blog.dasrecht.net

When I’ve set up my Odroid Server earlier this year, I’ve wondered if it was a good idea to run a public-facing DNS resolver based on Pi-Hole. Against all the voices telling me no, I decided nonetheless to try it and see what happens. In the end, the traffic will be limited at some point by the CPU power available, and the Operations Team at CommunityRack.org will give me a hearty slap on the wrist saying, “you broke it, you’ll fix it”, and they will make me buy some Pizza and/or Doughnuts for the next time we meet in person. So the experiment began towards mid-February.

You can see the traffic I was making most of the time until around May. Primary clients connected to the VPN using the DNS Resolver following mostly standard day/night/weekend traffic patterns.

There’s a noticeable bump in July, a considerable Spike towards august, and then in October, the floodgates opened entirely with a couple of million DNS queries per day. My theory is that at some point in July, the resolver got on some well known DNS list and started to gain “trust” as it was always online.

A few observations:

1. First, there was only my traffic, but soon after, someone or a small group of people discovered the resolver and started using it.
2. Discovery — I was confused why and how people found the resolver, but they seemed to use it steadily.
3. Service-Thoughts — But you can’t get in touch with someone like that, so I’ve set up a small landing page on the IP and added an email address for anyone to reach out if they plan to use the service for an extended time, so I could give them at least a heads up in case the service needs to shut down. If you ever debug a failing DNS server, you would know why – Nobody deserves this.
4. Privacy — It was when I noticed that I’d need to shred the log files at some point and started lowering the data logged to disk. The less I know, the better. At this point, I only cared for the raw numbers.
5. Trust? — And last and the most concerning one for me personally is that people seem to blindly trust a random IP on the internet that gives them DNS responses. (I kind of pride myself that I was able to run a DNS resolver with seemingly good uptime and minimal maintenance).

So how long?

The answer is 7 months and 3 days (15th March till 18th October).

Sorry to the people that have a broken DNS resolver now. And sorry if my resolver has been part of some sort of a DNS Amplification Attack (based on the traffic it should not have, but that’s hard to say).

The experiment has ended; thanks for participating. I’ve just shredded all logs.

Well, Evernotes past year or so was a bummer as a customer. Don’t take it from me; just have a look at the Evernote Reddit, and it echoes exactly what I saw for quite some time:

• The new Android App was much slower than before – scans of documents suddenly were barely usable – it took around a minute to snap a picture of a document and scan it, and the app sometimes crashed in the process.
• Mac App also got terribly slow and memory hungry; the old app was fast.
• New Pricing model – I mean… why…

As my renewal would have come around soon, I’ve started looking into all sorts of alternatives, and the most promising one seems to be the open-source note-taking app Joplin.

As I rarely need the online Sync for note-taking exporting from Evernote and importing everything into Joplin was easy, just two or three notes that had issues, but that was an easy fix — or better said a cleanup as those notes were ancient and not needed anymore. And OMG, the web clipper of Joplin is so fast and has a few features I like a lot.

My workflow for Document scans currently runs through Dropbox, something I’ll look into when I got more time. But for now, that’s enough, and the Dropbox App gives me a nice PDF that I can Import and File where it’s needed. Also, having documents in the Note-taking app is something I stopped a while ago, so the PDFs live in a separate file structure that works for me.

The really cool thing about Joplin is that there are tons of Plugins available to tweak the app to your needs. And suppose I ever need Joplin to sync my data to secondary devices. In that case, there are several ways of getting this done, as it supports Dropbox, Nextcloud and Joplin Server – which is just another Container to run somewhere.

So far, I’m happy having liberated my notes into a System that works better and provides a lot of flexibility.

In einer Woche lädt die SVP interessierte Mitglieder zu einer «Arbeitstagung» ein. Das Thema: «Luxus-Sozialisten in den Städten diktieren der Landbevölkerung das Leben». Geleitet wird die Tagung vom Zürcher Nationalrat Thomas Matter. Das Vermögen des Bankiers und Unternehmers wird auf 200 Millionen Franken geschätzt. Er lebt in Meilen an der Zürcher Goldküste. Einer Gemeinde, die über weniger Landwirtschaftsfläche verfügt als die luxussozialistische Stadt Zürich.

Quelle Zuger Zeitung / Schweiz am Wochenende – 21. August 2021

Wenigstens Spalten wir die Bevölkerung nicht mehr nach Herkunft, sondern weiten den Stadt-Land-Graben ein bisschen aus. Als sogenannter Luxus-Sozialist Städter finde ich es befremdlich, mir von Multimilionärinnen in meinen Mandelmilch-Kaffee spucken zu lassen (der war teuer!).

Alternativ sollte man sich den Twitter Thread zu den neuen “Feinden” der SVP zu Gemüte führen.