Got a phone interview for a backend dev job in an opsec company.

Interviewer:
This is a very serious and prestigious position, we take care of the most important bits of code.

*Proceeds to talk introductory nonsense*

Interviewer:
Do you know what a DNS is?

Me:
Yes, of course! DNS stands for Domain Name System.... Blah blah blah... I explain about the servers, about hosts file, about DNS spoofing and everything else possible on this topic.

Interviewer:
See, I was patient with you - letting you finish. I'm not sure what you're talking about and where you got it from, but a DNS is that line in the browser where you type the site's name.

He didn't ask any more questions, just told me that they'll get back to me. I asked not to do that.

Three weeks later I got an email claiming that I'm not qualified.

Hello guys. So after I posted the rant about me blocking Google and Facebook through my hosts file, some people commented with the idea of creating a gitlab page with more privacy tips etc.

Well, that is turning into a project (actual website) that I initially started alone but @ewpratten joined the 'team' as frontender!

He'll be doing the front end and I'll be doing the backend :).

I think this will be my first ever (active) collab so I'm pretty excited =D.

First rant from a phone without Google services.

Put shitloads of Google/fb etc domains in the hosts file so my phone cant reach those either.

Root firewall blocks everything except for devrant, a download manager, fdroid and firefox focus.

As for my phone, I'm Google free!

So the new mass surveillance law will be going into effect from the 1st of January.

Of course, since I'm very keen on my security/privacy, I'm going to implement some precautions.

- A few vps's connecting to tor, i2p and VPN provider so that I can always use a secure connection.

- Setup anti tracker/ads/etc etc shit on the VPS's. Probably through DnsMasq and the hosts file.

- Use Tor browser by default. I've tried this for a while now and damn, the tor network has become way faster than only even a year ago! Some pages literally only take a few seconds to load.

- Wipe my laptop, encrypt the harddrive and at least put QubesOS on it together with probably a few other systems.

- Ungoogle my new phone, use it with VPN by default.

- Get rid of all non encrypted communication services. I think that only leaves me with a few account removals because I haven't chatted unencrypted for nearly a fucking year now.

If anyone has any more ideas, please share!

I don't use Google/Facebook for privacy reasons (and their sub-services etc). Haven't used them for ages but noticed that google still loads a lot of domains like analytics etc. This goes for facebook as well.

I now blocked a lot of google/facebook domains through my hosts file.

It's funny to see the amount of DNS requests to those fb/google connected domains nearly go to zero and also the fact that I literally can't load google/facebook anymore!

Holy fuck, this is starting to work!

Problem: I am highly anti google/facebook/few others and I'd rather null route those DNS requests.
The problem is that the pihole only can blacklist domains or wildcard domains but not words. So if Google would come up with a new name for some of their domains, I'd be fucked because I can't filter out the word Google through the pihole.

Today I fucking found the solution (still a work in progress but a PoC is nearly working):
Compiled a program which can monitor DNS queries/requests and logs them to a file.
Have a php (yes I write most of my cli tools in php) script tailing the log file and gathering the requested domains from it.
Then I can see if the domain contains the substring which I don't like (google as word for example) and echo it to the end of my hosts file with 0.0.0.0 in front of it if that's the case.

Holy fuck this seems to be working! 😍

Ok, I'm adding devrant.com, reddit.com and youtube.com to my hosts file for the next weeks

Damn procrastination

PS: If I answer or ++ any of your comments, it means I failed. You devs can hold me accountable for that, thank you!

My devGoals for 2019 are:

- Move DNS blocking from hosts file to a PiHole (or similar) at home

- Implement a full HAL for some smol microcontroller in C

- Create better automation templates for testing, building & deployment for our Angular projects

- Get rid of crippling depression

- Force my boss away from firebase and google tools in general

- Spread the love for CraftCMS

- Spread more love in general (with protection of course) 😄

21:30, sysadmin, chatting with my colleagues, when one posts a screenshot of a message he just received from a dev :
"Hello, sorry for bothering you this late but we have a demo tomorrow morning and the app is completely stalled. It fails with the message 'cannot write to <file>, no space left on device'"

I say "I bet that they somehow managed to make their DB grow uncontrollably".

Colleague asks which server hosts the app, Dev answers "one of ours", then adds after a few seconds "wait, do you need the IP of the server? Dev2 should be able to provide it", before finally adding "we use a scheme in <other project> DB actually".

