Michael P. O'Connor

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…)

In my attempt to get away from google more and more, I have decided to try The Brave Browser. First thing I have notices, after I copied all my settings over to The Brave Browser then opened up as many windows, and tabs (coping over the URL from the open tabs from Chrome) and shutdown chrome, my Linux boxes load average dropped from 6.5 to 2. I also like the dark theme it uses. Also it does more tracking blocking, even beyond what I have going with my Pi-Hole. Also with the load average, I have noticed the browser feels like it also more responsive too.

What is a load average see here for a full articular I will take some experts out of it below.

On Unix-like systems, including Linux, the system load is a measurement of the computational work the system is performing. This measurement is displayed as a number. A completely idle computer has a load average of 0. Each running process either using or waiting for CPU resources adds 1 to the load average. So, if your system has a load of 5, five processes are either using or waiting for the CPU.

You probably have a system with multiple CPUs or a multi-core CPU. The load average numbers work a bit differently on such a system. For example, if you have a load average of 2 on a single-CPU system, this means your system was overloaded by 100 percent — the entire period of time, one process was using the CPU while one other process was waiting. On a system with two CPUs, this would be complete usage — two different processes were using two different CPUs the entire time. On a system with four CPUs, this would be half usage — two processes were using two CPUs, while two CPUs were sitting idle.

Also note I have a 6 core CPU, so 6 is fully using it.