For the simple things, I actually feel like I have it mostly working.

But the big thing is to get OVN working across my Ceph nodes. That hasn’t happened.

So for today, I’ll dig and dig some more, until I’m good at this.

Then I’ll add another technology to my skill set.

Got busy and forgot to write last night. Take some memes as an apology and checkout Giga Based Dad’s thread for more.

Yes, I took them all from him.

Found on the book of faces:

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The reports are that this is a 14 year old girl in Scotland. As you can clearly see, she is brandishing a knife and a hatchet. Both of which she is prohibited from having.

This is just another example of how the youth of the UK are becoming more and more violent. We need to make an example of them.

Maybe there is more to this story?

Such as the girl in the picture was defending her 12 year old friend who had just been assaulted by a foreign invader. That she was afraid of being assaulted herself. That there were more foreign invaders moving toward her.

If you have watched the video, you can hear that evil invader taunting her to show the knife. He knows that if he reports her for having the knife, she will be arrested.

Nothing will happen to him.

This video clip might be the start of something good for the UK.

… but not as you usually hear it.

Sorry this is kind of short, but I’m pinch hitting for Chris tonight. He’s having network issues and so asked me to share a Tuesday tunes with you guys. This is a group/person that I have been listening to for a while and she does what’s called Bard core music. She takes modern tunes and turns them into medieval ones. I adore them and think they’re hysterical and usually really good. And this is the one that I was listening to when he asked me to post for him and so I am sharing with you. I hope you enjoy!

I realize not everyone likes tofu, but let’s face facts: it’s cheap, it’s relatively healthy, and you can cook it in a zillion different ways. I’m in the process of learning how to use it for more meals, and so I’m going to share some of those recipes (the good ones) with you. This one in particular was so yummy that even my tofu-hater was willing to have it again!

Ingredients:

• block firm tofu, drained
• ¼ cup soy sauce
• 1 tbsp dark brown sugar*
• 2 tbsp unseasoned rice vinegar
• 1 tsp toasted sesame oil
• 1 tsp red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp fish sauce (optional)
• 2 tbsp cooking oil
• 1 tbsp ginger, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• lime juice, for seasoning
• wraps or pitas, for stuffing

Start by wrapping up your tofu in a lint free towel or cheesecloth, and putting it onto a cutting board. Place a cast iron skillet or a baking sheet weighed down with something heavy on top on top of the tofu, and let it drain for at least 15 minutes, or as long as 45 minutes. Don’t skip this, as it helps with the texture of the tofu.

Crumble the pressed tofu into a bowl using your fingers. You want small pieces, with none larger than a pea.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, sugar (*you can use Splenda brown sugar blend or any other sweetener you prefer if you don’t like the regular stuff), vinegar, sesame oil, red pepper, and fish sauce (or if you don’t like fish sauce, you may sub in Worcestershire sauce or mushroom ketchup for umami). The sugar may not fully dissolve, and that’s okay. It will once you begin heating it later in the recipe. Do your best!

In a large cast iron skillet or other nonstick pan, heat the cooking oil over a medium high heat. Add in the tofu, shake it to make an even single layer, and let it cook without stirring until it crisps up and is deep golden brown on the bottom. This can take 5 to 7 minutes. It’s okay to peek to see how it’s doing, but don’t stir it up until it forms that crispy bottom. Once it’s crisp, stir it up (breaking it up if necessary), and try to flip over the pieces to crisp the other side. You want the entire batch of tofu to be crispy, which requires you to let it sit and cook in the oil. It shouldn’t take too long, though.

Once the tofu is crispy, add in the ginger and garlic and stir gently until fragrant. This should take a minute or less. Add in the soy mixture, and continue to cook until the liquid essentially evaporates. This may take up to 10 minutes, but more likely will only take 5 minutes or so.

Spoon the tofu into the wraps or pitas, and add any garnishes you like (such as cilantro leaves, shredded lettuce, tomato, hot sauce, etc.). Top with a light squeeze of lime, then serve.

Notes:

The spicy hot mixes so well with the sweet in this! Too often, tofu is served squishy, and this avoids that problem. If you find that you can’t get a good crisp on the tofu crumbles, you can try dusting it all with a teaspoon or so of cornstarch and then just hand mixing it lightly before frying it. The cornstarch helps it crisp, but also adds to the calories, so avoid it if you can.

This case is being set up for a bases loaded home run.

Consider the Second Amendment legal landscape of 4 years ago. Heller had set the standard. Is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated? If so, what is this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation?

This was a joyful time. I remember that D.C. became a constitutional carry location for about 5 minutes before they changed the rules.

The problem we had was that there was a footnote in the Heller opinion that the anti-gunners used to pry open the path to gun control.

