First draft of clacks article.

content/posts/the-clacks-overhead-a-hidden-memorial.md

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+title = "The Clacks Overhead, my hidden memorial"
+date = 2026-02-26T15:44:14Z
+draft = true
++++
+
+```bash
+curl -I gabevenberg.com
+```
+
+Dean Hansen, a dear friend of my family and of mine, died last week.
+
+This isn't the first death I've experienced in my life,
+but it was the first unexpected one.
+It hit me hard.
+I ended up flying back to the US on short notice to attend his funeral.
+
+Other than attending his funeral and being there for his family, there... isn't a whole lot I can do.
+But I have to do *something*.
+So for the first time in my life,
+I added the name of someone I knew personally to the Clacks Overhead.
+
+## Pratchett and Going Postal
+
+> "A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
+
+Going postal, Ch 4.
+
+In the book *Going Postal* by Sir Terry Pratchett, there is a system of sephamores invented by Robert Dearheart across the contenent that serves as a loose analogy for the modern internet.
+These are called the Clacks.
+In the Clacks system, messages are preceeded by headers roughly giving instructions on how to route the message.
+In particular to the story, three header letters are important:
+
+*G*: Send the message on
+*N*: do not log the message
+*U*: Turn the message around at the end of the line.
+
+In *Going Postal*, Dearhearts son, John, dies while working on a Clacks tower,
+Dearheart sent a message prefixed by `GNU` into the network,
+causing it to bounce along the network forever, memorializing his son for as long as the network stands.
+
+## Pratchett's death and the Clacks
+
+On the 12th of march, 2015, Sir Terry Pratchett passed away.
+The same day, on the reddit announcement thread,
+somone [posted](https://reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/2ysv26/sir_terry_has_gone_for_the_long_walk_across_the/cpcmru1/) a quote from going postal explaining John Dearhearts name living on in the overhead, along with the signoff **GNU Terry Pratchett**.
+
+2 days later, [somone](https://old.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/2yt9j6/gnu_terry_pratchett/cpcvz46/) posted instructions on how to make apache send the `X-Clacks-Overhead` header,
+and others quickly chimed in with how to do it for a myriad of web servers, email servers, email clients, browsers and web frameworks.
+A [browser extention](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnu_terry_pratchett/) for viewing `X-Clacks-Overhead` headers
+and [website](http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/) explaining the header and how to set and view it were quickly setup.
+
+Breifly, a fair few websites sported the header,
+though the number soon reduced, and it has been a few years since I have seen it in any websites other than my own.
+
+## The Clacks in my homelab
+
+My Clacks Overhead headers are not new.
+I first added them when I learned of the death of them,
+adding just the name of Terry Pratchett.
+Then, I added Bram Moolenaar, the creator of VIM.
+They went undisturbed for years,
+staying there even as my homelab setup moved from Proxmox to NixOs.
+
+Since then, I added the name of Ken Bartz,
+the former owner and operator of Kens FM,
+a radio station that we listened to every day when we lived in Fargo.
+
+And now, Dean Hansen, who had been a fixture of my entire life,
+a kind, generous, and joyful man, is there too.
+He and his family always welcomed me,
+he would drop everything to help somone who needed it.
+
+It is likely that if I had not written this,
+the Clacks Overhead in my sites would have sat there,
+transmitted as part of every call,
+parsed by every computer that visits here,
+and yet never been seen or inspected by a human.
+I... I guess the intent is not to be seen or noticed.
+It is the digital equivalent not of a gravestone,
+but a name carved into the cornerstone of a building.
+A message left on the blank space of a PCB or silicon die.
+They are part of our infrastructure,
+and yet serves no practical purpose.
+
+That does not make it useless, though.
+These small gestures keep us human.
+They are small gestures of remembrance,
+little rituals to help us process our grief.
+And whenever someone does notice them,
+it might give them a little pause,
+a little contemplation over those we have lost.
+
+If you want to join me, put the following lines in the root of your NGINX config,
+replacing the names with those you want to be remembered in the Overhead.
+
+```nginx
+add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Terry Pratchett";
+add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Bram Moolenaar";
+add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Ken Bartz";
+add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Dean Hansen";
+```