Blogs

Setting up Wireguard based VPN is quite easy. Depending on your distribution you install kernel headers (as Wireguard is loaded kernel module), install Wireguard and configure it and you’re off to the races. With Linux kernel 5.6 Wireguard will be built in so this process will be even simpler. Installation Currently on my Ubuntu (18.04) based server, I had to do the following: apt-get update apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) add-apt-repository ppa:wireguard/wireguard apt-get install wireguard Since that automatically built kernel module, loading it with:...

Seems to me that this my little trip to the Windows land might actually trigger me to learn a thing or two about that OS. Naturally, I’m also planning to jot those things down here. So while installing Windows to spare NVMe drive it decided to place its bootloader to existing EFI partition where up until then only Fedora had its EFI image. This behavior doesn’t suits me as I can’t offline drive while in windows and then pass it through to the Hyper-V machine (long story…)....

I’ve since evolved this script a bit and have published it on GitHub: https://github.com/ivantomica/AWSVault To log in into AWS I prefer to use small function which calls aws-vault utility and gets URL to login to specific AWS account and then opens that AWS account in its own container tab in Firefox. Reason for this is that my natural habitat is terminal, or textual interface in general, so invoking thing from there instead of doing 20 clicks through interface somehow feels better to me....

For most of my private email needs I prefer to use Mu4e within Emacs. It is a module of Emacs which basically searches through Mu index file. Naturally, to be able to index something, you first need to fetch it. In this case “it” are email messages from the server, or, my mailbox if you wish. For this particular purpose OfflineIMAP utility has served me well over the time, and to be honest, my needs are quite simple:...

I have been previously installing Ubuntu on ZFS (root-on-zfs) and since then I’ve transitioned to Fedora, on ext4+lvm, to avoid much complication and hassle. It is also not necessary for me to have all those nice ZFS features on root. When I was installing Fedora I have reformatted existing drive. Unfortunately although new GPT should’ve been created it seems like I’ve missed something and root of my device was identified as ZFS member:...

Obviously, I’ve decided to revert this decision on new articles again. There has been this thought in my head about completely disabling comments on this website for some time now. Sure, it is nice to get nice feedback for the articles I’ve written in the past or comments that correct some of outdated or otherwise incorrect information in articles but I think that those comments can be easily posted by contacting me directly....

In order to expand ZFS pool first step is to resize underlying disk. Once that’s done, by default on Linux, partition 9 of size 8MB is created at the end of the disk. Reasoning for this partition is not completely clear for me, but according to some random discussions on the internet, it would seem that it comes from Solaris, but no clear explanation why it exists in the first place....

Prompted by the excellent article at RedHat’s blog on the topic of “What my family thinks I do all day?” I decided to do the same research on my own, just to see where I stand and how much understanding I get from the family about the work that I do. It is quite hard to explain things that sysadmins do in plain English, especially when the audience is not very technical....

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to solve few particular set of problems which I won’t go into detail here, perhaps in another post. One of the challenges I’ve faced is how to export NFS from my ZFS pool on Fedora host machine and mount it within Ubuntu based VM. The whole process is quite simple and straight forward so here we go. In order to be able to use NFS at all we first need to install required components on the host machine:...

I had this problem with playing Netflix videos in Firefox on Fedora where even at video preview-s I would constantly get yellow bar with the message that Widevine Content Decryption Module, required for playing DRM content Netflix serves, has in fact crashed. Videos worked fine in Chrome, but I’d like to use Firefox. After some digging through, mainly by following Journal logs and triggering error in parallel I’ve came across following error...