103 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
103 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
+++
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title = "The Clacks Overhead, a Hidden Memorial"
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date = 2026-02-27T15:44:14Z
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draft = true
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+++
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```bash
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curl -I gabevenberg.com
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```
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Dean Hansen, a dear friend of my family and of mine, died last week.
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This isn't the first death I've experienced in my life,
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but it was the first unexpected one.
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It hit me hard.
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I ended up flying back to the US on short notice to attend his funeral.
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Other than attending his funeral and being there for his family, there isn't a whole lot I can do.
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But I have to do *something*.
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So for the first time in my life,
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I added the name of someone I knew personally to the Clacks Overhead.
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## Pratchett and Going Postal
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> "A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
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Going postal, Ch 4.
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In the book *Going Postal* by Sir Terry Pratchett,
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there is a system of sephamores invented by Robert Dearheart across the contenent that serves as a loose analogy for the modern internet.
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These are called the Clacks.
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In the Clacks system, messages are preceeded by headers roughly giving instructions on how to route the message.
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In particular to the story, three header letters are important:
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**G**: Send the message on\
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**N**: do not log the message\
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**U**: Turn the message around at the end of the line
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In *Going Postal*, Dearhearts son, John, dies while working on a Clacks tower.
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Dearheart sends a his name prefixed by `GNU` into the network,
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causing it to bounce along the network forever, memorializing his son for as long as the network stands.
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## Pratchett's death and the Clacks
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On the 12th of march, 2015, Sir Terry Pratchett passed away.
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The same day, on the reddit announcement thread about his death,
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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**.
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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,
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and others quickly chimed in with how to do it for a myriad of web servers, email servers, email clients, browsers and web frameworks.
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A [browser extention](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnu_terry_pratchett/) for viewing `X-Clacks-Overhead` headers
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and [website](http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/) explaining the header and how to set and view it were quickly setup.
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Breifly, a fair few websites sported the header,
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though the number soon reduced, and it has been a few years since I have seen it in any websites other than my own.
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## The Clacks in my homelab
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My Clacks Overhead headers are not new.
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I first added them when I learned of them,
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adding just the name of Terry Pratchett.
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Then, I added Bram Moolenaar, the creator of VIM.
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They went undisturbed for years,
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staying there even as my homelab setup moved from Proxmox to NixOs.
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Since then, I added the name of Ken Bartz,
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the former owner and operator of Kens FM,
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a radio station that we listened to every day when we lived in Fargo.
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And now, Dean Hansen, who had been a fixture of my entire life,
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a kind, generous, and joyful man, is there too.
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He and his family always welcomed me,
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he would drop everything to help somone who needed it.
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It is likely that if I had not written this,
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the Clacks Overhead in my sites would have sat there,
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transmitted as part of every call,
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parsed by every computer that visits here,
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and yet never been seen or inspected by a human.
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I guess the intent is not to be seen or noticed.
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It is not the digital equivalent of a gravestone,
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but a name carved into the cornerstone of a building or a message left on the blank space of a PCB or silicon die.
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They are part of our infrastructure,
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and yet serves no practical purpose.
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That does not make it useless, though.
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These small gestures keep us human.
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They are small gestures of remembrance,
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little rituals to help us process our grief.
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And whenever someone does notice them,
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it might give them a little pause,
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a little contemplation over those we have lost.
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If you want to join me, put the following lines in the root of your NGINX config,
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replacing the names with those you want to be remembered in the Overhead.
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```nginx
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add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Terry Pratchett";
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add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Bram Moolenaar";
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add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Ken Bartz";
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add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Dean Hansen";
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```
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