Michael P. O'Connor

Well it has been over a month and a half since I ditched chrome for the brave browser, and it been very good. When I was using chrome my Load average was alwasy pegged at 6 and above, with the brave browser it is going as low as 2. It is nice to have a second system blocking tracking and ads (along with my pi hole) I would highly recomend it to anyone not just for the blocking it has built in, but for how much nicer it is on the CPU and it does not use as much memory. It less of a resource hog then chrome is.

Well this morning Verizon has a total network outage where I live. A while back I setup my USG to use my T-Mobile hotspot as a fail over network. So I still have internet but burning though my data plan on the hotspot faster then I thought even with not streaming any video or music. In 2 hours I have used 3Gbytes of data. I should look into getting a second internet connection instead of my hotspot for when things like this happen, instead of destroying my data plan on the hotspot (only have 10GB on the data plan, or maybe updating to the 30BG plan but I would loss the data stash, probably should call T-Moblie to explore the options later today.)

But this has shown me even more the importance of having physical copies of my Entertainment be it my CDs or my DVD/Bluerays as I can still watch my shows, or listen to my music when I don’t have access to streaming services.

Well I have a VPN end point into my home network. But the issue has been the changing IP address you get with home networks, and Verizon charges to much for a static IP (I don’t want to go to a business account) So I found this site http://rizwanansari.net/digital-ocean-dynamic-dns/ that has a script for doing it. Then using this site https://michaelryom.dk/custom-ddns-on-ubiquiti-usg/?doing_wp_cron=1621004472.1860389709472656250000 I setup the following cron job on my Unifi router

0 */12 * * * /config/scripts/post-config.d/create-ddns

So now the script from the first site runs every 12 hours, at midnight and noon. So now when I connect I have a static host name to use that is updated every 12 hours with what ever my IP address is. Makes connecting my cell phone to my home network easy (using OpenVPN) plus I get all the anti-tracking and anti-ads that my Pi-hole has.

Today I have deleted (or should I say “deactivated as twitter puts it) my twitter account. Next I will be deleting my facebook account, I have not used them since January. True I know they will retain that data for as they want to keep it to try to sell my info to advertisers. and shadow profiles, but it just makes it eaier to break from them. Plus with the anti-tracking lists I have added to my Pi-Hole it will be harder for them to spam me.

Well I have in my Pi-Hole blocked many URLs from google. One of the URLs is the Android connection test. “to make sure your phone is on line” To circumvent my phone saying it is not on line I followed this guide Self-hosting the WiFi Connectivity Check for Android

So basicly I created a file called 204.php on my internal web server I use for testing stuff that contains
<?php
http_response_code(204);
exit(); ?>

I put it in my /var/www/htdoc directory and added the following to my httpd.conf file

NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName connectivitycheck.gstatic.com
RedirectMatch 204 .*
</VirtualHost>


The thing is I would never have known about this URL to be blocked if they did not make so many requests. When I look at the stats for my Pi-Hole it is the top requested domain name, in the last 24 hours the phone has done 5512 lookups for the domain. I keep an eye on the stats on my pi-hole, and when there is a unrecognized URL hit that often I start to look into it, most of the time they get blocked. If google was not so greeded for the data and spamming it so often I might never have known the requests were being made, and it would have flown under the radar, but since it the #1 requested URL on my network it looked suspicious to me. So I looked into it, and blocked it, and setup a work around to it.

(more…)