HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router
Proceed at your own risk! (... it's worth it)
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The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 130 posts.
Proceed at your own risk! (... it's worth it)
A practical deep dive into Tailscale exit nodes: route changes, traceroute evidence, DERP fallback, trust boundaries, and why this model can be free.
This was unavoidable, given my post from the other day about how to make traceroute display (almost) arbitrary strings.
In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio…
Solving the conflicting subnet problem with overlay addressing, WireGuard, and 1:1 NAT.
EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th. Instead, a Verizon tech called me, and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming…
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.
In case you were wondering whether this would mean... writing zone files with some arcane syntax that BIND 9 is apparently famous of, I hereby present the main point of this post a recommendation for which DNS server to choose.
Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES . NSA used export-law exceptions in the 1990s to entrench RC4 and RSA-512, causing security problems for decades . NSA in the…
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web…
The IPv4 "exhaustion" is not real. The addresses got hoarded and the market devolved into a wild sub-leasing economy where anyone can choose where their IPs appear from, who owns them on paper, and scrub them clean of any history.
The Social Smolnet par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP, a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT. Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is…
When to reach for a well-known URI — and the traps that catch most protocol designers.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol involved in getting the lock icon to appear in your browser next to the URL. Under the hood it uses a bunch of really cool numbers for encryption. Some numbers are considered private and need securing; some are considered public and are fine for sharing. You can mix your…
The files mentioned in this article are available for viewing or cloning here: the 'pf-bedtime' repo .
The GDID helped catch a hacker despite his VPN. I set up a VM to see if it can be neutralized: what works, what doesn't, and the scripts to stop it from ...
While starting my first year at the Colorado School of Mines, I came across a rather interesting fact: the local DNS servers will assign a subdomain to each device that connects to the network. This means that a device called “meow” will be visible as “meow.mines.edu” on any campus wifi, though the network still…
Personal Blog of Christian Haschek
Token Ring and ARCNET once competed with Ethernet as networking standards
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that.
A small HTTP-header tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett
Behind a cheap Temu doorbell sits an IoT backend where device IDs are sequential and requests are forgeable with a string baked into every firmware. One signed call lifts any device's persistent password and lets anyone on the Internet hijack the next live call.
From 15 March 2026, CAs must validate DNSSEC on CAA lookups and ACME checks. I've run DNSSEC for 14 years; see if your registrar supports it.
This post covers how RFC8950 gives the ability to route IPv4 over IPv6 BGP sessions with IPv6 next-hops
To kick off 2026, I had clear objectives in mind: decommissioning my trusty VPS and setting up its successor. Embracing a complete paradigm shift, I built myself a container-centric, declarative, and low-maintenance setup for the years to come.
The research roots of finding “optimal routing” networks trace back to the late 1970s. Mathematicians defined special kinds of networks called “expanders“. These are graphs with strong connectivity properties guaranteeing no subset of vertices can be isolated from the rest. In 1976, Leslie Valiant gave one of the…
Since 2020, I've taken on a Steve Jobs alter-ego (on a very, very part time basis, and often for humor purposes ). The firs...
FreeBSD 15 comes with a new bridging implementation which has native support for VLANs. They have also soft-deprecated the ability to have any layer 3 addresses on member interfaces which makes it behave like a real hardware switch. The net.link.bridge.member_ifaddrs sysctl controls this behavior and it will …