On June 2nd 2002 I published the first (test) entry in this weblog. The first entry has disappeared since (thus making the second entry the first one in the archive of June 2002).

Compared to 20 years ago, the about page no longer needs to explain what a weblog is.
Interesting though that the linked definition of a weblog from back then already did foresee the rise and fall in popularity of weblogs which happend during the last two decades.
To me it seems in the last 1-2 years there has been an increase again in activity around personal weblogs; curious to see if this revival trend continues.

Also the weblog here has changed quite a bit. Initially its content was more on the pure web-logging side (commenting on interesting links I encountered during my daily Internet surfing) mixed with some kind of a journal/commentary of my day-to-day life. Later on it moved more towards a 'knowledge dump' on technical topics mixed with some music discoveries and random personal post from festivals and travels. And lately it has been rather sparse again with posts, still mostly on technical topics around coding, networking, security mixed with some personal posts commenting on the current world situation.
The frequency of posts also followed the changes in content where early on there sometimes were multiple posts per day, nowadays there can be multiple months without any post and there were even entire years where nothing new was posted; let's see how this goes in the future :-)

From the list of linked Blogs in 2002, only deep-resonance aka mk is still active, special shout-out to Markus for the continuous persistence.
To the next twenty years :-)

A while ago I wrote a little tool to set the time on MikroTik devices. It takes the current time from the local machine and does set it on the device through the API (while respecting the timezone configured on it).
I mostly use it to set the proper time when the device time was completely off (when setting up a new device or when it has been powered off for a long time). Afterwards NTP should take care of keeping the time in sync.

The tool is now available on GitHub together with installation and usage instructions: mt-set-time

Dr Putin isch e Hueresohn

(via)

Today I went to Bern to the rally for peace.
My motivation was to show support for the people suffering in this war and to send a signal to our swiss government that the population wants clear participation in sanctions (while remaining neutral, the two in my view are not exclusive!).

Swiss media reported that this was the largest rally for peace in Switzerland since the rallies against the war in Iraq in 2003. That I can link to my own blog entry regarding the rally for peace from 19 years ago, makes me sad.
Clearly we as human species did not progress enough on this topic :-(

Besides showing up to the rally, I also did donate to the ICRC to provide humanitarian aid and I do encourage you to do the same.

After switching my Debian hosts from Quagga to FRRouting, I noticed that running vtysh has become quite a bit slower especially when making multiple calls to it from my status/monitoring scripts.
This has also been observed by other users of FRRouting (there's an open issue in their bugtracker: #7799).

The Prometheus frr_exporter works around this by directly sending commands to the UNIX sockets of the FRR daemons (PR).

To use the same approach in my monitoring scripts, I wrote a small utility which acts as a drop-in replacement for vtysh and sends the commands directly to the UNIX sockets of the FRR daemons: vtysock
By skipping the parsing and validation checks done in vtysh, vtysock can achieve a significant speed improvement when executing commands.

In situations where IPv6 connectivity performs better than IPv4, you might want to force SSH to use IPv6. In interactive mode this can be achieved with the -6 commandline parameter.
But in situations where you can't modify the commandline parameters a different approach is needed (for example in rsync backup scripts which use SSH as underlying transport layer).

We can use the ssh_config file to encforce that IPv6 is used for a specific host:

Host myipv6host
	AddressFamily inet6

This instructs all SSH commands to use IPv6 when connecting to myipv6host.

The same approach also works to force usage of Legacy IP by specyfing inet as address family.

After running it for a bit more than a decade, I've now removed again the Google Analytics tracking from this site. It does not feel appropriate anymore on a personal website.
At the moment no alternative statistics solution is in place yet, but I could imagine setting up a self-hosted solution like Matomo or Plausible in the future.

Google Analytics declared illegal in the EU.