Unix, Sysadmin, Programming, and other random stuff.
I have been self hosting my own email for quite some time now on OpenBSD. In the beginning, I had a little trouble with getting out of peoples spam boxes, but eventually my mail server became my least troublesome server since there has only been 2 people on the server, not much room to get on a spam list. My configuration has been to use OpenSMTPd, dovecot, and rspamd to handle everything. My…
I have been using the fish shell recently. I have it tweaked some, and one day (probably after an update), I started to get this message: Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell Type help for instructions on how to use fish > ~ Not sure why I need a greeting every time, don t want it. So I found two ways to disable this functionality: 1. Create an Empty Function File The method I chose was…
This summer, I was tasked with a workshop: spend roughly 8 hours of the day teaching Ansible. The workshop went great. I got good feedback to improve and good remarks. I have grown to love to teach, and I always appreciate what people think about how I do. As a part of that workshop, I wanted to have VMs available for any of the people there that couldn t virtualize on their own computers. The…
Software I started with a Fedora iso to update firmware stuff easily tried with the efi updater but it would not work OpenBSD installer ure0 ethernet card works iwx0 wireless works Post-Install Here is a list of what does/doesn t work: audio - yes battery status - yes bluetooth - no keyboard backlight - yes ethernet - yes wireless - yes ssd - yes suspend/resume - mostly touchpad - yes video - yes…
In an earlier post , I wrote on my migration to SmartOS. It has been about 6 months now and I thought I would write up some on my experience so far. Fault Management Architecture (FMA) Right after I got setup, it didn t take long for me to start digging into FMA . FMA was one of the selling points for me, since I thought it would be cool to get some insights into the hardware I was running. This…
I ve had this blog go through some different softwares. First time I did it all in raw AsciiDoc and used the asciidoctor tool to export it all and one of their stock css styles. Worked fine, but I wanted more utility. I went onto Hugo, but had some issues there, and now am on 11ty. Hugo Problems I like writing in AsciiDoc. I ve tried Markdown, I just can t get used to it. Its feature set is too…
TL;DR Run this: #!/usr/bin/env sh sed -i 's/Types: deb/Types: deb deb-src/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu.sources cd /tmp apt-get update apt-get install -y dpkg-dev apt-get source mtr apt-get build-dep mtr cd mtr-0.95 # Get patch curl -o debian/patches/5908af4c19188cb17b62f23368b6ef462831a0cb.patch https://github.com/traviscross/mtr/commit/5908af4c19188cb17b62f23368b6ef462831a0cb.patch # Apply…
In May 2022 I wrote about switching from FreeBSD to OpenBSD. Today I want to revisit that post, as a lot has changed since then in OpenBSD land. The Hardware My hardware has changed since: Ryzen 5800X Some B450 motherboard 32GB DDR4 at 2666MHz OS Drive: 500GB WD Black SN750 MSI RX 6700XT ZSA Ergodox EZ keyboard Ploopy Adept trackball AudioEngine D1 DAC/amp Environment/Software i3 (i3bar +…
Today I continue my SmartOS saga. Actually, it s done! I have SmartOS on my main server. It was quite a task. In addition to my dad s server being replaced with SmartOS in April (which has been running very well), I have yet to get SmartOS on my friend s server. Previously, I said I would probably install SmartOS on a friend s box before mine, but events lead me to get ahead on my box first.…
I ve been writing about doing more with SmartOS and switching to it. The more I try it and look into it, the more I am interested in the operating system for my personal use. I have already deployed one lighter use server with it, and it was a pleasure. I will also be deploying one more that will likewise be somewhat lighter use. However, I will have to pause for my own personal server. It will be…
I ve been a Flair user since the beginning of my making home espresso. I started with the Classic, got the Pro, and pre-ordered the original 58. I ve used it near daily for the last almost 3 years now. I did just have to set it aside to put a semi-auto machine on my coffee bar so both my wife and I could make espresso - she didn t like coffee much up until recently - so I wanted to make a long…
