While fiddling with my educational TFTP client code
I noticed an oddity.
Sometimes my client could talk to a TFTP server,
but not vice versa.
The TFTP server, when it condescended to acknowledge a connection,
logged a message like recvmsg(): connection refused.
I used a local TFTP server, running on my laptop,
to avoid these errors,
but the mystery of why the server returned
no TFTP ACKs or DATA packets remained.
My laptop’s /etc/hosts file has entries like this:
fe80::46a8:42ff:fe2d:c255 monarcheno1
# eno2 - 10.0.10.1
fe80::46a8:42ff:fe2d:c256 monarcheno2
# eno4 10.0.20.1
fe80::46a8:42ff:fe2d:c258 monarcheno4
# ens5 10.0.40.1
fe80::6a05:caff:fe4a:8ac7 monarchens5
IPv4 address 35.211.226.190 requested the URL /posts/dfuds/
from my blog’s web server
841 times between 2026-01-16 and 2026-03-10,
approximately once every 45 minutes.
I bought a 8-port Netgear GS308E switch. I plugged it in, and it worked, but I noticed the LEDs on the RJ-11 ethernet socket flickered regularly.
At 2025-11-15T15:38:20Z, I submitted my Goofing on Meta blog post to the Hacker News link aggregation website. Shortly after that, at 2025-11-15T18:22:00Z, short blurb tech news website slashdot.org put an article about the same blog past in the Technology News section.
Since I run my own web server, I can see how the two sites’ users compare.
I set up two Raspberry Pi SBCs with GPS boards as NTP servers earlier this year. I used an oscilloscope to see how far apart the “pulse per second” (PPS) pulses that the GPS boards output.
Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of
meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)
was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.
2025-11-29: Hacker News and Slashdot comparison for this post.
On Saturday, May 31, 2025 11:06:36 PM UTC, I submitted a link to the How often does my IP address change post on this blog to the famed “Hacker News” web site.
On Saturday, July 26, 2025 2:25:36 PM UTC, I submitted another link, this time to the 10 Lessons from Napoleon post on this blog to the same web site.
I signed up with Fathom Analytics for a few months to see what “web analytics” were, and how they are gathered.
My house has 2 CenturyLink fiber optic connections to The Internet. On July 5, 2025, the connections didn’t work for 3 periods of time.