u/jrgldt

Hi!

I’m planning to visit Universal Studios Japan this October and I’m trying to understand how Halloween season changes the usual planning.

I know tickets for October are not available yet, so I’m not trying to buy anything now. I just want to be prepared when sales open.

Last year I noticed that the Japanese ticket pages seemed to show more Halloween related options than the international purchase pages, and that confused me a bit. It really scares me.

My main questions are:

1. During Halloween season, does USJ change a lot compared with the rest of the year?
2. Are Halloween attractions/events usually included with regular park admission, or do they require separate tickets? They have some things, but only on the japanese site.
3. If I buy an Express Pass from the international site, does it usually cover Halloween attractions/events, or only the regular rides listed on the pass?
4. Are there usually any Harry Potter-related Halloween events or seasonal additions? My partner is a huge Harry Potter fan and dont want to miss anything HP related.
5. I’m also considering a 3-hour or 5-hour VIP Tour as a surprise for my partner. During Halloween season, is it better to book a morning tour as usual, or can an afternoon/evening tour make more sense because of seasonal events?

I’m mainly trying to avoid planning USJ like a normal day and then realizing that Halloween changes the best strategy.

Any tips from people who visited USJ during Halloween would be totally welcome.

Thanks a million in advance.

Hi all!

We are planning our second/third travel to Japan for October. I have all the reservations already done and I think we have a nice trip...but its a surprise for her and would like to check with more people if the pacing or route is OK.

We have already done the classic Tokyo/Kyoto/temples route before, so this trip is more about variety, scenery, theme parks, food and a few special stays.

This plan is very Yamato luggage transport based, I already mailed and called the hotels many times and I am totally sure they can send and store luggage if needed (and got plan B just in case)

Current plan, 18 days:

• Tokyo A: 2 nights - on checkout, luggage transport to Osaka
• Magome-juku: 1 night
• Osaka: 3 nights - on checkout, luggage transport to "Tokyo B"
• Koyasan: 1 night
• Tokyo B: 5 nights - on checkout, luggage transport to "Tokyo C"
• Tokyo Disney Resort: 2 nights
• Hakone: 1 night
• Tokyo C: 2 nights

I know, lot of places. She won't like to pack so often very much, but she will totally love to sleep in so many different places and got so much surprises. Already told her if she would be OK with moving much more this time and travel and sending baggage, she is fine with it.

Tokyo A and B are the same hotel. Tokyo C is another surprise, a hotel in the Tokyu Kabukicho Tower, we never have been in this kind of hotel.

My questions:

1. Does this sequence look reasonable from a logistics / pacing perspective?
2. We are very fit, Nakasendo trail will be easy. Usj after Nakasendo on Tuesday, or the day after on Wednesday?
3. Any tip for the last leg of the travel? Tokyo B is on the sports day weekend, tried to do my best so we dont get so much crowd problems.

Thanks a lot!

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to better understand a DNS behavior in my home network, rather than looking for a simple step-by-step tutorial.

For years I used OPNsense, and I remember running into something similar back then, although I honestly don’t remember how I ended up mitigating it. I recently moved my whole network over to UniFi, and now that I’m inspecting DNS traffic more closely with AdGuard Home, I’m seeing the same kind of behavior again.

My home network is fairly segmented, with multiple VLANs/networks such as main, IoT, lab, guest, etc. I also own a real domain, which I have been using internally for my home network naming scheme. I host some services at home, and having a real domain is a godsend so I can use Nginx Proxy Manager with SSL certificates easily.

For example, I have something like:

lab.mydomain.com
iot.mydomain.com
guest.mydomain.com

as the domain name/search suffix for different networks.

Everything basically works, but when I look at AdGuard Home logs I see a lot of queries like this:

example.com A
example.com AAAA
example.com.lab.mydomain.com A
example.com.lab.mydomain.com AAAA

So it looks like clients are trying the normal public domain first, and then also trying the same name with the network’s DNS search suffix appended.

In some cases I also see things like:

some-service.mydomain.com.lab.mydomain.com

which looks especially ugly, although I assume it is just the resolver/search suffix behavior doing its thing.

My questions are:

Is this simply normal DNS search suffix behavior?

Is it considered a problem, a privacy leak, or just harmless noise?

I really dont know if this is something dangerous or just normal.

Thanks a million in advance!

Hi!

I have been using OPNsense for many years, and I recently moved my whole setup over to UniFi. So far, I’m totally impressed. It does everything I wanted (my biggest fear before switching), and having such a clean and comfortable single panel to manage the network from is great.

There is one thing, however, that I remember also being a bit tricky to get right back when I was using OPNsense, and now with UniFi I am not really sure where to start.

I have a segmented home network, with several VLANs/networks. Some of them provide different internal services. I also own a domain, which I use for my internal network only.

When I create a network in UniFi, I’ve been using the “Domain Name” field to keep things segmented, for example:

iot.mydomain.com
lab.mydomain.com
guest.mydomain.com

So each network gets its own domain name.

Everything seems to work perfectly so far, but I recently added AdGuard Home and started looking more closely at the DNS traffic. That’s when I noticed something I don’t fully understand.

It’s very common to see a client first query:

example.com A
example.com AAAA

and then, if there is no immediate success or as part of the resolver behavior, it also tries:

example.com.lab.mydomain.com

(assuming the client is on the lab network)

I understand this may simply be normal DNS search suffix behavior, but I’m not sure it’s what I actually want. I definitely don’t want these generated internal looking queries to be forwarded upstream to public DNS resolvers.

What is the recommended UniFi way to handle this?

thanks a lot in advance!