Tag Archives: martian

Redirect traffic to loopback

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Today I wanted to transparantly redirect the DNS requests coming at the output of a tunnel to a local caching DNS resolver. The caching DNS was listening only on the loopback as port 53 was already bound to other interfaces. That would be fairly simple on Linux:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i tun0 -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1
iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -o lo -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT

But… The kernel will refuse to route packets with the loopback as source or destination because this qualify as a martian packet. The solution was to enable the route_localnet flag. As stated in the kernel documentation:

route_localnet – BOOLEAN: Do not consider loopback addresses as martian source or destination while routing. This enables the use of 127/8 for local routing purposes (default FALSE).

This is per interface. So I just had to enable this on the tunnel interface:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tun0/route_localnet

Today’s movie: The Martian

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The Martian

The Martian directed by Ridley Scott based on a novel by Andy Weir. Considering the last science fiction movie directed by Ridley Scott, I waited for this movie with a bit of anxiety. I still think Scott is a great director, but a butchered plot really can ruin everything.

Annnnnd… I really enjoyed it! It was like watching Prometheus again, except that the plot actually made sens. Damon Lindelof is an awful writer, some have gone so far as to call him an anti-Midas because it seems like everything that he touches just turns to shit. But this isn’t a Prometheus review…

Matt Damon already knows a thing or two about being stranded on a distant planet. But don’t get me wrong, this movie is entirely different.

Dr. Mann I presume

Dr. Mann, I presume? [Interstellar]

The Martian is fun, optimistic and keeps its feet firmly on the ground, well Martian ground to be more precise. While dancing around a black hole made for Interstellar breathtaking moments, The Martian can be summarized as Man versus Mars. Put in other way while Cooper’s crew carried on their shoulders the last hope of humanity, Mark Watney is by all standard simply that – an ordinary man.

The Martian [xkcd]

By the way there is still something I’ve a hard time to find out about this movie. And I wish I could see it again just for that. From time to time you can see a personage programming to solve some random problem, the camera switches to some computer screen and you can briefly see the source code. I noticed semicolons, and perhaps arrows, but could not pinpoint which language it was. Still it seemed familiar. So if anyone knows better.