California was one of the first states to drive through that gap. Chicago, Maryland, New Jersey, and others quickly followed.

These Heller response laws were challenged. The cases made their way up to the circuit courts, where we learned the wonderful world of interest balancing.

Under interest balancing, the courts would first ask the purpose of the law or regulation. If the proposed purpose was deemed to be “important” enough, then a lower standard of scrutiny would be applied. If the proposed purpose wasn’t important enough, then higher levels of scrutiny would be applied.

What this meant was that the courts looked like they were treating the plaintiffs with respect while putting four or five thumbs on the scales of justice.

The 9th, 7th, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th circuit courts all took up the cry of “interest balancing.” The other circuits weren’t ruling on Second Amendment cases, so it didn’t really matter.

All the circuits that took up Second Amendment challenges all decided in the same way. Against The People.

Bruen put an end to levels of scrutiny. The inferior courts are still playing games. The current game playing focuses on “Is it an arm?” and “Can you prove it is in common use for self-defense?” Their goal is to keep Bruen from being applied.

But we have a problem. All the circuit courts that are ruling on Second Amendment cases are ruling the same way. Against The People. They are still the same rogue, inferior courts, thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court.

But something has changed out there in New Jersey and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Trump and other originalist jurists have become a majority in the Third Circuit.

If we can get just one more confirmation, and there is a nominee going through the process right now, it will be an even larger majority.

The People got a shitty draw of judges for the merits panel. Not that surprising. We expected another loss. Judges Shwartz, Freeman, and Smith heard oral arguments on July 1st 4-2450-24-2506_Association of NJ Rifle Pistol Clubs v. Attorney General N. Jetal.

Here is where it gets interesting: on the same day that the case was argued, the court ordered the parties to produce a transcript. Which was entered into the record on July 15th.

Why did they need a written record? Likely because they expected other courts or panels were going to want to read it.

Under the Third Circuit’s internal operating procedures, a merits panel must circulate their opinion(s) before they are published. This gives the rest of the judges on the court an opportunity to comment and provide suggestions.

But something else can happen: if a majority of the active judges are in disagreement with the proposed opinion, they can grant an en banc hearing sua sponte. (Without a request from either party). And this is what happened on August 21st.

We are pretty sure that the opinion by this three-judge merits panel was going to go against us. If the majority of the active judges agreed with that opinion, there is no reason to call for an en banc hearing.

En banc hearings in the Third Circuit are a pain. It is all the judges dealing with the one case. It isn’t common.

In Snope we saw the Fourth Circuit do the same thing; gut in that case, we were expecting a positive opinion.

Oral arguments will be held on October 15th at 0930.

The only wrinkle is that Judge Smith is no longer an active judge, but he has elected to participate as a member of the en banc panel. Smith is currently a senior judge, meaning he only hears cases of interest to him.

If the Third Circuit finds for The People and the Constitution, this will create a major circuit split. This makes the case ripe for the Supreme Court. Matching it with Kavanaugh’s dissent in refusing cert on Snope.

Because I am invested in The Fort at No. 4, I see news articles from the area. Yesterday I read a press release from School Administrative Unit 6 (SAU-6) which covers Claremont, NH.

Claremont is just up the road from the Fort so I read it.

The Business Administrator has been put on paid leave; a school board member with lots of accounting (CPA) was appointed to do the job of BA.

From my weak sources, it seems like this BA wasn’t doing a good job. There are no signed Audits since 2021. They have a budget short fall over around $5 million.

Entirely the fault of this administrator and those supervising her.

This, of course, led to the comments.

We could go into the blame game. Which comes down to Trump and “local taxes.” The local taxes are property taxes. The SAUs are funded from the local property taxes. Residents of the towns that belong to the SAU have to vote on the school budget. Occasionally the proposed budgets are not approved.

The budget for my SAU has failed twice in the past 10 years. The first time I showed up at school board meetings was to find out where the money was being spent. What I did manage to get into the record was that while the teachers salaries were not increased because of the vote, the administrator’s pay still went up.

I pushed for, and I believe they passed, a resolution that says, “If the teachers don’t get a raise, the administration doesn’t get a raise.”

The last time, the school system just overextended itself doing too much non-educational stuff.

Our SAU didn’t have anything looking like abuse of the budget; it just wasn’t restraining itself.

Claremont’s issues are entirely self-inflicted. 19 new teachers to the SAU were canned. They had already signed contracts, so those teachers are well and truly screwed.

And this is the straw man. This person has never listened to a Republican; instead, they have built an image of a “Republican” where they put motives and evil.

