What did you do today?

[danlb]

I checked the pictures from my security cam. It was a busy day. There were 750 pictures on the picture server. Only 7 kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhood this Halloween.

So sad. Now we have to eat the whole bag of candy.

Dan

[Dan Dubeau]

Had bit of a creative streak today and modeled 5 different fishing lures and then designed match plates and patterns for a couple of them. 2 will be hard resin poured baits and will need a silicone mold cast off a 3d printed matchplate (printing right now). One will be a cast aluminum mold for a lead pour, and I'll 3d print a pattern for it (tomorrow night). One will be a soft plastisol injection and is a bit involved so I'll machine it most likely (who knows when?). The last one I'm going to try a rotomold for a hollow bait with a rattle. The soft plastic and rotomold ones have been rattling around in my head for a few months, but I've just never found the time to sit down and draw them up. I've always wanted an excuse to try rotational molding. If it works, I've got a few different style baits I want to do.

We just booked our Biennial fishing trip for the spring and my goal is to catch as many fish on lures I made as possible. I think the cold snap and lack of outdoor jobs left to do around here has freed up time and kicked me into lure making mode again. I've got lots of ideas to fill my time again this winter. I tried to quit an hour ago and another variation of the first one popped into my head when I was shutting down, so I had to model it also. Capped off a good and productive weekend after an overtime jammed week at work. Heading to bed to do it all again this week.

[J Tiers]

We are getting a hard freeze (26 or 27 F) overnight and so I dug the cannas out of the 8 very large pots (about 20+ inch diameter) they grow in for the summers. Also brought all the alocasia and colocasia into the garage, and dug up other more tropical plants.

Was going to leave one hardy banana out, but that was only if I had planted it in the ground, which never happened. So they all came inside as well. The regular tropical dwarf bananas and another couple dozen patio plants were already in.

Of course it is getting back up to 70F after the freeze, for over a week, so without the freeze I would have had time to do all that when it is not cold out, except that actually I do not.

The only machine related stuff so far was clearing an immense mound of chips from the lathe, and another smaller pile from the mill. And, vacuuming the floor, which means clearing clogs from the hose by dropping a lead weight through it. And clearing up more, mixed with time spent glaring at the weird die head I have trying to think of a means to make it work for me on the turret lathe,

[DennisCA]

Can tell it's getting colder when both cats (around 10-12lbs) decided squeeze into the "strawberry"

[Tungsten dipper]

Great pic Dennis!!

[Dave C]

Gotta love some kitties I sure do miss my Raven your black one looks like her.

[The Metal Butcher]

Started a small fire in the lathe chip-pan at work today turning Titanium. It went out on it's own.

[danlb]

In between watching election returns, I addressed the problem I have accessing my private home network via VPN when I'm away from home. As a result I ended up writing a few programs which is something I've seldom needed to do since retiring. It's not that I don't like programming, but my programs tend to work well and don't usually need changes until some external event has to be taken into account. I've had some that have run automatically for over a decade without changes.

The problem with reaching my VPN turned out to be that the cable modem's IP address changed with the last power outage. I have a program that watches for that and updates the address on the DNS server, but a recent change to the cable modem's software broke that program. Somewhere in the last 20 years I'd stopped monitoring that particular utility.

On the plus side, the cable modem's now more secure. On the negative side, I can't programatically slurp up the configuration data anymore. I could have created a simple script that accessed the web page at "https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup" and grabbed the address from there, but I'd again be at the mercy of THAT web site as far as changes or even going offline.

I did it the easy way, with a daemon on my external DNS server that fires a packet at a network listener on one of my internal network servers. The internal server then fires a return packet via the cable modem to the external network of my DNS server. A temporary network listener on that system then slurps the IP address of the connection. The port on the external system is only open for the split second that it takes the packets to make the trip between computers.

Like all projects, it snowballed. The internal server is a Raspberry Pi 3 running an older Debian Linux version. The "netcat" utility was using a lot of CPU while it was listening to for a packet. 100% cpu usage is not a great thing. A quick check showed another Pi running the newest Debian did not have that problem. It used less than 1% of the CPU. I forgot that the upgrade process on this system works well BUT had a bad habit of stopping to ask permission to overwrite configuration files every 20 or 30 minutes. After letting the upgrade run for a few hours I checked the progress only to find it was about 50% finished. I babysat it for the rest of the process.

