Network on Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Making the LEDs on the LincStation N2 work in Alpine

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 20:27:00 +0000

I normally run backups on my network on a SmartOS server equipped with 2x14TB mirrored hard drives running ZFS, using rsync and SMB/CIFS as the access protocol (and eventually Kopia). It’s a bit noisy and sluggish, despite having a 10G Ethernet connection, so I recently bought a LincPlus LincStation N2 all-flash server during its Kickstarter to eventually replace it.

The N2 is a very slim device, has 10G (copper) networking, supports 4x M2 SSDs plus 2x SATA 2.5" drives (I suppose they could be spinning rust) and a 128G MMC boot drive so you don’t have to waste data drives on the operating system. The only thing missing, really, is ECC memory.

Getting the Hasivo F1100W-4SX-4XGT switch to work

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:05:00 +0000

I was first exposed to Cisco network equipment in 1995, and for a long time I used their gear for my home network. Then around 2012 I switched to Juniper switches for their more sane management interface and more reasonable prices. Neither have WiFI equipment that’s really appropriate for a home setting, however, with onerous licensing terms or crackpot schizophrenic hardware like my old Cisco 877W that was one half ADSL router and one half WiFi AP (coexisting uneasily in the same physical box with separate management interfaces).

Fiber for your home network

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 18:03:00 +0000

My apartment, like many, is elongated. The living room is on one end, the bedrooms (one of which is my home office), on the other side. This makes it hard to cover both sides with a single WiFi access point, or to have uniform Internet access speed on the wired network. I have a semi-pro Ubiquiti UniFi network of WiFi access points and switches, which makes it realtively easy, but only if you have good backhaul connectivity between the APs.

PSA: iCloud Private Relay can make Safari on your iPad unusable

Tue, 24 May 2022 21:01:00 +0000

After upgrading my iPad to iPadOS 15.5, Safari became unusable. It would take forever to load the Reddit login page, and many others like Dilbert.com. Opening the same in Firefox Focus had no issues.

Going into Settings / Safari / Privacy & Security / Hide IP Address and disabling it fixed this for me. Alternatively you can disable it only for specific networks (Settings / Wi-Fi / ⓘ / Limit IP Address Tracing / Off).

Setting HTTP headers for a static site on AWS CloudFront

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 15:49:00 +0000

For a very long time, I ran this site off my cloud server in the US. When I moved to London, I started experiencing the painful impact of the ~100ms latency on the loading time for images and videos, and decided to move to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with global reach. Unfortunately, most CDNs have steep minimum spend requirements that are excessive for a low-traffic site like this one. Amazon’s CloudFront is an exception, and my hosting costs are in the vicinity of $20 per month, which is why I settled for it despite my dislike for Amazon.

HSTS: surprisingly rare

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 16:21:57 +0000

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a critical security feature that allows a site to say “always use the secure HTTPS version, not the insecure unencrypted one”. There is a chicken-and-egg effect where the first time you access a website, you have no way to know if your site has HSTS turned on or not without accessing it, so browsers distribute a “HSTS Preload” list of domains for which it is turned on even if you have never accessed it before, as explained by Adam Langley of the Google Security Team. On Chromium based browsers you can check by accessing chrome://net-internals/#hsts. Yours truly is on the list, which means that almost every single device on the planet has a file with my name in it, to my never-ceasing amusement.

My Broadband Setup

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 23:15:05 +0000

I moved to the UK, a country that was a leader in Europe for PC adoption and early telecoms deregulation, but has since become one of the worst for the quality of its broadband through misguided laisser-faire policies. The only fixed broadband option available in my apartment is BT OpenReach’s pathetic VDSL service¹ (resold by Vodafone), which advertises 72 Mbps but I am lucky to get 40 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up.

Automating Epson SSL/TLS certificate renewal

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 17:54:05 +0000

Network-capable Epson printers like my new ET-16600 have a web-based user interface that supports HTTPS. You can even upload publicly recognized certificates from Let’s Encrypt et al, unfortunately the only options they offer is a Windows management app (blech) or a manual form.

When you have to upload this every month (that’s when I automatically renew my Let’s Encrypt certificates), this gets old really fast, and strange errors happen if you forget to do so and end up with an expired certificate.

Apple iCalendar's buggy SNI

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 18:15:05 +0000

I run my own CalDAV calendar server for my family and for myself. For a very long time I used DAViCal, but it’s always been a slight annoyance to set up on Apple devices because they don’t like DAViCal’s https://example.com/davical/caldav.php/majid URLs. What’s more, recent versions of iCalendar would pop up password prompts at random, and after re-entering the password a couple of times (once is not enough), would finally go on and work. The various devices would also all too often get out of sync, sometimes with the inscrutable error:

Edgewalker, a DIY VPN server

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 23:57:05 +0000

Rationale

There are many reasons to use a Virtual Private Network. Perhaps you are on an unsecured WiFi network. Perhaps you don’t want your Internet Service Provider to snoop on your browsing history using Deep Packet Inspection and compile a marketing dossier on your. Perhaps like my daughter you want to access video content on Netflix that is not available in your country. Perhaps you want to bypass the nanny state content filters the British government mandates.