I use OpenBSD a lot. I have 14 jails/VMs right now and 5 of them are OpenBSD. As a part of wanting to move to SmartOS, one of my requirements is that I get OpenBSD running on SmartOS. Since there is no image, I made it my own way following the Virtual Machine from Scratch docs on the SmartOS wiki. It makes it easy with OpenBSD 7.5 supporting EFI boot for the .iso images. I started with using this…
A while back I briefly wrote about using SmartOS and wanting to give it a spin. I ran short on time and excuses to try it, so I put it on the back burner, despite wanting to get into it. Well, great news! My dad s server died and a friend s TrueNAS CORE box needs replacing (it is having problems too, the plugins really do suck at times). With my dad having a timeline to meet to get a server up…
Lately I ve been growing a little disappointed with Nextcloud s offering. I ve been running it since its first release, and overall it has been a great piece of software. However, lately I ve encountered issues like sometimes the desktop client won t use secret service (and there s been lots of yelling about this on GitHub with 0 developer response), Nextcloud s pursuit for new shiny stuff like AI…
I ve been using Nextcloud since its first release in 2016. It has been fun to watch it grow and improve over all these years. I sometimes hear people complain about how difficult it is to maintain, or it breaking and such. However for me, 8 years later, it has been incredible and put up with a lot from me. I started using Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi 2 with a 32GB flash drive for storage, a…
I ve only written tech stuff here, but I wanted to share a good recipe that I threw together for dinner tonight. It s a pork top loin chop from Costco with buttery garlic mushrooms, and a white wine pan sauce. I made 2 loins for my wife and myself. Ingredients This is only an approximation, I throw stuff together on the fly. The meat: 2 pork loins Salt and pepper Avocado or olive oil The…
Today, I am going to try something very different. I am going to give TRITON SmartOS a shot. A number of years back, I tried OmniOS and loved it. But I wasn t ready to move to it or anything. After trying out some of the Solaris zone and SMF stuff, I was hooked. It was really cool tooling to use and felt thought out. Now again, I am going to try again, but with SmartOS. I found the idea of running…
I was tasked with trying to get both Hebrew and Greek to be readable with Asciidoc , primarily for epub and PDF, but I also wanted to try with HTML too. Both HTML and epub worked great, but I had troubles with getting it to work with PDFs. Installation I m on OpenBSD, but there are similar steps. In fact, I also did this on Linux and the steps were pretty similar. First I had asciidoctor installed…
Somewhere around Firefox 120/121 I noticed my Firefox notifications were getting messed up. At first I didn t see them, then I realized they were transparent and would freeze the part of the screen where the notification would appear until it eventually faded away. But It was hard to know when that was, so I would have to reload i3 constantly when I needed to access that part of the screen since I…
The other day, I received my Ploopy Adept in the mail, after having waited since mid-December when I placed my preorder. I have been a trackball user for a few years now, mainly having used the Elecom HUGE and the Kensington Orbit Fusion. The Kensington was awesome, but the angle was a bit too steep for my wrists. The Elecom has been my favorite by far, but the stock bearings caused me a lot of…
I roast coffee at home regularly. I haven t updated my roasting log , I need a more lazy man approach to converting it all nicely. But I still do roast, and I use the neatest, dumb script ever..which I know works on OpenBSD and Linux. And it s public domain #!/usr/bin/env sh COFFEEDIR="$HOME/Documents/coffeeroasts" echo "Coffee country of origin?"; read origin mkdir -p "$COFFEEDIR/$origin"…
Like many of us, I have been using SSH since the beginning of learning how to learn Linux, or some other UNIX-like OS. My usage has moved from password logins, to SSH keys, and now I have picked up on SSH certificates. This is an introduction to using SSH certificates with OpenSSH . Before I get to my pros/cons, what the heck are SSH certificates? Think of getting an SSL/TLS certificate. First, I…
