Disclaimer I work for Google, who has a partnership with ADT to integrate Google Home cameras with ADT (and Google bought a 6% share of ADT). I do not work anywhere near this product line at Google. I also was a beta tester for Nest Secure (the home security system), which I had received for free during the beta tests back in ~2017. Stuff I have been using the Nest Secure system happily for the last few years, but saw the writing on the wall when Google stopped selling the product back in 2020. And now we know in 2024 the Nest Secure will be going offline, though they at least provided some coupons for those that owned and active used the product. (Note: I did not receive this coupon). ...

Intro Firewalls are great, until they get in your way. I run a simple website that occasionally gets really large traffic spikes, so I like to load test it to know its limits. I’ve been migrating it from GCP to Linode, and during the migration testing I ran into some performance bottlenecks. This has led me on a really long journey of writing my own nftable firewall rules. If you want to skip the firewall background, jump to the debugging section. See the note section about the truth of the article title. Spoiler: performance issues were caused by connection tracking. Firewall Background At a high level, firewalls are meant to limit and control traffic to, and sometimes from, a server. Firewalls can work in many ways and at any layer in the OSI model), though most people think about them at the Network and Transport layers. As well, firewalls can be at a network’s edge, per machine, or both. ...

I wrote about Picking Ghost a year ago, but I’m now going back to a static site generator. For personal writing, I previously published a few posts on another domain back in 2013. I used Hugo back then, but much of it was poorly done (and I wasn’t able to regenerate that site since ~2015, so it just languished). Last year I tried Wordpress and Ghost, but went with Ghost. And now in 2022, I’m back to Hugo. ...