Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Gotthard Base Tunnel

June 4th, 2016

This link(german) talks a little about the Gotthard Base Tunnel. I guess Switzerland is not in the EU but they have positioned themselves to transit goods via this tunnel between Italy and the rest of the EU. This is a great deal for them and I'm a little jealous they can take all the glory. Surely there must be benefits for us, ie. cleaner air from the Alps because Lorry drivers should take a train now. That remains to be smelled and tasted. I don't think I'll notice a diff. However a lot of Europeans quality of life may get better minutely due to this tunnel. Another great tunnel would be the Finland-Estonia tunnel if it ever makes the drawing board and political acceptance.

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Moved delphinusdnsd

May 26th, 2016

I have moved my in-production delphinusdnsd back as a hidden master. It will only do AXFR's now to the slaves. What's replacing the authoritative end on omega.virgostar.net is a BIND nameserver, which will also do recursion eventually (with TSIG key).

In other DNS news my domain name swshell.de is still on the denic nameservers and I don't know why it's not removed, the domain is expired.

Still other DNS news is that delphinusdnsd has a problem with the database. It goes into an infinite loop under some condition while querying the database. I did a tcpdump at the same time and it doesn't appear to be outside traffic causing this. I'll be stripping the berkeley db eventually I suspect and replacing it with something homegrown.

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Turkeys government? No go!

May 21th, 2016

The german chancellor Angela Merkel should not have visited turkey after they got rid of their democracy. What is turkeys secret plan? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Instead of Toronto, Ireland?

May 20th, 2016

I'm weighing the option of going with an Irish AWS instance instead of a Toronto Digital Ocean instance. Difference is that I'll be able to run OpenBSD on AWS. Tomorrow americas.centroid.eu will expire. Days later the domain name swshell.de that is hosted on there will expire too. Then I'll do clean-up of the authoritative domain names (removing glue records etc). I'm still undecided on the Ireland thing, we'll see.

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5 days left for americas.centroid.eu

May 16th, 2016

Americas.centroid.eu I'M letting expire. It's my vps jail in panama. It expires in 5 days. What I'm doing is I'm renting another vps in toronto from digital ocean. It will be a DNS recursive server at first. Along with io.solarscale.de I'm going to make them recursive with TSIG security so that my home network uses them. Since I regularily download from a server at 151 Front in Toronto I know that I get about 1.1 MBit/s on that route. That's enough for a DNS server, which uses a lot less. Only problem is that there may be passive dns spies along the route. Hmm oh well, more money to the north americans I guess.

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Ordered books

May 15th, 2016

I have ordered the following books:

Construction of Attack-Resilient and Efficient Overlay Topologies for Large-Scale P2P-based IPTV Infrastructures - Mathias Fischer
P2P Networking and Applications - John Buford et al.
P2P-basierte Gruppenkommunication in drahtlosen Ad-hoc-Netzen - Peter Baumung

If you'd guess what would I do with these and other purchases of books? Perhaps something with SIP and P2P perhaps?

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Donated $5 to ISC

May 12th, 2016

I have donated 5 dollars (USD) to Internet Systems Consortium (I hope I got that right), the makers of BIND software. I use BIND at work, and privately (at least for another week or so). These guys deserve it.

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The need for a mesh network

May 12th, 2016

Imagine if everyone has a hotspot whether freifunk or other on their router at home. This will create a landscape of doors into the Internet. But they aren't meshed, meaning there is no inter-door activity. This is because the hotspot has no concept of networking with other hotspots. You can see this if an entire outdoor dslam (those boxes the telecom puts up) has a power failure. An entire neighbourhood will be affected and no Internet.

The solution is to create a mesh. Meshed hotspots talk to each other. They will bridge distances of 10+ hotspots if necessary to find a gateway that is available. They are smart in the protocols they speak. We need this in Germany which is a leading technology country. What we need is an open standard by which these hotspots can talk to one another. Freifunk has a standard that's open, but the beauty of freifunk is that it's able to adapt quickly to changes in protocols due to their use of Open Source Software.

Will we get there? Not sure, due to the chaotic nature of hotspots popping up and disappearing again when new router equipment is installed.

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Stoererhaftung has been eliminated in Germany

May 12th, 2016

I wrote about this last october. Finally the politicians reacted. I also signed a few petitions against this, which helped. We finally are able to share our Wifi with others and legally. This makes a lot of things a lot easier. Finally a human should have several gateways instead of just one. The elimination of the stoererhaftung will help with that.

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Europeans love English!

May 10th, 2016

The stats are that there is more ESL speakers in Europe than there is people who speak german. Europeans love English. With Britain before a referendum the EU may have to refocus it's transition language to german. This is why we all need Great Britain in the EU, to prevent that from happening. We love english in Germany even. More than half of our music played publically is english in some form. But there is more german music these days than there was say 30 years ago due to the emergence of german rap. I can't stand it although the producers make a good beat. We love english and it's not so good without the english speaking countries, as long as you don't come to germany to talk about your dreams of naked men on the S-Bahn. We can decipher such blasphemy! :-)

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