I’m not using any wonderful scripts on my website, that would measure your “responsiveness” or encourage you to subscribe to newsletters. I only refer to font files and that’s basically it. what I am checking every month is from where, how and on which device you’re browsing my pages using goaccess package. thanks to this, I am not tempted to profile you in any way or serve you some customized content and similar “things”. ...
I’m not a fan of such ‘solutions’ because they hardly qualify as genuine fixes. however, if you find yourself working in MacOS-heavy environment that’s plagued by radio frequency interference, you’ve probably experienced the erratic behavior of Bluetooth-connected accessories. on my mega-desk, I have numerous devices scattered about, not to mention the abundance of Macs themselves. as a result, I encounter this issue quite frequently—almost on a daily basis. some might suggest employing various ‘voodoo’ tricks like “quickly disabling and enabling the mouse, which worked for me” or “updating firmware, shutting down awdl0, and then reading a fairy tale to your children.” ...
ever since the initial tuning of the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack around version 4.x, I’ve found myself occasionally tinkering with the contents of /etc/sysctl.conf just to fine-tune things, you know over time, numerous changes have been made to the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack, including the introduction of modularity. however, MacOS X, being based on FreeBSD, is more conservative and lacks certain options. therefore, on my MacOS systems, I make use of the following /etc/sysctl.conf configuration: ...
as I’m installing FreeBSD boxes and VMs left and right, I typically do some initial setup before doing anything else. while some use cases call for additional ports to be installed (like bird or routinator), there’s pretty standard “intro”. first, make sure the packages themselves are up to date: sed -i '' s/quarterly/latest/g /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf pkg upgrade this will trigger initial pkg install. then, it’s my personal minimum set of packages: pkg install htop bmon mtr-nox11 screen wget doas git-lite as ZFS is only filesystem you should be using ( ;) ) and this is not some NAS system, I typically disable access time marking to speed up VM filesystem operations a bit: ...
if you have to pack a lot of things, using sheer power of modern multi-core/multi-threaded CPUs may come handy. unless… the tools you’re using are not enabling that by default, and you suffer running everything on one core/thread. as I spend most of my time recently with FreeBSD and MacOS the tools I typically use are command line. therefore, for every gzip - consider using pigz. and for bzip2 - consider using pbzip2. ...
if you, like me, just love corporations that blatantly lie in your eyes about “protecting your privacy”, you’re ready to spend some time to make their lives as hard as possible. one of the new ideas is Google FLoC - Federated Learning of Cohorts. great concept, that apparently was to “increase privacy”, but instead actually decreases it even more. first of all, stop using Chrome. use Brave or Firefox - and make sure that security and privacy settings are properly configured (one of the key is DoH, which may be enabled by default and that actually overrides your configured DNS servers). ...
one of the most common, but at the same time easiest problems to solve, when you’re working with FreeBSD system installed on too small disk is rebuilding the system. in my specific case, it was very old i386 system initially installed around release 6 on a 20GB HDD. at around release 11 I ran out of tricks to pull and still make it, so had to finally add a disk. fortunately, just before that, the machine was moved from physical box to virtual machine. ...
FreeBSD just migrated to git, and while handbook is being updated, you can do the migration yourself. first of all, move original src directory (if you’re synchronizing over SVN) away, along with customized kernel config file. for my deployments I do: mv /usr/src /usr/src.old then, let’s install git - it’s not (yet) installed by default: pkg install git last, but not least, you need to invoke git to clone the source repository. I prefer to track latest -STABLE version of the tree, and in such case you should execute: ...
recently during casual browsing of WLAN controller i spotted that sometimes users are having problems with receiving responses from DHCP server. i was suprised, as family doesn’t complain - and they’d do that immediately. well, so i went troubleshooting element by element. obviously, switches were primary suspect. why? everything was working, and those DHCP problems were very, very rare - that may mean drops on switch interfaces. Cisco QoS configuration on Catalyst and Nexus switches is far from easy. comparing this however to other vendors… there’s really nothing to compare. on one side you can do whatever you want, on the other side - you can shoot yourself in both foots, stomach and then in the head pretty quickly. just assume, that if you haven’t spent couple of weeks labbing QoS on real hardware - it’s area that you shouldn’t wander alone in unsupervised ;) in very simple terms, either use dedicated GUI for managing campus networks - Cisco DNA Center or stop at either enabling QoS globally (mls qos) or disabling it (no mls qos). ...
as it’s easy to notice, I did a site migration. instead of moving to WordPress however (which was original plan), i decided to follow more ambitious path, and deploy Hugo platform, supported by Go… and static page generation (yeah!). Hugo itself supports i18n, so it provides the most important functionality. it doesn’t hurt that this solution frees me also from continuous tinkering in PHP and SQL :)