Fun

💥 The Incident A few days ago, someone decided to DDoS the entire IP range of my Hong Kong VPS provider. My machine had fail2ban running. It did its job — maybe a little too enthusiastically. Within minutes it had banned over 20,000 IPs, allocating memory for each rule until the box ran out of RAM entirely and triggered a kernel panic. The VPS went dark… Great… :/ So here’s the irony: fail2ban didn’t fail because it was badly configured. It failed because of a fundamental architectural problem. Every packet in a flood still has to be received by the kernel, handed up the networking stack, and then evaluated before fail2ban can react. Under a real volumetric flood, that cost alone — tens of thousands of soft interrupts per second — is enough to saturate a single vCPU and collapse the machine before any rule can take effect. ...

I dropped my 🏊‍♂️ swimming team competition just to work at the 🤖 robotics club… AND I DON’T REGRET THAT CHOICE ONE BIT!!! (Coach Fiore, please forgive me 🙏). I think I’ve told you about our lab before, but sadly, I lost some posts during the migration of my blog site (so frustrating 😓). I’m both a coder 💻 and an engineer 🔧 on our team, which means I can literally do ANYTHING! If you’ve never heard of the VEX Robotics Competition, check this out: VEX Robotics Competition Introduction. (Trust me, everyone would love it! 😄) ...

Let me tell you about my servers! Right now, I’ve got several running—one in Hong Kong 🇭🇰 and others in the United States 🇺🇸 (One of them is my content delivery machine dedicated to this website). I host some fun stuff on them, such as some of my hobby projects like TinyUrls and Transcribly but mainly I use them to set up proxies so I can access YouTube and Google Scholars. I can’t remember exactly when I first started messing around with Virtual Private Servers. Probably sometime around 2021, during the pandemic. My parents kept saying, “Staying home all the time is just making you play more video games.” ...