Recent content on Notes
After the very basic server setup , having some kind of simple Intrusion Detection System (IDS) seems like a good idea. While all the previous steps were designed to prevent someone taking control of your server, if someone has managed to tamper with something, short of being locked out - how would you know? That's where an IDS comes in, that can hopefully tell you if something has changed, and…
Since starting with FreeBSD for my homelab and self-hosting experiments, I've come up with a few standard first steps that I do to any new server. You can automate these with shell scripts or Ansible if you're doing this more frequently. Commands starting with $ are run as a normal user, prefixed with # as root user (possibly via sudo or doas ). Names or variables for anything that you choose…
As someone who's barely experienced snow, I love it. The way it makes everything look clean and white, the crunchiness underfoot, and the sunlight sparkling off it. This year we've had more snow than I've ever experienced. The first fell on January 1st, it's now mid February, and we just had another light flurry. Most years here we've had a light scattering one day, and it's melted away by the…
A quick note for me on switching between wireless and wired networks on my FreeBSD laptops. For a long time I've been confused at how to switch from the wireless ( iwn0 ) connection to a wired one ( em0 ). I'm mostly using a ThinkPad X220 (currently on 14.3-RELEASE), which has both a wireless card and (like all good machines should) a network jack. The network is setup as following /etc/rc.conf :…
This year has been a pretty good year for me listening to music, but not that much of it has really been ‘new’, either to me, or in the absolute sense. Early in the year I discovered that second hand CDs can be very cheap, often ridiculously so. The result has been a bit of a spree, the details of which might come in a later post. While I've bought some absolute ‘classic’ albums, a lot have been…
I asked on Mastodon : This year I discovered that second hand CDs are super cheap, and so have been buying old ones that I kind of 'missed' when I was younger. I was chatting with a friend who's ended up doing something very similar with DVDs. He asked if I was trying to build a 'collection', like he at some point decided he should have all the Academy Best Picture films. I hadn't thought about it…
September is a strange month. The end of summer and the rapidly shortening days emphasise the sense of time speeding on. In recent years it was a month for off-season holidays and adventures, but with our children now in school, it's regained the traditional, slightly melancholy and reflective feeling that long hid its beauty from me. To start with September was always the beginning of a new…
& Now For Something Completely Different This is, erm, different? Yes. Don't worry, you've not landed somewhere else, this is still henryleach.com , but I'm trying something new. Something that will hopefully be a bit more fun, a bit more whimsical and a bit more, human? This is the result of two separate streams of thought that have been circling the same conclusion for the last year. The first…
I learnt about Tom Petty after 11 million people watched Victor Meldrew die. On 20 th November 2000 the last episode of the hit UK sitcom 'One Foot in the Grave' aired, in which the main character, grumpy pensioner Victor Meldrew, is killed in a hit and run accident. When the credits started to roll,'The End of The Line' by the Traveling Wilburys played. Except, I don't know that's what the song…
A few weeks ago I set up a simple git server to run at home so I don't have to rely on Github or similar external services. That worked fine, but two things felt unfinished: The ability to create a new repository, and an easy way of listing the existing ones, without having to SSH into the host. Luckily with GitWeb, shell scripts and CGI magic we can fix that. I thought I could live without these…