Linux, at its base, is just a kernel, but what does the kernel do without additional packages? The Kernel enables everything, but software that interacts with the kernel is what makes a linux distribution. Every distribution has its own way of handling things. Some focus on stability, as a platform for critical workloads, others on…
Building a Mastodon instance, to vacate birdsite. On RHEL, in Podman.
So, maybe you’ve heard about the Musk take-over of twitter, and maybe you’ve heard about the mass exodus of a large number of users from the old platform. Personally I try not to knee-jerk react to things like this but I haven’t been exceedingly active on twitter lately. I have also long had an interest…
Enabling Unsafe Interrupts for PCI passthrough on RHEL 9
This should be a quick one. I bought some older hardware for my home lab/home services and one of the things I want to do with it is host my plex server on it. Plex benefits from a GPU, it doesn’t have to be a fancy one, but a lower end nvidia GeForce desktop adapter…
Virtual Reality, Online Worlds, and Metaverses
Snow Crash, Ready Player One, The Matrix, these are all cautionary tales of what virtual online worlds might bring to the world. I have been exploring the concept of “The Metaverse” a bit since everybody’s favorite evil android Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company, Facebook, was re-branding to Meta in order to position themselves as…
Making those home hosted services available with some help from WireGuard!
So, I have a long history of self-hosting. And let me tell you, self-hosting has gotten harder over the years. There was a point where I ran a linux server in my parents basement. It ran this web site (or a very much older version of it anyway) and a number of other services. In…
Adding a first boot task via systemd
Sometimes You just want to run a task once, the first time a system boots. There are a bunch of ways you could do this, but I was working on trying to solve a specific use case for a customer. In this case, we’d like to run some tasks on the first boot of a…
Nextcloud, in a container, in a bucket
Join me while I build a private cloud document and photo storage solution. Backed by an object store, so you’ll never need to expand your storage as you add files! …
Getting my digital life back from Google Photos
This is the second installment of a series I’m creating on “de-googling”. My goal here is not to eradicate Google from my life, but rather to limit my dependence on them. You can read some back-story in the previous article Untangling my life from the Google ecosystem. My first goal here is to try to…
Untangling my life from the Google ecosystem
Google. It’s become such a part of our lives. Certainly for those of us who are not Apple users. I don’t really have anything against apple exactly. I even ditched my android device for a little over a year and went to an iPhone. It wasn’t terrible, but I just liked the android experience better….
In the Days of Text
This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.The Mentor (http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html) When dial-up ruled There was a time that some of us can still remember. A time before fast networks ruled the industry. When connection speeds over 1mbps were blazing fast, and most of us lived…