Once a week I pop out the microSD card on my church s recorder and get the sermon uploaded. I do this on OpenBSD, and also mount/umount the microSD card via the command line. On another note, I use the SSH ControlMaster feature when logging into my servers. Why is this related? You ll see. The other day I mounted the microSD card doas mount /dev/sd3i /mnt/usb Then cd d to that directory to copy…
It has been almost a year and a half now of using OpenBSD on my desktop. From previous blog posts I have noted some of my frustrations with the desktop experience in OpenBSD, and in some ways, these have been more or less addressed. So, why do I really love using my computer with OpenBSD? sndiod This may sound funny, since in my previous blog posts and in other public forums, I have frequently…
Table of Contents My Tools Scripts Backing Up Pruning Backups Cron Nuke Restoration Restoring Packages Bow on Top It s not often I backup and restore my desktop, but I do like having good backups for my desktop computer, especially since I rely on it for work. I use OpenBSD for my desktop operating system. I ve been running -current since May 2022. 99.9% of the time it has been very good to me…
In an older blog post I focused on creating FreeBSD base jails with VNET on ZFS. Today, I want to do the same thing with Thick jails, since I have some use cases where base jails don t quite do what I want to do in terms of management. Thick Jail? A thick jail in creation is basically half the steps of a base jail. It is a jail with its own complete userspace, no nullfs mounts and the sort. My…
Table of Contents Synapse My Setup My New Plan Set up a Virtual Machine Set up a VPN Restore my data Restoring Packages The New VPS Moving to the New Server The Problem Wrapping Up I have been paying to host my Matrix synapse server for 2.5 years now. It has been one of my favorite projects to host because I have found a great communities this way and have been able to learn a lot being on Matrix.…
Table of Contents OpenBSD Initial Setup I ve mulled over setting up a mail server for years. I tried once 5 years ago, and failed. I don t know why I wanted to do this, it s just something I wanted to do. So I did. I have been on a kick to move a lot of servers to OpenBSD. I love OpenBSD. It is simple (as in simplicity) to use, and I find it easier for me to maintain more than other operating…
Table of Contents How to Setup Resources Many years ago I was told about a way to speed up my SSH connections to servers I have recently made a connection to. The idea was that a session would be kept open for a certain amount of time, even when you had closed out of your sessions. I couldn t remember the name, so I forgot about it until today when I was trying to find out ways to speed up my…
Table of Contents The Trouble USB on OpenBSD Sucks New Hardware Time Audio on OpenBSD Sucks So What Now? I have been an OpenBSD desktop user since May . In my blog post, I mentioned I was having some audio woes with OpenBSD. Namely, when running Firefox on OpenBSD it wouldn t take long for the audio to sound like someone was taking a hammer to my ears. Now that may be an exaggeration, but someone…
Table of Contents Where I began From Pis to Towers Changing Hardware to Changing Operating Systems More New Hardware! Rearranging My Jails and Data Where Am I At Now? Why You Should Self Host I have been self hosting since about 2015. It is probably something I could say is a decision that I regret the least and have enjoyed the most. When I say regret the least I mean it has been a rewarding…
I work primarily with Linux servers during $dayjob and sometimes come across needs where I need to have packet loss. Of course, I can t be sitting around waiting for it to happen. Turns out, there s a pretty simple way to do this. iptables -A INPUT -s <SOURCE_IP_ADDRESS> -m statistic --mode random --probability 0.1 -j DROP You can find more info in the iptables-extensions(8) man page. There are…
Table of Contents Windows Install Woes Fixing OpenBSD Bootcode If You Read This In The Future Back in April(?) of this year when I got my AMD RX 6700XT graphics card I came across FreeBSD still not supporting the card. So, I switched my desktop to OpenBSD. In that same step, I had to fix Windows because it put some of its bootcode on my FreeBSD drive. Long story short, I switched to Linux to do my…
