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+++ title = "The Clacks Overhead, a Hidden Memorial" date = 2026-02-27T15:44:14Z draft = true +++
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 continent that serves as a loose analogy for the modern internet. These are called the Clacks. In the Clacks system, messages are preceded 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 sends a his name 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 about his death, someone posted a quote from going postal explaining John Dearhearts name living on in the overhead, along with the signoff GNU Terry Pratchett.
2 days later, someone 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 extension for viewing X-Clacks-Overhead headers
and website explaining the header and how to set and view it were quickly setup.
Briefly, 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 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 someone 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 guess the intent is not to be seen or noticed. It is not the digital equivalent of a gravestone, but a name carved into the cornerstone of a building or 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.
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";