Finally, Dev2 declares that the bug is solved: "There was a loop that caused a DB view to grow constantly and it filled the filesystem".

Me: "Called it".

They cleaned the view: 41GB freed.

So my host of choice decided to migrate an old site to a new set of IPs without warning yesterday, down side to a VPS I guess.

Now this wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t on a dedicated IP you wankers.

DNS won’t resolve to new location yet and Virtual hosts contained the old IPs and for some fuck of a reason the httpd file is auto generated 😡so updating it will be lost on reboot.

Like What the flying fuck you imbeciles, this site has been up and running for 5+ years on this IP.
I barely do any maintenance for t as it’s just an old horse sitting on the web but fuck you don’t need to fuck with it or atleast give some fucking warning before you go drop it offline 😡

looking at my uncle's webpage because he wants to switch hosts.
The logo has a white background, we want to change that.
Uncle: "It's not supposed to look like this"
Me: "the jpg file type is not transparent, you have to make something like a png."
U: *pulls up word* "hmm... I don't have that font on this laptop..."
M: *slowly loses sanity*

Back when I migrated my file server to a VM, I used robocopy to copy everything over (and caused quite a few fuckups before it'd behave halfway decent.. or so I thought). Now I tried to add my desktop's SSH key to the authorized_keys on said server but it wouldn't accept my key after that. After a bit of digging I've found that my entire home directory (where the file server hosts its mirror of my D: drive) had everything set to 777, and that's why the key isn't accepted. Great permission mode, isn't it? Much secure, very wow! Thank you so much robocopy!!!

open hosts file:
151.101.1.69 devrant.io
(Stackoverflow)

So now Microsoft is suddenly deciding devices that "weren't" compatible are now perfectly compatible with Windows 11, and they're rolling this out in bunches at a time.

I still get "This device can not support Windows 11" but my coworkers are starting to see "Upgrade NOW!" and it's honestly gotten a bit sour seeing as I may be next. They're bypassing those who're editing the registry to stop this, too.

If I have to start diving into the deep ends of Windows and find out what IP Windows gets it's updates just to slap it into my HOSTS file, we're already in the apocalypse.

This upgrade is not bad for common people, but upon seeing that the Start menu GUI and taskbar got butchered horribly (I place my taskbar on top of the screen, Windows 11 doesn't allow for that) I myself absolutely want as much distance between me and that shit as possible.

In college, I've been hearing my fellow classmates having issues with Windows 11 left and right, including with how hard it is to get another browser to even work, to the Windows Store not even downloading Microsoft's own apps, to endless update loops, to the infamous "Update of Death"

Keep in mind, they got computers with better specs than mine, and they're having a worse experience. A lot of them just got refunds to the very last issue I just mentioned, all within August, day of purchase to day of return.

Microsoft, I am begging you for mercy, I'm so close to just getting up, finding out where you are, and blocking you from my network at all network and device levels.

Client: Can you have a look at this website template for me?
Me: Sure, what's the address?
Client: You'll need to modify your hosts file to see it...
Me: 😡😷

So been working with Linux for almost 10 years now, so am not new with this. But yesterday, a friend had difficulties accessing Wikipedia and their sister sites so I tried to help him out, you know, the usual way. Ping, Direct IP, DNS, and proxies/VPN, checking his /etc/hosts, but to no avail. Decided to download TeamViewer and install it so that I can help him out remotely. Went afk for 30min for dinner and when I came back, TeamViewer installation .Deb installer literally uninstalled every single software from my Kubuntu machine, from Spotify and slowly even my file manager and terminal was uninstalled. When it was over, even my grub was uninstalled.

Had anyone faced the same issue before?

//rant

So i ordered myself a web server and am trying to get access to phpmyadmin.
I got generated username and password for the phpmyadmin login.
So i created mysql databases and database users, outside the interface, but that's fucking it, i need to create tables as well, can't do that without the interface, cuz NO ACCESS!

Fucking piece of shit service provider, they had one thing to do and they can't even fucking do it right. How dare they call themselves web hosts at all...

It's probably a badly configured config file but i can't access the file myself to start sorting this shit out, so i got to wait at least 12 hours till work hours to be able to contact with them and sort this shit out.

Fuck who ever put the `hosts` file in that path WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REMEMBER!

and then fuck who put the httpd-vhosts.conf in a totally different path that is impossible to remember!

