With installing my new desktop I am also going to move my 4G modem. I wanted to
get some signal strength numbers so I could be sure I wasn't completely ruining
things for myself. My router has a hand status page that among sensitive
private information has signal strength, SNR and noise numbers.
On that page there is also a
CELL_ID
field. The
field is the unique network
id
of the base station you are connected to. This is apparently useful for
location lookups, the wikipedia page has a list of databases that use this
field.
I tried to feed my
CELL_ID
into some of these databases, but they all wanted
more information.
MCC
and
MCN
are pretty easy to find, there is a big table
on the wikipedia page
. I was not able to resolve down a
LAC
from
anywhere. There are apps I could try, but I don't really want to install any of
them on my phone.
Reading:
Gun Machine, The Difference Engine
I am finally starting to make a dent in the pile of things I could be using,
but aren't. A friend gave me a motherboard, case, graphics card and power
supply over about 18 months, in the past fortnight I finally put it all
together and had a working computer.
The machine came up no problem, one of the drives I recycled from another
machine and it already had FreeBSD on it. It turns out the motherboard I was
given doesn't want to boot from USB at all.
We tried all the different configurations and eventually fell back to using
PXE. There is an excellent graphic PXE boot environment available from
netboot.xyz
, there was a FreeBSD entry in the OS boot menu, but it this
is not a supported boot method for FreeBSD.
netboot.xyz uses a
mfsboot FreeBSD image
to launch a live system over
PXE. The image is created with a set of
scripts available on github
.
FreeBSD supports booting from a bundled memory image configured with the kernel
config, it looks like that is the feature that makes all of this possible.
It
is
Sunday, so that
makes
seven
days
of
writing
.
Reading:
Gun Machine, The Difference Engine
Not that I can fix any of those either.
I set up
ssl with Let's Encrypt
for
an experiment
yesterday following
a handy
guide on the FreeBSD wiki
. The guide suggested
this mozilla
tool
for generating server configs with good parameters.
With the tool I was only able to hit an A rating on the
ssllabs
testing
site, the A+ rating was annoyingly elusive. I am using
nginx
as vhost for a
go web service, for HSTS a header has to be appended to the response. The
config from Mozilla does this for
nginx
like this:
# HSTS (ngx_http_headers_module is required) (15768000 seconds = 6 months)
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;
But, the hosted application has control over the response headers.
nginx
can
be configured to always set the header with the
always
flag:
# HSTS (ngx_http_headers_module is required) (15768000 seconds = 6 months)
add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000" always;
Reading:
Gun Machine, The Difference Engine
