For a while, it has been possible to boot OVH servers in rescue mode and, using QEMU, install an OS in any way you want with its regular installation ISO. This includes unsupported modes such as a non-standard filesystem on / or using full disk encryption. The only requirement was to map the disks to regular QEMU devices, such as -hda /dev/sda arguments. I don’t remember exactly when I first did…
I started receiving warnings on Chrome about uBlock Origin, stating, “This extension may soon no longer be supported”, after I set it up on a new computer nearly three months ago. These warnings are related to the ongoing deprecation of Manifest V2, which has been going on for a few years and is expected to be finalized by June next year. I can’t even imagine using the internet without an ad…
Since 2018 (and again in 2020), I’ve been writing about how defaulting to cloud-based solutions instead of self-hosting everything has changed my life for the better. Even knowing that for years, I still made the wrong decision to self-host a service I needed and almost doubled down on doing it again. This was until I stopped and figured out an easier way to achieve the same goal.
Writing is hard. I’ve been writing in this blog since 2011, when posts were still written in Portuguese - those have since been deleted. It hasn’t gotten any easier after nearly 15 years. Posts still take hours to be written, proofread and double-checked before being published. On top of that, much of the energy I have to write longer chunks of text is spent on project documentation, issues and…
Since my early days in programming, I’ve always worried about isolated development environments. Of course, this wasn’t relevant when developing C applications with no external dependencies in Code::Blocks, but it soon became a necessity when I had to deal with Python packages through virtualenv. The same happened with Ruby versions using rbenv. Later I settled on asdf to do that with multiple…
As I mentioned in the previous review, my experience with the MikroTik router that only supported wired networking encouraged me to look for a Wi-Fi one. After browsing the available models, the slogan of a particular one, the hAP ac3, caught my attention:
The MikroTik hEX (RB750Gr3) is a simple wired router - one of the cheapest from the Latvian company - that surely does its job. It’s really flexible, which is simultaneously both a pro and a con. It’s the router with the largest amount of configuration options that I ever seen, including the possibility of making any sort of LAN/WAN combination from the five ports available.
GitHub offers a very superficial view of how GitHub Actions runners are spending their minutes on private repositories. Currently, the only way to get detailed information about it is via the Get usage report button in the project/organization billing page. The only problem is that the generated report is a CSV file, shifting the responsibility of filtering and visualizing data to the user. While…
After doing a clean Debian 11 (Bullseye) installation on a new machine, the next step after installing basic CLI tools and disabling SSH root/password logins was to configure its firewall. It’s easy to imagine how big was my surprise when I found out that the iptables command wasn’t available. While it’s known for at least 5 years that this was going to happen, it still took me some time to let…
Exporting Prometheus metrics is quite straightforward, specially from a Go application - it is a Go project after all, as long as you know the basics of the process. The first step is to understand that Prometheus is not just a monitoring system, but also a time series database. So in order to collect metrics with it, there are three components involved: an application exporting its metrics in…