Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

ap.centroid.eu

June 13th, 2014

This is a notice that ap.centroid.eu will go away in less than 3 months. I'll likely point ap.centroid.eu to americas.centroid.eu when the vps in hong kong is reclaimed. The day this will happen is September 10th.

A brief history on ap.centroid.eu. I rented it from Host Virtual an american vps provider (http://vr.org). It resided in the NTT datacenter in Hong Kong and had the main outgoing route go through NTT's links (first to Japan and then on to the US to get to Europe). It was my presence in Asia for 2 years, and it attracted a lot of asian but also eurasian traffic. Not as much traffic as I had hoped but in retrospect at least it did not kill me. I was satisfied with the performance and service of this virtual computer. Over the course of the two years I have accumulated about half a TB of traffic, so not much.

So what's next for my network? I'm downsizing the VPS's a bit and in February I'm likely changing my DSL provider in order to get a static IP again. I'll host a master nameserver likely from home then.

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8 days until northern solstice

June 13th, 2014

On Saturday June 21st is northern solstice. For us here that means the longest day of the year. Have fun whatever you're doing.

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What happens when...

June 11th, 2014

You mix Reggae with RFC's? Out comes RFC-Reggae...

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Isn't it time for a new computer design?

June 11th, 2014

In my view computers have become too cheap, at under 200 euros a pop. The Von Neumann architecture design has proven its simple design since the 1950's. But is it secure? Why should a device on a firewire, serial or PCI bus have control over the entire memory of a computer? And how would one do the interface if not?

I'd happily trade in a few things from the current computer.

rare metals, I'd willingly pay more if my computer used less of these
green manufacturing, I'd willingly pay more if my computer used such process
secure architecture (shielded keyboard, protected RAM, shielded CPU)
quantum elements (quantum cryptography, quantum processing)
perhaps manufactured somewhere other than asia?

Anyhow, I think you get the drift. While the current design may be good for first time computer buyers in the 3rd world, the stuff is being flooded in 1st world markets. And we're not learning a bit about computers. Even though my computer was less than that today, I'd argue that a computer in the 2500 to 10,000 euro range is a worthwhile investment, one that can become the next "dream" machine as people only dream of getting it. So I'm saying don't artificially make computers more expensive, as that's only more money in the producers pocket, no..make it new, make it different, make it the cheapest possible design at a different approach. And then we can possibly compare.

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My 2nd WRT router

June 5th, 2014

I have purchased another WRT router (TP-LINK TL-WR841ND). This router I'm going to set up at my parents house for freifunk.net. The cost of this router was 28 Euros and is acceptable for a product that gives free Internet and networking to people in range. Eventually we'd like to see a network evolve out of this on the street, neighbourhood, city, state. I can't wait for it to become popular.

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Have purchased a riddim from itunes

June 5th, 2014

I have purchased the rest of the drop-it riddim on itunes. I had one song from this by chuck fender already, this completes the purchase.

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Opinion: the destroyers of the 'net

May 31th, 2014

In my view all government agencies, from far and wide, are the destroyers of the Internet. Believe it or not the Internet is built on ethics and values. The government agencies that try to exploit the Internet are in gross violation of these. They are like a cancerous substance in the human body. They must be removed but somehow I think the governments do not see a need to remove them. What this does in end-effect is it destroys the 'net. We're dealing with low-IQ jealous type kindergarten kids here. Because as soon as the government agencies lose interest in the Internet, they'll recommend its removal. What it is they are after is hard to say. However I have a clue. They are after people trying to make a home for their soul. They are after people who make the Internet more beyond the laws and limits of any nation. People have made the Internet a supra-national governed body based on something else that the governments have fathomed. It is based on the rules of logic, and laws as written in the RFC's. The secret services organizations want to destroy this because only they used to have a monopoly on thought and logic.

I'm going to write a small poem about this, here it goes:

Internet my light my saviour
why do you stir such bad behaviour?
For I am being watched with every keystroke
By who other than my government who poke
and peek in my private life away from home
Did you know I live in a dome?
Yes it's made of gold and copper
But you ask me where it is I don't know.
You call me a liar?  It isn't so
For my soul travels along these fibre lights
and while I dream and rest at nights
during day is when I exercise my rights
to use the Internet for a cost and for free
that's what's it about in technology
I demand that governments take heed
to retreat from their creeping deed
And let this 'net be open to my mind
Without them trying to watch my time
And analyse beyond analysation
This poem is for the digital nation!

Well I feel much better now. But the Evil NSA and other governments agencies are still about. Let's pray for them!

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Another TODO for wildcarddnsd

May 29th, 2014

A few days ago I tested wildcarddnsd with 240,000 records. I was horrified. It took 9.8 GB of hd space which took forever to load the records and when I made the underlying database filesystem a tmpfs (memory fs), it still took 30 seconds to load all records. The problem is that wildcarddnsd has a record for each domain name, so something.centroid.eu, somethingelse.centroid.eu and someother.centroid.eu are 3 records in its database. I made it so that each record is 40K large as according to this test program:

int
main(void)
{
        printf("%d\n", sizeof(struct domain));
}

The output for that is

mercury$ ./sizecheck
44287

So what to do. In the past wildcarddnsd malloc'ed all this data and just stored the pointers in the database. This was good until I had several processes for wildcarddnsd that forked()'ed. I could of course store all data in a shared memory mmap segment, but getting the right size for that is hard and we run into a wall when I want to deal with dynamic dns which may add a lot more records than was evident at start of the program. So I think I'm going to partition the records in struct domain and make it a little like an IPv6 packet. To explain this we have flags such as:

#define DOMAIN_HAVE_A           0x1
#define DOMAIN_HAVE_SOA         0x2
#define DOMAIN_HAVE_CNAME       0x4

I'm just going to tag on an A RR section if that flag is set in the main struct domain which adds a little bit of memory. This way it's selective. Also when we get to NAPTR pointers being excluded we save _a lot_ of space in a record. This will all be put on my TODO in the tree so stay tuned.

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Snowden: All german citizens are spied upon

May 28th, 2014

Through another website I heard the news. The german government meanwhile wants proof or they're calling Snowden a liar. To me the news just make sense. I heard stuff like that after 1945 there wasn't any german effort to govern the people. It was all done by the Allies of WW2. And the german government became a backseat pilot in such things such as intelligence and security. Everything in Germany after 1945 was erected in a manner that it suits the will of the allies not the will of the people. We have the NSDAP and Hitler to thank for that. Germany is a mass-surveillance experiment.

So how do I feel about that? Personally I feel it devalues everything. The money is fake, the world is fake. Fake values and fake systems. And as always the hands are tied behind ones back and it's a tough pill to swallow.

In recent conversation with my parents I had the viewpoint that Snowden was not safe in Germany and hence we should not give him Asylum. I think Snowden knows full well what he'd be getting himself into if he came to Germany. And the efforts to protect him would just be a waste of time.

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