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VPN directly on a host

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All past VPN usage was inside containers & virtual machines, but problems with doing that behind wifi led to dedicating a host to a VPN.  The journey begins with installing a new raspberry pi.   dd if=image of=block device bs=4096 status=progress  Edit /etc/passwd & delete the root password to allow a root login without password.  They don't support the pi user anymore.  Then from the serial console, disable some services.    systemctl disable lightdm systemctl disable cups  systemctl disable ModemManager  systemctl disable NetworkManager  systemctl disable wpa_supplicant Reboot it  To enable public wifi on it, you need to log in on a browser.  iptables is not included in the image.  sshd, firefox, & chromium do come with the image.  sshd_config needs the PermitRootLogin yes line.  Firefox is broken but chromium can log in with a lot of prodding.  Then you can install iptables & bypass t...
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    Torrents inside a VPN inside a container behind masquerading inside wifi were the next challenge. ifconfig showed the container transferring data, but transmission-remote showed nothing coming in.  wget & ping were pretty intermittent. Every VPN needs a script that sets the tun0 MTU.  Wget only worked intermittently with 1420 for eth0 & 1340 tun0.   Openvpn uses options in the .ovpn file called tun-mtu & mssfix.  After a certain number of logins, protonvpn starts rejecting everything for a while.  This & the lack of peers for torrents make troubleshooting quite difficult. Looking like torrents need to join gootube downloads on the gateway & that means the gateway needs to be not recording audio.  The local wifi shouldn't be recording audio either.  The raspberry pi 3 doesn't do 5Ghz.  Another raspberry pi 4 could come online & go on the floor. Simultaneous access point & station requires both f...
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After intermittent success with yt-dlp on xfinitywifi, it eventually croaked with nothing but HTTP Error 403: Forbidden.  The problem is the alternative downloaders don't do 4k. It's probably blacklisting IP addresses & xfinitywifi is sharing a neighbor's blacklisted IP address. The leading theory now is just to finally invest in a tunneling program for the phone & use the phone's 30GB plan when all other means don't work.  ppp to the phone USB would be the ultimate solution.  Would 1st verify yt-dlp is still broken using the formal tethering plan so the lion kingdom can cancel it. Anyways, upgraded the piano to the latest python in order to try yt-dlp on it & it seemed to be working when run directly on the router.  The MTU hacking required for VPN's to work might break yt-dlp.  The problem is that MTU hack has to apply to the whole machine instead of a container.  This level of hacking has really reached the limit of what can be done with...
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    Is this purely AI generated world better or worse than what we had 5 years ago?     ------------------------------------------  https://growmane.blogspot.com/2023/09/acquaintances-seem-to-have-much-shorter.html 2 years after the last great Comca$t battle, seemingly to the day, the connection was disabled at 2am one monday night & the lion kingdom was back in walled garden mode. What previously worked: the outage map, waiting a while, restarting the gateway, restarting the router, deleting dhcp cache, no longer worked. It seems the worry free plan of a lifetime had just 2 years in it. Despite the overwhelming incompetance in the organization, they might carefully audit all the accounts.  There were hopes the plan would last until retirement.  Then lions would be excused from dealing with Comca$t for the rest of their natural lives. Phone tethering as a backup didn't go so well anymore.  Either the 5G network or 2.4Ghz might be saturated dur...
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 Estephone was the most recognizable voice of the 80's but the wall spares no-one.  A few early hits & lions are there in that bedroom again.        Dublin blvd in 1949 got the lion kingdom's attention. It originally branched into Dublin canyon Rd & the intersection was the mane drag.  The centers of civilization were still moving out of the wilderness. Then a halftoned picture of Chester Nimitz dedicating the cypress structure was quite eerie.  Sadly not enough resolution to see him.  What a lion would do for that negative.   https://localwiki.org/oakland/Cypress_Structure   Young lion thought double & triple deckers were the future of all freeways as land ran out.  The human factors of cost cutting & quality assurance put them out of reach.            
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 The last walnut crusher before race day was the worst of all of them.  The apartment water went out at 3pm, at is often does, so the lion kingdom decided to go out & run without eating anything or wearing contacts.  Normally, there's 8oz of rice krispy treats before the run. The relapsed ankle had recovered slightly, over 2 weeks of shorter runs interleaved with walks.  By mile 13, it was imperceptible. Was hungry for the 1st 13 miles.  Started taking cliff blocks at mile 15.  Took 12 in total during the next 11 miles.  Wasn't feeling hungry anymore but found 9min to be extremely fast.  Hit the wall at mile 22 & started run/walking.  Decided to bail out at mile 26.  Abandoned the 28 mile route of long ago in order to have bailout options instead of spending the whole day out there. Temperature started in the high 70's & finished in the mid 60s.  Was sweating quite a lot in the 1st half because of high humidity. Ran out ...
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 So it was a .25% cut, with another .5% built in the next 3 months. The game continues to be running housing inflation has hot as possible by offseting it with falling wages.  The stonk market had already priced it in. The downward pressure on interest rates from falling labor costs must not be underestimated.  If interest rates were anywhere near neutral for the last 100 years, the last human would have lost its job 100 years ago & they would be totally unemployable at any cost. The lion kingdom's opinion on manetaining a 50/50 portfolio continues to be the impact of a significant stonk market decline, not having any buying power during a decline, & the lack of need for home runs.  The FIRE gootubers absolutely need the highest returns they can get. Despite record S&P highs, lions made most of their money from paychecks this year.  It was definitely slow going.  The mane stonk went sideways since its high in 2024 while the S&P is up 10%....