Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 81

@SuperFloppies I got the thing I wanted, which is that the other routers will notice if my ISP checking script has disabled the default route, so they don't try to fall back to another router that doesn't have Internet access.

@SuperFloppies My assumption with RIP was that it flowed like water and will create routes for everything unless you stopped it. The truth, at least in RouterOS'es case, is that it only does that for dynamic routes that aren't default routes. In my case, I want redundant Internet access, so I told it to broadcast default routes as well, and then it worked like I wanted it to.

@SuperFloppies I'm running it on an interface where there can only ever be other routers that I have configured, unless a future network admin screws up badly.

@SuperFloppies The backbone is a completely closed network, and RIP is only running there, in order to propagate information about the LANs and default routes.

@SuperFloppies They can't do that on the backbone.

Yeah, using RIP on this network was a very good idea. 10/10 will recommend.

I ended up employing RIP on the backbone VLAN between the 3 routers on the network I'm setting up for the landlord. I had written a script that would enable or disable a route depending on whether its gateway could be pinged or not, and I was trying to figure out how to extend it with the ability to ping a router 2 hops away (ISP router) through the backbone, and at that point, I started wondering if perhaps these dreaded routing protools I'd been warned about would in fact be simpler.

@poetgrant Nutrition is one of the reasons I'm keeping multiple options on the table.

@beanis If you continued to consume dairy products and eggs, you'd be a lacto-ovo-vegetarian. I'm leaving such options open, since they are still more sustainable than the alternative. If you add fish, you'd be a lacto-ovo-pesco-vegetarian. If you dropped all animal products, you'd be a vegan.

I think what many anti-capitalists forget is that you don't need money to have capitalism. If money didn't exist, commodities would be traded instead. Stock dividends could easily be paid in goods or services, for example. All you need is exchange rates, and where there's exchange rates, there's a market you can speculate in. Eliminating capitalism would require some pretty severe restrictions of liberty. Capitalism is but one form of exploitation. There are many other forms.

I'm toying with the idea of going fully or partly vegetarian or vegan. The idea comes up from time to time. On paper, the argument for continuing to eat meat is very weak, and mostly boils down to habit.

If I did it, I'm not sure I'd go as far as refusing meat in a social setting. I think some people use identity as a crutch: If eating meat goes against your self-image, it's easier to abstain from it.

My approach would probably be to file it under the "unhealthy" category.

This Kurzgesagt video about meat is interesting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxvQPzrg2Wg

Video: "This is how horrible meat production is, but hey, don't feel bad about eating meat..."

Comments: "Uhh, we're going vegan."

Of all the places one can be born in, I was born in the least populated part of a tiny country named Norway. What are the odds?

Norway has its ups and downs, the climate being a particular downer, but on the whole, I feel incredibly privileged. It's safe, modern and affluent, and it's not hard to find a job I'm a natural citizen and didn't have to lift a finger. All I had to do was seize all the opportunities as they presented themselves.

You can't really complain, can you?

@SuperFloppies Thanks! See these screenshots to get a general idea of how it works: https://octodon.social/@thorthenorseman/100828362106368701

Screenshots of RouterOS running my 1350 lines-long configuration script.

It's a general-purpose script for anything between a single-router and a broadband connection, to a multi-building setup with several broadband/IPTV connections and routers connected by a backbone. Most features can be switched on or off. Settings can be given for all routers and then overridden individually.

With all the code I've written to make the Mikrotik scripting language an acceptable programming environment, I think I could release a script called "Mikrotik RouterOS Script - The Missing Standard Library".

The language is extremely barebones. There are some basic calls for array access and string processing. The syntax gets very parenthesis-heavy the minute you try to do something fancy, because the parser is so primitive. It's a toy language, but it's way better than no language.

The common setup script for the Mikrotik routers on my network now amounts to 1347 lines of code. I'm not sure if anyone has stretched the Mikrotik scripting language quite as far as I have. I'm basically writing JavaScript-style code in it, with heavy use of data structures. Among the things the script does, there is a deep merge function so I can set defaults but override specific settings for individual routers.

The network I've been setting up for my landlord now has an L2TP over IPsec VPN, which is good, because I never liked the old solution I had to remote network administration, which was to forward a port to the SSH server on my Hackintosh. This seems more secure, and is also a great deal more flexible. I even got it working on my iPhone.

The problem with not being with it anymore is that you get tired of the old stuff and you don't like the new stuff.

I rarely listen to music these days because of this.