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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2026

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  • There used to be restrictions on a hostname.

    These had to start with and end with a letter or number, and have only letters, numbers, or a dash. (I heard that originally hostnames had to start with a letter, but 3M got that changed. This might be an urban legend.)

    That’s a common restriction for a name still.

    Things get funky when you want non-ASCII names - like if you want a cyrillic or Greek name - as registries often limit the allowed characters to limit “isomorphic attacks”. That’s where you use symbols that look the same to trick people into thinking they’re going to another site, like using a 0 instead of an O, or a l instead of an I.

    None of this will apply to the XYZ domains that give you a number.

    One other issue that might impact you is if you try to connect using only a numeric name. Some tools will interpret such a name as an IPv4 address. Easily solved by using the full name, but weird and confusing if it happens to you unexpectedly. 😅







  • I am never sure since I am American so know lots of Spanish from osmosis. But of course in any large European city there will be plenty of people who know enough English to help out. So yeah, he probably approached every interaction with stereotypical British arrogance and annoyed the people who would have been happy to help him otherwise. 🙈



  • I believe it.

    I worked with an Englishman who has lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years without learning Dutch.

    We had a work trip to Madrid, and he went the weekend beforehand for a short vacation. I ran into him on Sunday night and asked him how it went. He said it was terrible, because he’s a vegetarian and couldn’t eat anything because nobody spoke English. He didn’t know what to order or how to ask if something was vegetarian. He was outraged that nobody spoke English. In Madrid. The capital of Spain. 🙈



  • All I do:

    • Run updates daily
    • Disable password logins
    • Run sshguard
    • Daily backups to a cloud and off-site host

    I think that’s it. I have my host exposed to the Internet. As far as I know, it’s fine.

    BTW, sshguard is for the IMAP and SMTP that run on the host, which do allow password logins. But it helps reduce load from brute force attacks on port 22 (which are pointless anyway).

    I’m much more worried about my son installing dodgy Minecraft mods, or my wife installing another app that she saw on TikTok. I really should put them each on a separate VLAN…








  • Mostly accurate, although the flight delays tend to be announced one short delay at a time. “We’re going to be a few minutes late pulling out from the gate.” “We missed out takeoff window, so we’re going to have a 20 minute delay.” “We need to refile our paperwork, so we’re heading back to the gate.” “Ground crew changed shift, so we need another 45 minutes.” And so on…