a quick site maintenance note

content/post/2024/03/a-quick-site-maintenance-note.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: "A Quick Site Maintenance Note"
+date: 2024-03-20T09:00:00+01:00
+categories:
+  - braindump
+tags:
+  - vps
+---
+
+The nameservers of `brainbaking.com` have changed, from Cloudflare back to my trusty local hosting/domain provider. Since [the DDoS attack of last year](/post/2023/03/a-letter-to-the-ddos-attacker), I moved the nameserver to Cloudflare to more resiliently catch dumb fuckups of people with questionable ethical motivations, as Cloudflare does a couple of things for you out of the box: it uses an Anycast DNS system, it hides the IP address of your server, it caches partials, and it logs visits.
+
+So why change it back? My provider told me they've also set up systems to provide resilience, yet my naive `*` subdomain A-type DNS record provided easy access for attackers to spam at full force. I don't need that subdomain, it just made the _Let's Encrypt_ automatic certification process a bit less painful every time I require a new one. So I got rid of it. 
+
+I don't need Cloudflare's caching mechanism---it seems to only cache at peaks that only happen if a post makes it into Hacker Newsletter which isn't something I care for. Read [Matthew Graybosch's Hacker News, Again](https://old.starbreaker.org/blog/hacker-news-again/index.html) why he thinks HN is _"a venture capital company's fan club"_ (judging from the intellectual level of the comments on my posts, I agree). 
+
+![](../cloudflarestats.jpg "Cloudflare stats for the last month, showing 13% cached data.")
+
+So what if a huge peak makes the site go boom? It's a personal one run on a tiny server that I manage myself. I like to think of my websites as a tiny part of a huge distributed network. The more traffic routed through Cloudflare's system, the more centralized instead of distributed the internet becomes, which sounds worrying instead of reassuring.
+
+Looking at Cloudflare's [2023 Year in Review](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review), it's safe to say they've become alarmingly huge. They process 50 million HTTP(S) requests and 70 million DNS requests per second. Not only their services, but also their tendency to analyze everything that passes through is big business. "Google Analytics, React, and HubSpot were among the most popular technologies found on top websites." Okay, great trend? 
+
+It's very difficult to get an overview of how big Cloudflare actually is. How much of the internet flows through them? The biggest giants (Netflix, X, Zoom, Vimeo, etc) use it as a reverse proxy service according to [W3 Techs](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare), meaning `19.1%` of _all_ websites! In 2021, according to [a tweet of an employee](https://twitter.com/AxelrodG/status/1447938954758705155), that's `20%`.
+
+A few memorable Cloudflare outages already proved what the result is of this centralization of network data flow. [Guillome Garron](https://www.garron.blog/posts/cloudflare-outage.html) echos my thoughts on the matter perfectly:
+
+> Yes, we have return to a small Internet, it is big in number of websites, pages, content and all the fiber optic cable linking those servers, actually Data Centers full of servers, full in turn of VPSs or Containers… But small in the number of owners of the infrastructure, even smaller that in the first days.
+
+We are indeed putting all our eggs in too few baskets, ultimately risking losing freedom. I didn't completely realize this last year when I hastily switched over to avoid getting DDoS-attacked again, while all I should have done is remove the stupid `*` DNS entry. 
+
+Ideally, I'd even like to take this further and move my VPS to our home and run everything myself. There's something magical about virtual house visits. I'd more than happily take the risk of a higher latency and occasional outage into account. Some small personal websites are simply unavailable if there's too little sun, such as [Low Tech Magazine](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/):
+
+>  This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather. This page shows live data relating to power supply, power demand, and energy storage. 
+
+I absolutely love that idea, although _Brain Baking_ will probably be offline quite a bit more judging from the absence of a decent sun ray in the last few months here in Belgium... 
+

content/post/2024/03/we-are-out-of-olive-oil.md

@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ I was surprised to find France at not even `2 l`, as the Provence is also a big
 
 Since olive oil consumption almost doubled [since 1990](https://www.internationaloliveoil.org/changes-in-olive-oil-consumption/), that means when I grew up the average household in Belgium consumed `0.75 l`, which is even less than one of my `1 l` dark green glass bottles, while in our house, we consume a bottle every two months[^diff]. Why? Let's try to summarize what I use olive oil for:
 
-[^diff]: It's a very rough estimate, but one that ultimately means we consume about `6 l`, which is only `17%` more than your `5 l`, Luk!
+[^diff]: It's a very rough estimate, but one that ultimately means we consume about `6 l`, which is only `17%` more than your `5 l`, Luk! And we're serving 2.25 heads here. 
 
 - When frying anything but eggs (butter) and pancakes (sunflower);
 - When baking pizza & focaccia: royally;
@@ -38,4 +38,6 @@ And then there's the matter of [olive oil fraud](https://eostrace.be/artikelen/o
 
 According to [Helgi Library](https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/vegetable-oil-consumption-per-capita/), the total vegetable oil consumption rate per capita of Belgium is around `23 l`, somehow even ranked higher than Portugal? If these numbers are more ore less reliable, that means `21.5 l` of that is something other than olive oil, most probably sunflower oil, since peanut oil is [mostly used in China and India](https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=peanut-oil&graph=food-use-domestic-consumption) and the aggregate EU row peak is huge for sunflower oil.
 
+If I had to guess, we buy about a liter sunflower oil a year, and combined with olive oil, that's about it when it comes to vegetable oils---`7 l` or `30%` of the average Belgian household! If you don't mind, I'd rather not count the packets of butter that mostly disappear into cakes, waffles, and the like. 
+
 Gotta run now, out to go and buy some more oil! _Schol!_