If the federal tax rate was a flat 10% and you made $35,000/year, you would pay $3,500 per year in taxes. If you make $350,000/year, your taxes would be $35,000 per year. No leftist screams that going from 10% to 11% will cost the person with the larger income $3,500 more per year but it will only cost the lower earner $350 more.

But if the tax rate drops from 10% to 9%, it is a tax cut for the wealthy.

But I’m ignorant, according to Mr. achy_joints. He believes that everything that PragerU puts out is “bullshit.” Why? He can’t tell you why, but he knows it is BS.

It reminds me of the people claiming Glenn Beck was a horrible person for the things he said. This is a man who was on talk radio for multiple hours per day; he was on a national televised show once a day. With 10 years of history, every single “proof” lead back to the same 5 minute collection of things he said out of context.

Mr. achy_joints thinks that everything will benefit from more regulations more taxes. Taxes he is unlikely to be paying.

I just get sick over reading the straw man arguments. These are people that haven’t had an open mind in years.

Today I was waiting for clients to get back to me. While I waited, I started installing OpenStack.

So far it has been going well. A few typos slowed things down. Errors are not always clear, but I am now at the point of installing neutron

This is the scary part. The terrifying part.

Neutron interfaces with Open Virtual Networking (OVN). This could be magical, or it could break everything.

OVN sits on top of Open vSwitch, providing configuration.

The gist is that you install OVS, then you add configuration options to the OVS database. This configuration instructs OVN how to talk to its databases.

Once OVN starts talking to its databases, it performs changes in the OVS database. Those changes affect how OVS routes packets.

The physical network is broken into subnets. This is a requirement for high-availability networking. As links go up and down, the network routes around the failures.

On the other hand, many of the tools I use prefer to be on a single network; subnets increase the complexity greatly. Because of this, I created overlay networks. One for block storage, one for compute nodes, and one for virtual machines.

Neutron could modify the OVN or OVS that brings my overlay networks down.

So I’m well into this terrifying process, and the power goes out. It was only out for a few minutes, but that was enough.

The network came back to life.

All but two servers came back to life. One needs a BIOS change to make it come up after a power failure.

One decided that the new drive must be a boot drive, so it tried to boot from that, failed, and just stopped.

All of that put me behind in research, so nothing interesting in the 2A front to report, even though there are big things happening.

The number of moving parts in a data center is almost overwhelming.

I don’t know if this is really a “prepping” thing, but it’s situational awareness and so I’m calling it prepping today.

Number One Rule: an armed female is a safe female. I believe with all the breath in my body that if every women carried a firearm and was well trained in its use and care, that sexual assaults would nigh on disappear. SA’ers are sorry, loser types who can’t handle real women, and coming face to face with a firearm would make the worm between their legs crawl away in horror. I continually and constantly encourage my women friends to go out, get trained, and pick a quality firearm that they can carry… and then to carry it always. I also believe that safely arming women is the best way to combat the woke shit going on right now, because while the Constitution says we’re equal, Sam Colt guarantees it.

Number Two Rule: people who sexually assault others have declared themselves dog meat, and will be treated as such. I’m not a “dog person” but if the SHTF for real, I’d be picking myself up a good quality mastiff or bulldog, and you can bet your ass I’d be sicking it on anyone who I caught doing such things (or had incontrovertible truth that they had done such things). If I catch you SA’ing someone, I will fuck you up. No, like really. I’m not good with firearms, but I’m hella good with a cast iron frying pan, and I own a ton of them. I catch you, I’ll start with your head, but I’ll end with your balls.

Number Three Rule: women (or anyone, honestly) who lie about sexual assault have proven themselves to no longer be human. And I mean that. I don’t want liars to be prosecuted for lying. I don’t want them to be prosecuted as if they had committed the assault. I want them to be executed. I am strongly of the opinion that the most dangerous thing to women out there is another woman who lies about sexual assault, because it increases the danger for ALL of us. Men and women alike.

So why are you talking about sexual assault today, Allyson?

There are several people in the ren faire community who have been accused of sexual assault. They’re all men, by the by, not that it matters. I’ve met a woman who sexually assaulted men, and I saw her in exactly the same way I saw the males. She was a cretin and she should have been burned at the stake. But I digress… These people come in three categories: known SA’ers, suspected SA’ers, and people who’ve been falsely accused or accused with no credible facts to back it up.

One of the women who had been sexually assaulted three times by different men recently spoke up in the RF community. She chose to post a picture of one of her assaulters and make the post public. And this is where we get a bit dicey. See, perp numbers one and two HAD assaulted her. She went to the police, took them to court, and they were jailed or fined or whatever, and were legally labeled assaulter. All fine and dandy. Perp number three, the one she posted the picture of? She’s “chosen” not to go to the police. And that makes me concerned.

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