Saturday, 26. March 2022 Week 12
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
Tuesday, 15. March 2022 Week 11

Sunday, 27. February 2022 Week 8
Dr Putin isch e Hueresohn
(via)
Saturday, 26. February 2022 Week 8
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.
Sunday, 20. February 2022 Week 7

Saturday, 29. January 2022 Week 4
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.
Sunday, 23. January 2022 Week 3
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.
Wednesday, 19. January 2022 Week 3
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.
Wednesday, 5. January 2022 Week 1
Wordle seems to be the trending topic these days.
It's a word game similar to the french Motus game show (resp. the american Lingo game show).
Wordle 200 4/6
⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
⬜⬜🟨🟩⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