nsg's blog

Yeah, I agree that there is an AI hype going on. I agree that there is a lot of overlap with the cryptocoin hype. I also wish that people stopped to shoehorn in AI to everything. I wished we never called it AI because it's not intelligent. But here we are.

I love distributed and federated systems. E-mail must be the biggest one out there, and it's also one that almost everybody uses. Everybody has an email, right?

I recently installed the newly released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on my laptop. Canonical has introduced a revamped installation interface, which is visually appealing. However, I found that the options for manual disk configuration are limited. For instance, I couldn't manually set up LUKS encrypted partitions or utilize LVM. While the GUI lacks functionality in this aspect, you can on the other hand define any desired configuration in autoinstall.yaml.

I'm moving a few servers around and I just realized that systemd-networkd supports WireGuard! This saves me from installing the wireguard tools packages, or any packages for that matter because systemd is already included.

Almost exactly a year ago I restructured my storage setup. I have always been careful with my files and that's why I moved over to ZFS on my storage server. No rotting bits here! One of the new things with my new setup is native ZFS encryption.

I had some time to thinker with the blog over the last days. There has been a lot of interesting things invented since I last looked deeper at CSS, like flex and grid layouts, animations. Yeah, I have been out of the loop since forever.

I have kept an eye at Podman since Giuseppe started to work on it, I have played with it from time to time and I have been impressed how the project has evolved. Since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Podman is finally part of the normal Ubuntu repos so I'm in progress of replacing all my Docker usage to Podman and from time to time I find a few quite awesome small tools, like this one:

I have a lot of servers all over the place, and it's not uncommon that I need to connect them together in some way. For simple setups WireGuard is working fantastically well but I usually need layer 2 networks. For that I still use tinc, another software I can recommend. Before WireGuard was a thing, tinc was easily my default choice.

Last night I installed a new server with an LUKS encrypted drive. The server also has a large ZFS pool that is used as the main data storage, of course that needs to be encrypted as well.

I just realized how easy it is to unlock the disk encryption password on a remote and/or headless server via SSH. There is a package called dropbear-initramfs that does exactly what is sounds like, it embeds a dropbear SSH server inside initramfs, cool!