Recent content in Posts on Alex Haydock
Back in 2024, I rescued a Wii from the tech swap shop at EMF Camp. After spending a while under my TV playing only the finest Wii games, I repurposed it last year to host this blog. You can read last year’s post here . This year, I brought it back to its EMF Camp homeland to continue its job hosting the site: Assuming you’re reading this between Friday 17th July and Sunday 19th July…
I recently had some issues with quirks relating to my IPv6-only network when trying to set up an AirPlay sink on Raspberry Pi OS. I struggled to find info relating to the IPv6-only bit specifically, so I’ve tried to collate some of the issues I had here in the hope they’re helpful. All of the below was done using Raspberry Pi OS Lite Trixie (Debian 13). Issues I faced New hotness…
I’ve recently been building a number of containers based on the very interesting StageX project. Many of the public StageX recipes and examples make heavy use of the heredoc syntax for easier to read Containerfiles without creating unnecessary additional layers. Useful features in newer Podman versions You may have different reasons for wanting a newer Podman version, but for me it’s…
This is my NAS. It averages somewhere between 4 MB and 12 MB of RAM when running, and the OS fits into an on-disk footprint of less than 20 MB. Of course this is not quite the full story. This “NAS” is an LXC container on top of Proxmox, and Proxmox underneath is doing the heavy lifting of providing our kernel and managing the ZFS filesystem that’s storing our content. But before…
Recently I’ve been switching my authoritative DNS provider over to SERVFAIL – a project that was first announced at 38c3 in a talk titled “we made a globally distributed DNS network for shits and giggles” . After making the switch, I had to rework a bunch of my homelab services to allow them to continue renewing their certs via DNS-based ACME challenges. This post details…
If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii. You can check the Wii’s live(-ish) status page for system load info. For a long time, I’ve enjoyed the idea of running general-purpose operating systems on decidedly not-general-purpose hardware. There’s been a few good examples of this over the years,…
I’ve been on a bit of a journey recently related to IPv6-only networking, and wanted to share a fix I had to apply to smooth out the experience on Apple devices. If you’ve deployed an IPv6-only or IPv6-mostly network and you find your Apple devices waking from sleep and reporting that their network connectivity has broken, this is probably the same problem you’re seeing. I wanted…
As part of my recent adventure running an IPv6-only network for a month , I ended up setting up a full IPv6-mostly home router setup using OpenBSD. While doing this, I noticed that many of the guides online for doing this with OpenBSD are great, but are very focused on IPv4. Even the Building a Router page on OpenBSD’s website doesn’t seem to reference IPv6 at all. So in this guide, I…
Warning: It’s possible that there are good traffic-analysis-resistance reasons why the Tor Project haven’t enabled the option below by default. If you rely on Tor in a hostile network or territory, I can’t recommend setting the option discussed below without doing additional research. As an addendum to my recent post about running an IPv6-only network , I wanted to share some…
So it looks like Hacker News found my No NAT November post from a few days ago . I’m really glad to see from the comments that it seems to have spawned quite a bit of discussion. But aside from all that nice constructive networking discussion there were a few posts that I, as a (mostly) self-respecting sysadmin just couldn’t ignore: Uh oh… I was originally hosting this blog…
Day 0: Challenge accepted Near the beginning of November, nixCraft posted this challenge on Mastodon, daring people to take the No NAT November challenge and disable IPv4 for the month, relying only on IPv6: With the challenge laid out like that, I couldn’t resist. Conclusions I know this is quite a long and technical post, so I figured it makes sense to put a conclusion about my experience…
I recently found myself in a situation where I needed to read a ZFS-formatted drive, but with only a Windows machine to-hand. Now I could walk across the room and simply grab a device running a more penguin-oriented operating system. But that’s no fun. So I decided the optimal course of action would be to spend the afternoon learning about WSL internals and recompiling the Linux kernel…
I’ve recently been playing with using Ubuntu’s autoinstall feature to reinstall a few Ubuntu Desktop machines. It has what I think is a very user-friendly flow so I thought I’d write a bit about it. What? Ubuntu’s autoinstall allows us to pass a YAML file which defines all the options we want to install our system with directly to the Ubuntu installer. It’s something…
Hi, I’m Alex . Welcome to my new home on the web! The IndieWeb This post will probably be quite a short one, but I wanted something which would serve as an introduction to this new site which I’ve spun up to act as my entrypoint to the IndieWeb. I’ve been watching the IndieWeb develop for some time now, along with the Fediverse , and I figured it was finally time to get in on the…