LOL Not really, but boy it has been a day. Started at 7:00 am and I finally resolved (?) the issue. In fact I’ve got through every last bit of my network, and at this point in the evening, I actually don’t have a solid reason why the issue was present. Something in my VPN settings glitched, or something got triggered on pFsense and got hung up…something, something with Tailscale. It wasn’t CLoudflare this time. LOL
You ever do so much to a problem that when you ‘fix’ it, you have no real idea what the fix truly was? You ever have a problem and find all the shit you cobbled together in the name of ‘just get it running and back online’? I did, and decided that I would fix that shit too. It took all flippin’ day.
You guys that do this for a living…I salute you! jebus crispies!
ETA: 8 bells and all’s well today.
I hate, hate, hate when I fix something and I don’t know why the fix worked (or what the fix even was…). I want my suffering to result in something learned so it doesn’t happen again.
“So what was the problem in the end?”
“Man, I don’t fucking know.”
- me, every goddamn time
It’s always DNS
OK, here’s a somewhat famous case of email that could only be sent within something over 500 miles, but no further: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
When you do it for work, you log what you have changed each time you make a change to try to fix it, and you log what you revert, so you can keep track of what you have tried, what worked, and what didn’t and have a clearer idea of what the solution was.
Sometimes it really does take a while to nail down though, and sometimes it isn’t entirely clear why what worked worked. Especially if you’re a junior network engineer without as much experience.
I made a self-hosted forgejo repository of /etc. Commit messages aren’t always informative, and I’ve never actually gone back to the repository to figure something out, but it’s there, just in case. Me cosplaying a sysadmin.




