Watching the bots eat my iocaine poison. Its most of my traffic.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Muuhahahaha!
Tweaking my various Nix configs feels good and satisfying.
... When it works, that is.
I love to fiddle to see if I can improve on some app, service, or configuration of my server just to see if I improve performance, etc. Example: pFsense....great googlymoogly at the options. I kept trying this or that tut, no joy. So I sat down with the manual, and just did what I knew, Then did a lot of reading, and I did find one or two tuts that actually were, I guess you'd say, 'at my level'. Then I fiddle to see if I can get better performance or to see what one of the thousands of options does. I have leaned heavily on backups from time to time.
Mine is using a network share to transfer files faster than any USB device we have at home.
....and how do you manage those speeds?
Three important factors:
- Gigabit ethernet
- SATA-attached storage
- My family not knowing what the fuck USB 3.0 is, and why blue USB is better than black USB.
- Seeing the rising request count as ai bots circle around in iocaine
- Knowing where my photos and files are
- Having useful services that don't require a subscription to random company
- Learning and experimenting with things
Learning and experimenting with things
This is the part I really love.
Seriously, of there is a guide for how a newbie can set this up, please let me know. My little website is being bashed everyday.
Iocaine? I followed the instructions on the website which were fairly easy to follow. Depending on your skill level it might suffice.
Mine is seeing the "removed" and "started" when I update all my dockers
Can relate.
Use Watchtower. You'll miss out on this pleasure though.
I like manual updates, keeps me in the loop
Not maintained anymore.
Please look for replacements and stop recommending it.
Sure, but why? If you've a simple router running OpenWrt or something with all WAN ports closed you basically have the same thing.
Maybe it's a pretty graph/reports thing? I enjoy looking at the pihole dashboard and reviewing top blocked domains. I even look at the top allowed domains and add some to the blacklist.
I too use my PiHole for this pleasurable activity
Look at all the bots and trolls that slammed against my Skynet OpenWRT module... and died.
It really is satisfying. I can't explain it fully, but there is a sense of satisfaction.
It reminds us we are on the side of The Good.
It is also wonderful schadenfreude to see scammers frustrated.
Why do I like to watch them? Can't explain that fully, but I also find watching the flows in ntopng to be fascinating. Maybe I'm just easily entertained. As far as why I would run pfsense over OpenWrt or similar, it's mainly what I know and I can drive the pfsense bus well enough. Back in the day I experimented around with OpenWrt, and it may have improved over the years, but I found it kludgy.
ETA: Also to do IDS/IPS you'll have to install Suricata, Snort or SoftEther anyways so......
Do check OpenWRT again. These days even a network-ignorant person like myself can point and click to set up guest networks, configure individual devices' access, adblock, crazy good firewalls, ...
Very slick & professional
Gaming with friends and family over Tailscale on my servers; it just works
Do you get a lot of latency with Tailscale?
Nope! We use it for Jellyfin too which also works great 😸
Cool. I just figured traversing a Tailscale VPN would be yet another 'thing' between you and your gaming partners.
Tailscale runs on Wiregaurd which is ridiculously fast. Also helps we're located physically near each other on fiber from the same company so less network hops.
I'm no stranger to Tailscale, I just thought it would have been a bit slow for gaming.
Either way you’re just going over the internet. There will be overhead, but not enough to be that big a deal.
Why would they? It is peer to peer
Mine is looking at the blocked domains in pihole and watching my TV trying to call home desperately without success.
I don't feel so weird now that I see a lot of people who have the same guilty pleasures.
I get a good deal of satisfaction seeing my aliases of blocked connections.
Not really a guilty pleasure though.
Do you feel guilty if I'd asked you about that?
Do you feel guilty if I’d asked you about that?
Yeah I probably would because I spend a lot of time watching it, blocking new threats and unwanted guests. My goal is to achieve the cleanest stream possible.
Good luck on achieving that.
You'll be more successfull in whitelisting every possible connection instead ;)
Spend some time (IMO too much) mysealf researching ASNs and publicly accessible blocklists of datacenters/crawlers.
Not an easy task.
Edit: Grammar (lol)
Man, why you want to trample on my vision? LOL My default is 'deny all until something complains, and address PRN.' Some of my more productive lists are the Internet Storm set, a lot of Firebog lists, and some I've compiled myself. Tons of CIDR rejects, not a whole lot of passes.
No offense intended.
Like I mentioned earlier: I am doing that myself.
Also have some of the firebog lists, spamhaus and my very own which I have recently started.
Currently also in the progress of doing my own ublock origin blocklist.
It's all coming along pretty nicely!
No offense intended.
Just pulling your strings man.
I got jebaited
......oh you kids and your slang!! (We had plenty too) I had to look it up. Going to have to try to work that into conversation. Thanks. I have a fascination with the etymology of words, phrases, and their history.
Coming from here: https://youtu.be/d1YBv2mWll0
Actually it seems to be a twitch (or probably 4chan) meme.
Not sure and too lazy to research.
Have fun :)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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