Field Notes

Notes on infrastructure, networking and the occasional yak shave.

Recent

MTU, PMTUD and the tunnel that worked yesterday

Path MTU discovery fails silently more often than it fails loudly. A short checklist for narrowing it down before you start blaming the application.

A backup you have not restored is a rumour

Notes on scheduling verification restores instead of trusting exit codes, and why retention policy is a separate problem from backup policy.

Reading a TLS handshake without Wireshark

openssl s_client still does most of what you need. What the flags actually tell you, and the three things worth checking first.

Why IPv6 quietly breaks in small offices

Dual-stack is fine until one stack is worse than the other. Happy Eyeballs in practice, and the failure mode nobody notices for months.