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cloaked from Verizon Tuesday, July 29 2014
This afternoon I set up a squid proxy server on my under-utilized virtual private server. If I'm going to be paying $6/month (or whatever I pay) for it, I might as well use it to make my Bittorrenting appear to be happening from some IP address that doesn't belong to a member of the consumer ISP compact voluntarily policing Bittorrent on behalf of copyright oligarchs. I've set up squid successfully in the past, but I had trouble today. The squid.conf file is 171K in size and full of rambling documentation in the form of comments. It's not the kind of thing you can get into, make a few quick changes, and then get out of (which is what .conf files really ought to be). My challenge was figuring out how to make it so squid would accept incoming connections from any IP address (since the range of IP addresses dynamically assigned by Verizon DSL is vast). I never did figure this out, though I managed to find an old copy of squid.conf from late 2012 that did this correctly (evidently I'd successfully figured out how to do this back then). The only major change I needed to make to it were to force squid to require a username and a password, since I don't want every malevolent actor on the web using my proxy server for their nefarious ends. I also changed it so squid wouldn't transmit my original IP address in a header, which would defeat the whole purpose of actually using a proxy (unless the copyright enforcement goons haven't thought of looking in the headers, which is possible). Once I had that working (a process delayed somewhat by my mistyping of the IP address of my virtual private server), it was a trivial job to configure Vuze (on Gretchen's computer) and Deluge (on mine) to do all their communication through the proxy server. If the proxy server works and Vuze doesn't accidentally revert to some non-proxy setting, Verizon won't be forcing us to watch any more educational videos about copyright.
You can download the latest version of my working squid.conf file here.
At some point this afternoon I filmed this in the teevee room. Yes, Celeste the kitten continues to charm, and Oscar the big fluffy cat is venturing out of his hidey hole under the bed with increased frequency.
In our household, I cook very infrequently, and it almost never happens that I cook two nights in a row. But last night I'd felt the urge to use up an increasingly-marginal container of store-bought agaric mushrooms, so I'd made a quinoa pasta with chunky red sauce. Today I was worried about those Chantrelles from the Valley of the Beasts going bad (though that species seem to keep a long time after gathering even at room temperature), so I made a full-on Mexican meal complete with bean glurp (augmented with agaric mushrooms, onions, and kale) and a pot of rice. Since Gretchen doesn't like Chantrelles or green peppers, I prepared them as a side dish. Together they ended up looking like something like the stuff you put in a Chili's fajita. Sadly, though, Gretchen couldn't immediately take advantage of my unusual kitchen profligacy; she'd gone out for drinks with Carrie at the Stockade and then had dinner at Yum Yum in Uptown (one of several local restaurants so nice they named it twice). Gretchen has been down on Yum Yum lately, but today she reported that she had a great meal. I'd been waiting for Gretchen to come home before diving into dinner, though when she did I wound up being the only one eating as we watched Jeopardy.
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