Recent content on Graham Stevens – Grh.am
Background 
 At home, I run a small 4 node k3s cluster on Dell Wyse 5070 , primarily for the experience but also just for the fun of it. It houses all sorts of containers, but happily handles almost everything I throw at it, including Home Assistant, an MQTT instance, Predbat, Smokeping etc. etc. 
 This little stack of 4 Dell thin clients sits on the corner of my desk, each being powered…

 TL;DR - With such an overwhelming response to the original post , I have turned this into a KickStarter in an attempt to make this work. You can check it out here . 
 
 
 Even better news, this is now not just a thing, but an actual physical product! Please check out LidLayer.com 
 
 A few days ago, I posted about my MacBook Pro sticker prototype to help protect the lid,…

 This is now a thing! Here is the follow-up post, containing the details . Join the Kickstarter here! 
 
 
 Even better news, this is now not just a thing, but an actual physical product! Please check out LidLayer.com 
 
 
 Preface 
 I’ve always liked the idea of putting stickers on my MacBook Pro, but have always avoided it for two key reasons: 
 
…
16th January 2019 - I have updated the article to include DNS lookups over VPN too, where as previously they would have been going out via your ISP/WiFi/mobile provider. 
 
 WireGuard is the new kid on the block when it comes to VPNs. I could try and explain what it is and why you should switch from OpenVPN or IPsec to it, but they do a great job of that themselves:
It’s early 2016, and my employer comes up with a scheme that can help us purchase a laptop and spread the cost over 12 months. For those of us in the UK, it is managed by the same company that also do the Cycle To Work Scheme vouchers etc. 
 At the time, I had a capable but old MacBook Pro (2011 I believe), so the temptation of an upgrade was too great, and I jumped at the opportunity…
Whilst casually browsing Hacker News, I stumbled upon a fairly new post which had hit the front page suggesting that a Gitea (a self-hosted GitHub alternative) may have had some of its release binaries compromised . 
 The post linked to an issue on the Gitea’s GitHub page , where at the time it was unclear what & how this had happened, just that the releases had been altered and were…

 Note If you follow my process, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose data. Please think carefully before running any commands from this page. 
 
 A few days ago Elasticsearch died on one of my servers due to a lack of memory - One of my Python scripts interacting with a headless Chrome instance forgot a close a few tabs… a lesson for another day. 
 So, a few pkill s & a…
Recently (April 2018), I redeployed grh.am using Hugo after running the site with Jekyll for a number of years (which I never really blogged about, the last blog post talks about Pelican ! 
 Previously, deployment felt a little clunky, requiring a git push to a remote repository set up on a server, where a git hook picks up on the new commit and runs Jekyll (as per the Jekyll documentation).…
In late 2016, I replaced my ISP router & modem combination – the BT SmartHub 6 – with separate bits of kit, to give me a little more freedom and something to occasionally tinker with. After a bit of research and bargain hunting, I ended up with: 
 
 Modem – BT Openreach ECI VDSL 1b 
 Router – Linksys WRT1200AC 
 
 I originally picked up the WRT1200AC for its wireless speed &…
This will be the third year of taking part in the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge, and like many, I have been looking forward to it since late November. 
 I should really get round to publishing my unfinished attempt for 2016, seeing as it will complete this current series of blog posts… 
 
 Cranberry Terminals 
 First up, lets complete the Cranberry terminals in each of the…
Whilst setting up my new QNAP NAS, I received a warning: 
 [Volume DataVol1] The file system is not clean. It is suggested that you go to [Storage Manager] to run 'Check File System'.
 So, wishing to ensure my new HDD was healthy, I did as I was told and ran the ‘File System Check’ tool. 
 After a couple of minutes, I received another message, this time an error: 
…
This was to be my very first CTF challenge, and what better time to start than during the festive period! Lots of chocolate, alcohol, and mix in a bit of hacking. Perfect to improve my skills and prove my theoretical knowledge hasn’t gone to waste. 
 So… lets get started: 
 
 Download PCAP from ‘Josh’ 
 
 wget…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been plagued with an issue within the OSX El Capitan App Store, that resulted in me being unable to install any updates or install/purchase new applications. At first, I wondered if this was due to my hasty upgrade to the GM of OSX 10.11, which almost certainly was going have a few bugs and issues being the initial release of a new OS. 
 After a few attempts…
This post is rather outdated now, and so the details contained within are no longer valid. Read with caution. 
 
 I recently came across the rather snazzy looking subscriber count button on the Smashing Magazine website. A quick Google revealed that these are no longer available after MailChimp redesigned their service . Boo! 
 An example of the Smashing Magazine counter: 
 
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Not on nginx, but still want your Tumblr blog in a subdirectory? Henrik Nyh has got your back . 
 Have not personally used this, being a fan of nginx, but should at least be a good starting point to get you on your way.
Tumblr will let you run a blog as a sub-domain (blog.domain.com) rather than using their own URL scheme (username.tumblr.com), allowing your blog to appear much more professional and appear directly linked to your domain/website. 
 However, it is argued within the SEO scene that a subdomain is bad practice for maximising your search engine optimisation. This is because subdomains do not always…
This is a legacy post referring to how this blog was originally setup, using Pelican and Dropbox. It no longer reflects the current state of affairs, which can be read about here . 
 
 This website is powered solely by the wonderful static blogging engine known as Pelican . A static blogging engine means that each time a change is made i.e. a new post is created, the entire site is rebuilt…