Trying WireGuard

Thanks to previous jobs, I’ve had an OpenVPN server running at my house for the past decade. It gives me access to my home network while I’m out in the world, and allows me to securely proxy my web traffic over insecure WiFi so it bounces to the Internet from my house. It’s fast enough, but there’s that yearly churn of generating new certificates for all my devices and the occasional server cert maintenance. Kind of a hassle.

I’ve recently become aware of WireGuard, another VPN protocol, that offers some apparent advantages over OpenVPN like multi-threading (it doesn’t use openssl which is famously single-threaded), simpler config files, and no need to regenerate openssl certificates when they expire. The cryptography is faster. Many of the commercial/free VPN services also use WireGuard under the hood. It’s functionally serverless, but can be configured to run as one.

I tried walking through the WireGuard Quick Start Guide and, my friends, this page quickly confused me. It’s half whitepaper, half video demo of how to set up a tunnel. Who puts up a GIF of a screenshare where all of the useful text commands you’d need to create your own tunnel are not copy-pasteable? A cruel bastard, that’s who.

Thankfully there’s a library of sites that are more helpful than the tool vendor. Thanks to Elliot Cooper for his article on Bash-Prompt. This page helped me figure it out.

What confused me was the distinction between the wg command line app and wg-quick, the other command line app. wg does the heavy lifting in the kernel, but its commands and configs are fed in on the command line, not a config file. I was trying to feed the config file to wg and failing because it doesn’t understand it. Annoying. wg-quick takes a config file and uses the options there to tell wg what to do. It also handles creating virtual interfaces, adding routes, and controlling some firewall rules. Stuff you’d expect the main binary to handle, not a packaged script.

Equally confusing is that wg doesn’t provide its own systemd server daemon. No, that’d be too sensible. For that, you have to use, once again, wg-quick, which does provide a daemon service. But you’d have to install and enable the service. Whack.

Anyway, now that I’ve learned how to run the server and hammer out configs for each client, my fleet of devices can now use WireGuard. I don’t notice any speed improvements, because my home’s cable modem uplink is still limited, but I feel like my devices are burning less battery. That’s a plus.

I’ll continue running both VPN servers until I get bored of one of them. It’s nice to have options.

Fifth Space

There is an opportunity for me to chase this weird dream, but I shouldn’t do it.

For decades I’ve adored this urbanist ideal of living in an apartment above a shop in a busy stretch of the city, where I am in the thick of it, making a home in a bustling zone of commerce and traffic. One such opportunity has opened up — but I shouldn’t take it.

I’ve had my eye on this weird flatiron-style apartment above a secondhand shop, uphill from the cafe I’ve called my 3rd space for twenty years, and at the other end of the building from the bar I’ve called my 4th space for five. Suddenly, all the curtains are down and it’s now unoccupied. It’s on the market. On the market!

Now I’m floating these weird fantasies of renting it as a second home, where I can have a place to crawl to after a night out, where I can bring friends to, where I can set up my music gear and create without bothering neighbors, where I can get away for a bit with less consequence. But I don’t want to let go of my current apartment, which is cozy, quiet, and has been mine for the past 6 years.

So I would have to half-time it between here and there. And double-time it with furniture and other stuff I’d need to support my life. Two bars of soap. Two sets of kitchen pans. Two microwaves. Two couches. Two bedroom sets. Two Internet bills. Two of everything for as long as I held both leases.

This apartment is between an anarchist bookstore that throws punk shows on one side and a convenience store with a busy taco stand on the other. It’s loud, it’s brash, it’s hot, it’s cold, it’s poorly insulated. It’s hostile to restfulness. The parking is bad. The property crime is elevated. The nearby intersection is hectic and crash-prone.

Half-time indeed.

Honestly, I love this idea, but I also hate this idea on two grounds:

It’s a weird flex: having two apartments, in a city where housing is hard to find, not only makes me part of the problem, but an architect of the problem. I don’t want to pass this up, but I also don’t want to pay double for housing and be on the hook for the duration of both leases should something happen to my standard of living (I place no trust in my future employment). That spot should go to someone more deserving.

Not thinking big enough: this place and my current apartment are only one neighborhood away from each other. I’d love to once again live in this other neighborhood. It’s nice. But if I’m renting two places, why not be more geographically distant? Why not do the snowbird / sunbird thing and split time between locales where the weather’s different enough to be fulfilling?

I really, really should not call and look at the place. That would be foolish. So foolish. These stupid fantasies are going to be the ruin of me.

Flex is ruin.

Weak Valves

I think of all the greatness that will never be, because the urge to create is so easily satisfied. A thought at the kitchen sink can be hastily reworded into a funny quip and crossposted onto the timeline, half-baked, incomplete, a good laugh, and then it’s gone.

All the Buckowskis of the world never to be born fully formed with fire and intensity. All the Kerouacs sated and deflated, long before they can craft an idea into a journey.

I write less, because I blather more.

We need time to mull over ideas, give them flesh, pass them along to the other puppeteers in the chain, get them onboard. Then we make dragons.

Flux

On the same day, I learn that glitterkitten.uk and toot.community will soon be shutting down operations, for legitimate reasons. It feels, to me, like a dark day for the , but really it’s an example of how human systems change and evolve. I shouldn’t be so despondent. Change is part of the recipe, eh? This fledgling network will survive. We have juice.

Agonists

This year I discovered that my allergy to Aspirin and its derivatives is absolute bollocks. I’ve been carrying this belief since my asthmatic childhood, spawned by doctors asking my mother about a list of known triggers in my environment. We’ve heard that everything from Aspirin to pets to feather pillows could trigger asthma attacks. So, naturally, I had limited exposure to any of those throughout my life.

I’ve told every medical provider that I’m allergic to the ol’ ASA for this reason. But last year I took a trip to the ER where as part of the protocol they gave me two baby Aspirin — nothing worse happened! I was fine!

What I’ve learned in hindsight is that the primary agonist to my childhood asthma was the incessant indoor smoking by the adults in my life. Did I age out of my adolescent asthma, or did I just move away and live smoke-free?

PARENT [puffing a cigarette]: Doctor, why does junior have asthma?
DOCTOR [lighting a cigarette]: Ma’am, we’re not too sure. It is a medical mystery. Oh, here, please use this ashtray.

So what this all means is that, as of now, I can take Ibuprofen and Aspirin. Hell, I can probably even sleep on a feather pillow with a down comforter and be alright. Which is great because with my age also comes aches and inflammation; access to NSAIDs is a godsend. And, of course, down is comfy.