The problem is solved. Everything works as desired. But now I have an itch to go through and update all the systems in my bookshelf data center.

Dan

[Tim The Grim]

Did the initial mounting of my new front wheel configuration using the brackets I made to mount Razor quad calipers on the old 33.4 Sportster forks.
Everything fits, I just need some fastener changes.



And...I reassembled my old wood stove with all new cement and gaskets.

[Cenedd]

danlb If your IP changes, where will the external system be sending the initial packet to? Or is it some sort of DMZ where it can send to an internal address but the return packet gets NATd with the external IP?

Sounds like your programs are neater than my scripts tend to be. Mine involve only four commands: notepad, Google, copy and paste

[danlb]

danlb If your IP changes, where will the external system be sending the initial packet to? Or is it some sort of DMZ where it can send to an internal address but the return packet gets NATd with the external IP?

Sounds like your programs are neater than my scripts tend to be. Mine involve only four commands: notepad, Google, copy and paste

That's how I started... I copied bits of code I found on the system, altering them to do what I wanted. No manuals. No Google. No tech support since I was not suppose to be doing it.. Good times.

In answer to the question. I have one system (we'll call it SERVER1) that is exposed to the internet on a DMZ. It has a static IP on a DSL connection. Everything else is behind one or more firewalls and all traffic is NATed. SERVER2 lives on my internal net. Most traffic goes through the cable modem. The cable modem has it's own DMZ. The cable modem's external address is the one that occasionally gets changed when Comcast messes with their network topology or their DHCP servers or just has a multi day region wide power outage.

The data flow in this instance is: SERVER1 sends a packet through a hole in the DMZ firewall to SERVER2 which sends a packet through the cable modem to SERVER1 by way of the DSL. If the IP address that the packet comes from changes then the program alters the DNS entry and pushes the updates to the secondary DNS servers.

It would seem that I should be able to just use dynamic DNS (such as noip.com) but it's been my experience that these services tend to be either 1) unreliable or 2) subject to changing to a subscription service or 3) requires periodic intervention to confirm that the account is still active. As a side note, by cable modem does not support DDNS so I'd have to hack something together to make that work. Since I have my own DNS server, It's less work to make that do what it should.

It's possible that a determined hacker could gain access to the network at the cable or telephone company and reverse engineer the design enough to forge a packet and fool the program into changing the address to one under control of the hacker. They would have 1 second per hour to figure out that the SERVER1 port was open and to respond properly. I figure that if they have gotten that far into the internet infrastructure, they won't bother playing with my home brewed processes.

Dan

[J Tiers]

Today I raked multiple yards, and collected the leaves, then got out the shredding machine and shredded the huge pile, plus various greenery that had been cut,

What I got from that was a full composter, a nose full of dust brown snot, and a tired back from scooping umpty-lump scoops of leaves to pour in the hopper. Next spring, the batch before this one should be ready to come out the bottom. Takes two years for the full deal..

That will get mixed with various other stuff including local "dirt"and become "new dirt". Necessary here, because we have yellow clay not very far down. Got to keep making dirt in order to build up the soil here.

I sure miss that Minnesota dirt!

[RB211]

I'm between trips, have to go out for round two of Captain upgrade in a week. I'm purposely avoiding 99% of my hobbies, avoiding the workshop so my brain stays focused on the pilot stuff. For some reason the wife is super duper ecstatic happy with me. Apparently when I go into workshop mode I turn into the worlds most hyper focused asshole.
This tells me that I must seperate my workshop hobbies from my family life. Any future workshop must not be attached to the house or maybe even on the same piece of land.

[DennisCA]

Bought a new car. Well new and new... New to us. Mazda 6 from 2005, but in good shape and low mileage, as long as we get a few years out of it. A nice and boring A-B car for the family.

[Dave C]

Looks darn good considering it's age. Hope you get to enjoy it for years to come.