Month: August 2018
Tales from the road: going through security, immigration, boarding flight, without checking in
This happened a few years ago. I was coming from Capetown through Johannesburg to London, and then on to Toronto. Its a long journey, the flight from Joberg to London is ~12 hours alone. When I get to the airport in Capetown, South African Air gives me some shaggy dog story about “we can’t check…
Tales from the road: the cuisine of Taipei
This occurred years ago. My first trip to Taipei (before even the hello-kitty one). As is customary for bleary-eyed travellers who have just touched down from far away, one is forced to go out for a big heavy formal dinner more or less instantly. Your body says sleep or breakfast, the customer says let’s eat…
Taming the chatty firewall log
Want to log dropped packets in your firewall but not hate your console/dmesg/syslog? How about this little trick. First, configure your firewall, perhaps as below. See the ‘log-level 7’? Later we do dmesg -n6 (meaning the max level logged to console is 6). We then add a rule to rsyslog to route [TIMESTAMP] fwdrop: to…
Am I me? Are you you? The existential crisis of containers, not of Camus, and SPIFFE
Grade 9 French. Assigned Albert Camus’ “L’Étranger” to read. We all came back as one and had understood the words but not the meaning. Hippy french teacher then decides we really needed to understand existentialism. A few lessons later, tl;dr: something about a beach? There is a crisis of identity in the highly-orchestrated field of…
Tales from the road: the (non hello-kitty) Shinkansen
Japan. Famous for many things including high-speed-rail and many, many things that are very specific to Japan and confound foreigners. So, I arrive in Tokyo a few years ago for an IETF event that will be held in Hiroshima. The general way to get there is you land @ Narita, you take the (Narita Express)…
