Wall

Had a dream that the term “anticompetitive practices” was legally expanded to include “things that are free”. So everything offered without a fee, from comics to blogs to crossword puzzles, had to go behind a paywall. And the payment processors capitalized on this with fee structures that made sure nobody small made a profit.

I’ve read “Fahrenheit 451”. I know how this goes.

But now that this is out on the aether, some 7-figure MBA is thinking, “Well goddamn, we gotta sponsor this bill!” So, sorry?

On the Return of the Old Man

Saw Orion tonight for the first time this season.

Hey, Old Man, it’s been a while.

He and I used to walk the night fields north of campus and we’d talk about life. I’d unload all my concerns and toss them to the sky, and he’d do cartwheels over my head as my feet crunched the frosty grass below.

Every reunion stops me in my tracks and fills me with awe. He’s a majestic old friend. It’s too bad we don’t talk more. But I have to go back to my dark sky home town to see him.

And if my thoughts on moving to the Northwest were to become manifest, I’m afraid I’d see him even less, since he’s purely a southern constellation that only comes out in winter.

But that’s an apt allegory for how little I’d see the rest of my friends should I move, isn’t it? Should I chase the sun? Or should I wait for stars?

Time in a Tunnel

For my phone service I use GoogleFi, which rents T-Mobile’s network in the US. I also use OpenVPN at home so I can tunnel traffic from wherever I happen to be to my house so I can either access internal services or to go outbound to the Internet.

That’s all well and good. Or it was, until a year or so ago when traffic would sometimes just get hung or appear to completely drop when using 4G/5G. It would work fine otherwise on Wifi.

I see a ton of entries in the openvpn.log:

MULTI: bad source address from client [192.0.0.4], packet dropped

So I went down this rabbit hole. Turns out 192.0.0.4 is a “private” IP range, and sometimes the Android client says where it’s coming from. But it’s a red herring.

For mobile data, T-Mobile famously uses only IPv6 (an oddity in the mobile space), and 192.0.0.4 is an internal IP, given to every phone, that goes through this IPv4-IPv6-IPv4 translation as it traverses the network, where it then comes out some random gateway IP 172.56.92.x to its destination. Sometimes the client, like, just says it’s coming from 192.0.0.4 because that’s all it knows.

Red herring. So much time wasted.

The solution? The actual solution? It’s found here on a PiVPN (OpenVPN on Pi-Hole) forum. It’s an MTU problem. In server.conf, just set the MTU to an amount lower than the standard Internet packet MTU of 1500, to something like 1400, and also do some mss fixup (not sure about that part).

tun-mtu 1400 
mssfix 1360

Save, restart the service. You’ll still see the 192.0.0.4 warnings, but traffic will flow.

My theory is that the IPv4-6-4 translation is adding extra bytes to the UDP packet as it wraps the packet in a v6 frame, so many bytes that it’s going over the standard MTU of 1500 bytes. If we tell the server to tell the client to keep the MTU size smaller, that allows for plenty of space for the translation to enclose the packet without exceeding 1500.

I’ve wasted so much time today (and the past year) on the wrong things.

Selectivity

Catching COVID is totally not a moral failing — as long as it’s you or someone you love. Otherwise it’s schadenfreude. Though, let’s be clear, the virus doesn’t care about your beliefs or who you are or where you live.

But those stupid dumbasses totally had it coming, right?

Evitable

So the thinkable happened. I got COVID.

2nd time.

Thankfully I got the latest vaccine a month ago, so it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.

Fatigue set in on Thursday, then throat-sinus inflammation that night, and then by Friday morning, full blown aches, fever, swimming vision, and testing hot. Fever broke this morning, as it does, but now that it’s nighttime I’m back up into fever territory. As it does. Circadian rhythms keepin’ me beat.

Best I can do is rest at home, consume media, nap, order delivery, and shop curbside. I’m stocked up now on everything…except companionship.

But I was short on that already.