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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 17th, 2023

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  • I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.

    He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.

    So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.


  • I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).

    I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.

    Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.

    I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.







  • Last week I was peer pressured into trying out Helldivers 2 (yes, this is relevant, trust me), so I downloaded it, installed it, and fired it up with no issues. Set up my preferred control schema with no issues. Played the torturial with no issues.

    Then came time for joining my friends in multiplayer. Issues! No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to join them. Nor could they join me.

    I verified the installed files, I tried to connect via my phone to rule out ISP issues, and I tried all of the different versions of proton, but the result remained the same. I simply couldn’t join my friends.

    I don’t remember what caused me to go down the right path of troubleshooting, but I’ve always dosabled IPv6 on my linux installs. So I re-enabled it. The problem remained. Then I realized that I had it disabled in the kernel via grub command line flags, so I cuanged that and gave my PC a reboot. Success!

    So, despite networking being a large (maybe even the largest) part of my vocation for the past two decades, last week was the first time ever I actually NEEDED IPv6.