WiFi, WireGuard, Old stuff, TLS, SaveDotOrg, SSH, Oracle, Snaps

1. Read about WLAN 6 GHz aka WiFi 6E which will greatly expand the WiFi frequencies available and add extra bandwidth to avoid overlapping with other networks. Yet for local cases 802.11ay (60 GHz) would be awesome. Of course that basically requires WiFi box to be in every room, or even several per room. But at least that will mean that the bandwidth wouldn't be running out any time soon because frequencies can be reused so densely.

2. - Nice post "Why not WireGuard?" from Tailscale - https://tailscale.com/blog/why-not-why-not-wireguard/ -. I've gotten so many times totally frustrated by cross vendor IPsec tunnels that almost anything is better than that. Other points like CPU loads, AES, etc... Often best possible cipher suite is chosen with IPsec but even that can be bad, with older devices etc. Good points, nothing special there.

3. I'm just wonder that doesn't people remember - light pens - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen -. When they think touchscreen with stylus is something new. Touchscreens were also used with - CRTs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode-ray_tube -, before flat screens came to market.

4. More or less interesting SSL connection issues while using ODBC connections, after disabling TLS10 and TLS11 protocol support and related ciphers. Upgrading to "ODBC Driver 17" for SQL Server fixed these issues. Yet at usual, it took bit of straddling, some code changes and asking for permissions to install required driver(s).

5. Yet again another great - Darknet Diaries Episode 64: The Athens Shadow Games - https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/64/ -.

6. SaveDotOrg campaign was successful, and ICANN didn't sell .org TLD. Good job, yet the idea to sell it was crazy to beging with.

7. - SSH tricks and tips - https://smallstep.com/blog/ssh-tricks-and-tips/ - Nice post for newbies, but for perosnally it contained nothing new.

8. I decided to try Oracle Cloud, because they seem to provide a free tier VM in European Union (EU) (Germany Central, (Frankfurt)). That's nice. Yet, I hit a snag. I can't manage the console with my primary battle station, because my Firefox is always running in private mode, ALWAYS. And their management console requires IndexedDB which doesn't work in private mode. Sigh... Ok, I can use alternate computer to setup the VM, but this is still quite annoying. After changing to another computer with vanilla Chrome, it started to work without any problems. No other distributions to choose from than Oracle Linux. - Even if the VM is very low on resources, it's also really snappy. It's much much faster than my home server. Mostly because of the snappy storage platform it's using. Also it seems that Oracle is mostly using Telia as their primary peering partner at least for European traffic. Oracle, IPv6, say what? No nope, no IPv6. Strange. Actually my home server is lot faster (CPU & RAM) than this free tier always VM instance server. But faster storage makes it feel snappier. - Because the VM is using XFS, I had to play with xfs_Db and xfs_fsr tools a little. - After tinkering around, only thing I couldn't find was IPv6 support. I suppose it's not available or if it, it's very well hidden. Afaik, IPv6 should be the norm nowadays. I quickly worked around that using - he.net IPv6 6in4 tunneling - tunnelbroker.net -. But that's kind of ridiculous approach for servers. And should be seen as last resort work-a-round. - Opening ports took a while and reading documentation. It as bit confusing that "No route to host" means that the firewall at the host system isn't open. I had configured everything on the "cloud" management console correctly, but the VM firewall-cmd configuration was missing. Yet the research on topic revealed that it seems that I'm not the only one getting confused by that.

9. - Ubuntu 20.04 forcing users to use snaps - https://jatan.blog/2020/05/02/ubuntu-snap-obsession-has-snapped-me-off-of-it/ -. Agreed, I also slightly disliked the snaps, flatpaks and appimages. Yet with some software those are great. I preferred traditional install. But I do understand developers managing distribution packages, that especially with large and complex packages it would be nice to be easy to make just one packaging, whatever it is. Yet, I also found out that Snap, Flatpak and AppImage packaged software starts much slower than traditional installations (and I'm not the only one reporting similar experiences!). As example LibreOffice was one such application. Slow start especially sucks for small daily used apps. I yet don't mind if it's some complex huge specialty app which I fire up once a month.

2021-05-09