Microsoft Needs to Rethink Windows Security
In October 2003, Microsoft formalized “Patch Tuesday” as a phenomenon. Next month it will turn 21 with no indication of the stream of security issues being f...
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Take Me To Your Lizard
Every time there’s an election, I think of Douglas Adams’ brilliant exchange between Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent in So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish:
Changing Batteries on an APC UPS
A while back, a colleague gave me an old IBM-branded APC uninterruptible power supply. It’s a nice addition to the home server setup, as it both cleans the i...
…And Jekyll on Fedora
The other thing I resolved here was how to get Jekyll running at all on my Fedora laptop. I followed the instructions from the Jekyll website on what package...
Jekyll on FreeBSD
As I’ve mentioned, this website is statically generated by Jekyll, a Ruby based static site generator. My needs are very simple, so I have a git based workfl...
Exchange Shenanigans
I had an interesting adventure last night: The phone rang at 22:19, and then I spent a couple of hours with two colleagues assessing the situation, trying to...
Connecting to Home from Abroad
A long time ago I set up a VPN server on my pfSense network gateway. Then I switched away from pfSense, and then Covid happened, and during a number of years...
Fixing Performance Issues in Dirt Rally 2.0
A while ago I suddenly began seeing wild framerate fluctuations and gradual performance drops as stages progressed in my current favorite car game, Dirt Rall...
Lenovo X260 as a Unix workhorse
I’m writing this post from an old Lenovo X260 on which I’ve installed Fedora 39. For desktop usage this is currently my favorite Linux distribution: It suppo...
Alternatives to ESXi in the Home Lab
On Valentine’s day this year, Broadcom did what many of us expected it to do, and decapitated the free vSphere (ESXi) hypervisor.
Messing With the Badguys
Scrolling through my HAProxy logs, I got a bit miffed at the amount of bot traffic I saw attempting to access nonexistent paths obviously looking for weaknes...
Fullscreen Gaming in Gnome
I’ve been mostly enjoying doing my gaming in Fedora Linux, but the last couple of versions have been mildly irritating, in that some games were unable to gai...
Prometheus data from PowerShell
At work we have a system which is dependent on fetching email from an on-premises Exchange server via Exchange Web Services (EWS). Apparently there’s a “wont...
Ansible Secrets Management with 1Password
I’m migrating my work code repositories from an on-prem GitLab instance to GitHub as part of an integration project we’re working on. One of the consequences...
Happy Network News
I started writing a completely different story last weekend, but life is like an assorted box of network cables, and here we are.
FreeBSD After a Couple of Months
It’s now been almost four months since I relapsed into running some FreeBSD servers, and I’ve now had time to lift them through my first FreeBSD major versio...
Getting My Ducks in a Row
My home environment is mostly set to auto-update when new things are available - including my hypervisors. Occasionally, things would restart but my web serv...
Evidence-based IT Operations
A significant part of our time dealing with computers in some role or other, is spent troubleshooting why something happens that differs from what we intende...
GitOps website deployment with Gitea
I’m slowly simplifying and minimizing my home server environment for no particular reason other than enjoying the KISS principle.
FreeBSD Base Configuration
A while back I realized I haven’t been running FreeBSD since almost a decade, when I used it along with CARP for my first HAProxy load balancer pair at work....
A nice baguette
For once a very non-technical post.
Deploying a Ubiquiti Unifi appliance with Ansible
I finally got tired of my old 802.11n Apple Airport Express(!) that has been serving the kitchen part of our house with an Internet connection for many yea...
Starting a Jekyll blog
I’ve begun experimenting with a statically generated site in place of my Wordpress instance: The more I work with technology, the more I find myself enjoying...
Reflections on Proxmox VE
I’ve now been using Proxmox VE as a hypervisor in my home lab for a couple of years, and as I’ve reverted to plain Ubuntu Server + KVM, I figured I would try...
Serving static web pages from HAProxy
I recently had to prove ownership of a web domain at work. The suggested process was easy enough: Present a web page with your company name, and a way to sen...
PowerShell for Unix nerds
(This post was inspired by a question on ServerFault) Windows has had an increasingly useful scripting language since 2006 in PowerShell. After Microsoft ap...