Raft, UDF, Miredo, LLMNR, APM, E2EE, HFSWR

Just tested one email address management console. It let's me add in UI address like 1+2@example.org, but when I try to save, it fails. Sounds like shoddy engineering. Almost all of web sites fail on basic email address tests. It seems that some services even fail to bounce strange enough email addresses.

  • Reminded my self about Raft consensus algorithm . Quite simple single master replication & consensus protocol. Raft site and Raft whitepaper. Comparable to Paxos , but simpler due to single selected leader.
  • Helped a friend to move systems from OVH to Scaleway. Not all required projects were ported from Ubuntu for ARM so therefore we ended up using x86 server, even if the ARM servers would have been bit cheaper.
  • I got this newbie issue. I was bit confused what meta key means, but yeah. Now it's all working. Actually I think I haven't ever used with modern GUI the meta feature. Double escape, or escape once and then entering other keys. M- as it's said in nano help etc. Good to know. Also it's important to know how to manage screen and ssh sessions, escape ssh sessions etc. I so often see people getting stuck with basic stuff, which should be obvious and trivial, if you just bother and take a good look at it. Learn, try, study until you succeed.
  • UDF driver on Linux - Now one of the storage devices I got has some kind of corruption. But guess what, no. File system / driver doesn't give any kind of error. Any process trying to access that file, just ends up in infinite loop. Even if you try to kill the process, yeah, even with -9, it just goes as <defunct> and still keeps jamming the system. So much awesomeness! Even system shutdown after that failure hangs. I guess I've also had enough about the UDF experiment, it seems to have even more serious issues than the broken exFAT. I used alternate computer, trying to remove the files and the problem repeated it self. Therefore it's verified and clearly related to the UDF file system and something being seriously wrong with it.
  • Miredo (Linux Teredo tunneling client) on Linux, it was ridiculously easy and quick to setup and worked well. Yet for some reason the gateway seemed to provide really bad latency. I guess it could be overloaded (?). Because on networking terms, the gateway itself which I choose to use was TREX's Teredo was very well accessible with low latency.
  • LLMNR - Just reminded myself about LLMNR even if I usually prefer running local DNS relay server which is also responsible for local name resolution.
  • Found out that at least on Xubuntu the power.d configuration seems to reset APM settings for all hard drives disabling sleep. Maybe this is the problem I've been experiencing? Maybe not. Didn't get conclusive results just yet.
  • Had long discussion with one friend who claimed that trust no 1 or End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is something awesome and makes systems secure. Well, yes and no. He claimed that using encryption client and or JavaScript encryption would make things extremely safe. Well, yes and no. Sure, the encryption keys aren't (usually) passed to the service. But I don't really see big difference there. Because as long as all that code comes from one vendor / service provider. So what if they don't (yet / now) have the key? The key is handled by their client or their JavaScript code. If and when required, it's trivial to change that code so that they key(s) are leaked. Exactly same matter applies to password hashing, so what. So what if the hashing is done by client and whatever. This is the point which I'm always bringing up when something is E2EE secure and can't be breached blah blah blah. If the program got auto update feature... It's game over anyway. They can deliver special version just for you and you don't even know it. This is one of the very important reasons why I like about the setup, where encryption and data storage are done by completely separate entities. There are simply endless ways how smart people can break the encryption or leak the keys covertly.
  • Something different: Russian Podsolnukh (Sunflower) Over The Horizon (OTH) / High Frequency Surface Wave Radar (HFSWR). No link, because no great single source (like Wikipedia).

2019-08-18