What the fuck?
I can't understand people who are using ad blocking extensions in their browsers... Why don't you just use hosts file ad blocking or DNS service that filters ad provider hosts?
In this case you will have much faster working browser won't you?

A casualty of Windows Update wrecking my machine was the hosts file with the dev domains I added to make my life easier.

It's trivial to add them back as I encounter them, but that's just another little waste of time that Microsoft would be billed for if the world functioned like it should.

TIL:

How to become root w/o having to provide a password:

unshare -rm

no go ahead and bind-mount your own /etc/hosts (or any other file/directory) w/o affecting the rest of the system!

Co-worker: My local Weblogic instance doesn't work when my IP changes :c
Me: Lemme help you with that.
Me: *tries bunch of stuff and nothing* Weird...
Me: *checks his hosts file, localhost is mapped to old IP* KILL YOURSELF OR I WILL.

Goddammit,
today, my laptop crashed while shutting down.
I just switched it in again, and boom, Hostname-Resolution isn't working anymore.
I also already checked UFW, iptables and the hosts-file.
Guess I'll reinstall it tomorrow.

i need an adult. I know noone who would understand my worries, so you guys need to be it.

i have a nextcloud running on my raspberry pi. performance is horrible, dont ask, but it works.

i mostly use it to backup the photos of my phone sd card every night when my phone charges. Internally this works good. If i am elseplace it wont for obvious reasons.

In my youthful joy of doom i opened port 443 and forward it to my raspi. I get internet via cable and my ip is pretty much static (it was the same for 10 months). So external access is provided.

Now i thought, its stupid that i cannot sign an ssl certificate cause i dont have a domain. Lets buy domain. But before i do that i did some try runs with duckdns to test the principle.

Some back and forth, it works now. Pretty god, i could even make a cron job on the raspbi to renew (that should work right?). Only problem. randoname.duckdns.org doesnt work internally. Or should not at least.

So i googled a bit and it turns out that my router (a cable fritz!box i bought myself) can be a local network dns. Or cannot. Regardless what i try, it doesnt accept the changed config file.

Now the problem.

It works anyway. randoname.duckdns.org points to my external "static" ip and resolves to that from my internal network..so it works on my phone or laptop. if i traceroute the thing it goes via two hops out and finishes in less than 1ms.

Now to the problem:
I have no fokkin clue why. The expected behaviour would be that it shouldnt work. If i do what i intended todo on pc in the hosts file tracert works correctly, directly pointing to the internal ip.

What i cannot figure out, is it the fritz!box being smart? Is it my ISP being smart?

Reason to rant: i have absolutly NOONE to ask, i know not a single person who would even understand what troubles me. I want to learn, i want to know WHY not just some mindless russian patchwork of "if it works its good enough".

thats depressing.

2 hours of pain today, just because I forgot that inside the container 127.0.0.1 is not equal to my host IP !! Grrr

So after deploying an update for my apps api this morning, I very quickly had to move hosts as openahift for some reason does not install express on its 8.x container, heck its not even in the package lock file, and no help from Google. On the plus side, new ones faster, even though it's further away, and I can only image a replica set DB is better than a single instance.

been working on this docker thing for 2 weeks. 3 containers each running a different aervice (mariadb, nginx, wordpress) using debian as the base image (not the app image itself). Got all the configs down, all the dockerfiles down, the docker-compose yml down. Run docker-compose up, everything goes up all nice without errors.

Try to access the wordpress website. Only reachable from localhost, no atyling is served, all redirections fail… because it can’t find the local domain it is supposed to bind to. Tried editing the hosts file, didn’t worked. 3 days of googling, havent been able to find a fix. I don’t know what am I supposed to hate anymore. Is it nginx ? is it wordpress ? is it just the host machine’s dns/hosts config ? is it docker ? myself ?

I swear theres nobody in this world who wakes up one morning and happily cracks their knuckles to go write some dockerfiles.

I did some of the front-end and whole backend. build and manage the SQL + elasticsearch database. After all of this, only 17 lines of mother fu**er code ruined my life. The client is asking for code. And.... And... Can't say anymore.

input {
file {
path => "/home/rsa-key-20200528/aslogger.log"
type => "java"
start_position => "beginning"
}
}

output {
stdout {
codec => rubydebug
}
elasticsearch {
hosts => ["localhost:9200"]
index => "aslogger"
}
}