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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: November 2nd, 2024

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  • Sometimes even that’s not enough. I’ve had some questionable kit before that would just ignore the DNS settings fed to it if it thought they were no good, and fall back to something else preconfigured.

    pfSense is a wonderful tool for situations like that. Anything intended for local use only here just doesn’t get outside at all. Handy for stuff like a fire stick that only needs to be calling up a local media library.

    It can also mangle any DNS requests going out to a different server and redirect them to itself instead. You could do this without it with iptables/nftables on a generic Linux box, but pfSense makes it much friendlier.

    There are other packages that can do the same, but physically all you need is one piece of hardware as a bouncer that manages connections between inside/outside.



  • Was about to say, £s not pence :) 50s will also out you as a tourist, if nothing else does. Whereabouts are you planning to visit? Just London for the touristy stuff or going for more of an explore?

    As mentioned above, electronic payments are now the norm here and have been for ages. Shouldn’t have any problems using a phone or contactless card to pay in most places. Chip/PIN covers most everything else & when you get prompted to insert the card as a security check after trying contactless.

    Swipe & sign is possible last time I checked, but pretty much defunct with chip/PIN being readily available. Cash only places are rare and usually associated with food or drugs.

    .zip isn’t blocking UK access via apps/api, but it is for browsers. I like VPNs and supporting my home instance, so here I am :)



  • On Dell server hardware with the right cards/licensing, you can remove the need for physical access to the server to input an FDE password by leaning on iDRAC. This provides access to the console remotely during the boot process (and thereafter).

    Alternatives exist that supposedly do the same thing, but I’ve never had to try them. Airconsole, pikvm, blikvm etc.

    You can keep this interface unexposed by using wireguard to dial in when you’re away, as per your original thinking. Just make sure the endpoint isn’t on the server you’re rebooting…