Posts

Compressing your server's web traffic

2021-10-23
2 minutes

The internet is a pretty big place - a huge amount of data (approximately 131TB per second) is transferred over it every second of every day. The backbone of the internet is designed to transfer huge amounts of data, but people are impatient creatures, and want data as quick as

Docker in LXC

Docker is a great containerization technology for running applications. It keeps multiple applications completely isolated from each other, only allowing connections exactly when you tell them to. But what if you’re on a hypervisor? You want your host OS to be as lean as possible (else it defeats the point),

Making linking to my posts easier

2021-09-19
2 minutes

For anyone who’s spoken to me, they’ll know I’m very quick to link people to posts I’ve written. That’s not in terms of pushing the things I’ve written (usually), but also being able to retrieve the links as quick as possible. I recently added search search to my website, and

Fixing a permissions error on Proxmox backup

2021-09-18

I have a bunch of VMs and LXCs on my proxmox server. Whilst I like to keep as little data in each of them as possible, and instead mount in my storage (in the form of a ZFS and snapraid pool), I still use proxmox’s built-in backup feature to back

Building search into a Hugo website

2021-09-12
3 minutes

My website is built with Hugo, a great static site generator with a bunch of features. One of the big missing features though is search. Hugo has documentation on a bunch of different integrations, but none of them quite did what I wanted. Over the last few months, I’ve been

Self-hosting static websites

2021-08-05
8 minutes

Static sites, ie those which are just files on disk rather than requiring a custom application or database to run, are incredibly simple to write. You can either do it yourself from scratch with a bunch of HTML, CSS and JS files, or use a generator like Hugo or Zola.

Updating GitLab project dates

2021-07-08
2 minutes

As a developer I do basically everything in git and for fun I run my own git server on my home server. I’ve swapped around quite a lot between GitLab and Gitea, but finally settled on GitLab. It’s a bit heavy, but the deep CI integration is really nice. After

Backup Strategy 2021

2021-06-06
7 minutes

Backups are critical to any systems longevity and reliability. If you’re not backing up your data, stop reading this now, go do it, then come back… Assuming none of you suddenly panicked and left, let’s keep going. You can keep telling yourself otherwise, but eventually, every system will experience some

Website deployment process

2021-05-25
3 minutes

My website is a very important project to me. I’ve written a lot of content over the years, useful both to me and other internet folks. Currently, my website is a static site, powered by Hugo. Because it’s static, the content is served insanely quickly and handles any insane load

Server build 2020 - Proxmox setup

2021-05-03
11 minutes

Back in December, I fully rebuilt my home server from the ground up based on Proxmox. Being a hypervisor OS, it makes sense to run everything in VMs or LXC containers, not on the host. Therefore, there’s a huge amount of scope for opinions, lessons and customizations. I’ve had quite

Consuming YouTube through RSS

2021-04-12
3 minutes

YouTube is the largest video hosting platform on the planet, serving well over 1 billion videos a day to its over 30 million daily active users. People have had issues with YouTube’s subscription service for years, and for a service so large and so widely used it seems crazy that

What's new in Django 3.2 LTS

2021-04-06
14 minutes

It’s that time again, time for another Django LTS release. Since Django 2.2, back in 2019, a lot has changed in tech, in Python and of course in Django. Historically, I’ve worked entirely on LTS versions, hence combining these 3 releases together. Staying on the LTS version is a trade-off

ZFS on home

2021-03-01
3 minutes

ZFS is a great filesystem, especially for any kind of data storage, but the fact it’s not integrated into the Linux kernel makes it a risky choice for the root OS. Canonical are making this easier for Ubuntu users by tightly controlling and testing the kernel and ZFS to ensure

Securing public servers

2021-02-11
9 minutes

At some point, servers need to be put on the public internet. Whether that be a VPS in the cloud, or your new homelab. Once a server is on the internet, it’s subject to anything and everything the internet has to offer, from botnets to hackers and script kiddies. It’s

Unsafe routes with Nebula

2021-02-02
2 minutes

Nebula is a great mesh network I recently deployed into my stack. For connecting nodes spread between networks, it’s great, much better than my previous WireGuard installation. An additional feature of nebula is unsafe_routes. Unsafe routes allow nodes which don’t have Nebula installed to be accessible to other Nebula nodes.

Plausible & Gitea

2021-01-19

Yesterday, I moved my Git server from GitLab to Gitea. There’s nothing wrong with GitLab, I actually quite like it, but it’s a rather large tool for my needs. Gitea is much more lightweight, faster, and provides all its features for free. Now, it’d be nice to add some analytics

Nebula mesh network - an introduction

2021-01-08
8 minutes

WireGuard has been the “hot new thing” when it comes to VPNs, but it’s not always the best suited for every workload. Nebula is a mesh network originally created by Slack, but now owned by a separate company.TechSNAP 419 - Nebulous NetworkingLinux Unplugged 329 - Flat Network TruthersWhat’s a mesh

State of the Apps 2021

2021-01-01
7 minutes

It’s that time of the year again: time to look back at how I work, the tools I use, and how the next year might look. I’ve been working from home basically full time since the UK went into lockdown 17th March. It’s been quite an adjustment barely leaving the