Table of Contents My Backup Process A Problem with Rotations Lazy Roation? A while back I tried to develop a script to handle ZFS backups from my server to my external hard drive. Well, in the end I really didn t like what I came up with and thought it best to look at sysutils/zap to do my backups. The tool has worked great for me and reliably does snapshots and sends them to my destination. I…
For the longest time I was running borg on my server to do backups. Then one day I changed my destination s name to something different (different domain name). I know with borg, if the backup destination changes, borg will prompt you on the next run that the destination is different than before, and to confirm the change. I ran my borg backup script, confirmed the destination and all was good…
Table of Contents OpenBSD Firewall Configuration acme-client configuration Webserver Configuration doas.conf AsciiDoc CSS Styles How I Generate My AsciiDoc Uploading Site Content Swapping in Your New Site Wrap Up Bonus Bonus Bonus Bonus X3 Conclusion EDIT 2022-06-29 Note I want to clearly state this is 0 dependencies on the server . The server does not need AsciiDoc installed to operate. AsciiDoc…
From 13.0-RELEASE to 13.1-RELEASE $ zfs create -p zroot/jails/releases/13.1-RELEASE $ fetch https://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/13.1-RELEASE/base.txz -o /tmp/base.txz $ fetch https://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/13.1-RELEASE/lib32.txz -o /tmp/lib32.txz $ tar -xf /tmp/base.txz -C /jails/releases/13.1-RELEASE $ tar -xf /tmp/lib32.txz -C…
Table of Contents The Hardware Environment/Software First Impressions FreeBSD OpenBSD FreeBSD Experience What I Have Absolutely Hated WiFi USB Audio OpenBSD Experience Firefox Chromium Where s Muh Erlang? Not a Fan of vmm Me No Like OpenBSD s Wireguard Client sndiod is great and not Mouse is Missing Button Functions Overall Thoughts Addition 2022-05-07 Just last week (as of the date on this post)…
Table of Contents Mmmmm, PIE zfskeys SSH iwm(4) updates Boot Time Wrapping Up According to the FreeBSD 13.1 release schedule , the team is close to putting out the 13.1-RELEASE. I found the page and have been looking through the notes that are there so far to see what is of interest to me. On my desktop and laptop I have been running 13 STABLE, albeit blindly to what has changed, so it is nice to…
Table of Contents Update the Host Jail Updates In part 1 of my FreeBSD jail adventure, I switched from iocage to my own homespun jails. This will be a short piece on updating those base jails. Since they are all nullfs mounting the same directories, you only have to update things once. Note Allan Jude mentioned doing symlinks instead of nullfs, but I haven t tried that. You can hear his comments…
Table of Contents Coffee is Expensive I Make Better Coffee at Home What Do I Use? Can I Make Espresso at Home? But That s Way Too Much Money! Wrapping Up I am a big lover of coffee. If you know me, you are probably aware that I am rather knowledgeable and enthusiastic about my favorite drink. For many years (probably 10 now) I would go out for an espresso 1-2x each day. Now, I may go out once a…
Table of Contents Templating Site Layout Building Finishing Touches For quite some time now, I ve always wanted a basic static blog, but never really knew what I wanted. I settled on AsciiDoc because it has a very nice template for basic websites, and is pretty versatile. When trying to build a site in the past, I thought I had to tie together some language and build routes and bla bla bla. Turns…
Table of Contents TL;DR Things to Note wpa_supplicant rc.conf resolv.conf Connecting VPN Enabling the VPN Conclusion I ve been running FreeBSD on my laptop for under a year now. One of my biggest pain points so far has been completely around WiFi. It s slow, janky to connect sometimes, and very manual (sometimes not a big deal on that last part). However, I still prefer to use it. Lately, I ve…
Table of Contents Creating the Release Creating Our Skeleton Templates FSTABs The jail.conf File Host Setup Enable the Service Get jib in the Right Place Configure Our Interface Jails Needing Shared Memory Update 2022-01-20 As of late I have had some pain points with iocage, which I used since I started using FreeBSD in 2017. I came from an Ubuntu with LXD + ZFS background and iocage had the…