Watching the bots eat my iocaine poison. Its most of my traffic.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Muuhahahaha!
Pushing my commits that trigger my own gitlab runners that build my c++ application across 32 cores/threads homelab server.
A second guilty pleasure would be looking at my grafana dashboards.
My proxmox dashboards make me feel tingly in my no no parts
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Waaay out of my field of moderate expertise. Rock it tho!
Mine is using a network share to transfer files faster than any USB device we have at home.
....and how do you manage those speeds?
Three important factors:
- Gigabit ethernet
- SATA-attached storage
- My family not knowing what the fuck USB 3.0 is, and why blue USB is better than black USB.
Tweaking my various Nix configs feels good and satisfying.
... When it works, that is.
I love to fiddle to see if I can improve on some app, service, or configuration of my server just to see if I improve performance, etc. Example: pFsense....great googlymoogly at the options. I kept trying this or that tut, no joy. So I sat down with the manual, and just did what I knew, Then did a lot of reading, and I did find one or two tuts that actually were, I guess you'd say, 'at my level'. Then I fiddle to see if I can get better performance or to see what one of the thousands of options does. I have leaned heavily on backups from time to time.
- Seeing the rising request count as ai bots circle around in iocaine
- Knowing where my photos and files are
- Having useful services that don't require a subscription to random company
- Learning and experimenting with things
Learning and experimenting with things
This is the part I really love.
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Mine is seeing the "removed" and "started" when I update all my dockers
Can relate.
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Gaming with friends and family over Tailscale on my servers; it just works
We used to need tools like Hamachi back in the days. And it was awful, didn't work and caused me way too much headache
Do you get a lot of latency with Tailscale?
Why would they? It is peer to peer
Nope! We use it for Jellyfin too which also works great 😸
Cool. I just figured traversing a Tailscale VPN would be yet another 'thing' between you and your gaming partners.
Either way you’re just going over the internet. There will be overhead, but not enough to be that big a deal.
Tailscale runs on Wiregaurd which is ridiculously fast. Also helps we're located physically near each other on fiber from the same company so less network hops.
I'm no stranger to Tailscale, I just thought it would have been a bit slow for gaming.
Sure, but why? If you've a simple router running OpenWrt or something with all WAN ports closed you basically have the same thing.
Maybe it's a pretty graph/reports thing? I enjoy looking at the pihole dashboard and reviewing top blocked domains. I even look at the top allowed domains and add some to the blacklist.
I too use my PiHole for this pleasurable activity
Look at all the bots and trolls that slammed against my Skynet OpenWRT module... and died.
It really is satisfying. I can't explain it fully, but there is a sense of satisfaction.
It reminds us we are on the side of The Good.
It is also wonderful schadenfreude to see scammers frustrated.
Why do I like to watch them? Can't explain that fully, but I also find watching the flows in ntopng to be fascinating. Maybe I'm just easily entertained. As far as why I would run pfsense over OpenWrt or similar, it's mainly what I know and I can drive the pfsense bus well enough. Back in the day I experimented around with OpenWrt, and it may have improved over the years, but I found it kludgy.
ETA: Also to do IDS/IPS you'll have to install Suricata, Snort or SoftEther anyways so......
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #150 for this comm, first seen 9th Mar 2026, 10:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I get a good deal of satisfaction seeing my aliases of blocked connections.
Not really a guilty pleasure though.
Do you feel guilty if I'd asked you about that?
Do you feel guilty if I’d asked you about that?
Yeah I probably would because I spend a lot of time watching it, blocking new threats and unwanted guests. My goal is to achieve the cleanest stream possible.
Good luck on achieving that.
You'll be more successfull in whitelisting every possible connection instead ;)
Spend some time (IMO too much) mysealf researching ASNs and publicly accessible blocklists of datacenters/crawlers.
Not an easy task.
Edit: Grammar (lol)
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Mine is looking at the blocked domains in pihole and watching my TV trying to call home desperately without success.
I don't feel so weird now that I see a lot of people who have the same guilty pleasures.
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