*computer fell, broken in pieces*

Me calling [Microsoft] tech support: hey can you check my warranty on this computer, I think I broke it?

Tech support: yes sir but we must first go through the troubleshooting steps,

Me: no, no I just-

Tech support: have you tried pressing F8 sir?

Me: umm… no, look I'm just -

Tech support: sir please press the F8 key sir

Me: okay… I pressed it, now can you just check my-

Tech support: sir please what happened when you pressed F8?

Me: it's broken, now if you could just check my warranty -

Tech support: sir I'm sorry sir I think you did it wrong. Please press F8

Me: no just check my-

Tech support: sir I think you do not understand, sir it is at the top-

Yup.

I give up. I have never had a successful experience with iptables in my entire career. I have never seen any adult human successfully utilizing iptables at work. There is no debugger software with a window that shows a packet and you press F8 and you see what happens to the packet as it passes through the iptables black hole. No body knows why this piece of software does not work. Everybody believe that there's some hacker somewhere who knows how it works. And all projects that come to this point, end up giving up and finding a different solution that does not need iptable at all or just move to a totally different business altogether! The only thing that might work with ip table is to simply block some port numbers or some ip addresses. Routing traffic send to one port into another port or through another interface, etc. Forget about it! We really need an alternative to iptables. And I don't mean just a shell on top of iptables that just converts one format of commands into another. I mean a new linux kernel module that routes packages and does it successfully and comes with an IDE with debugger function.

!dev (kinda)

Warning: Might contain (be) stupid rambling.

So I got my new toy and want to play around with it. Just in case I have to return it I first want to make a full disk backup, so I try to boot clonezilla. I press the power button and mash F2, F8, F9 - and it boots straight into the windows setup. Nope, not what I wanted. Try again. And again. Eventually I look it up and apparently I have to hammer the ESC key to get where I want to. Alright, now it works. Boot from USB. Failed. Try again. Failed. Check the BIOS, disable secure boot, reboot. I need to type 4 digits to confirm disabling secure boot. Alright. Reboot, try again, failed. Secure boot is on again. Wtf? After some more infuriating tries I see that NumLock is disabled. AAAARGH. BIOS: Enable NumLock on boot, disable secure boot, enable legacy boot. Input the 4 digits - works! Try to boot from USB: Failed! Grab another USB stick, did the clonezilla image, try again: Finally! It! Works!

Format disk, install Qubes OS. Success!