Self Hosted Kubernetes

Over the years I have dabbled with Kubernetes on-and-off a bit, and mostly learned theoretical stuff surrounding it. I also managed and deployed few of the EKS based clusters on AWS at work, so I know certain operational things as well. To be honest, I haven’t really done any “cool and amazing” things with it. Those were mostly bare Amazon EKS setups, no ArgoCD or something fancy like that. Fanciest things I managed were Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and AWS ALB ingress controller on those clusters....

September 20, 2023 · 7 min · Ivan Tomica

Setting Up Nextcloud

After setting up Intel NUC with Debian 12 on top of it, I have decided to configure Nextcloud as my first application on this new setup. In order to have a successful setup for my needs, I have decided on the following: DNS name for accessing the installation (static DNS entry on the network + valid TLS certificate) HAProxy for terminating TLS and forwarding traffic to the Nextcloud installation Nextcloud and required services in the container Above noted requirements came from the experimentation, but I somewhat knew what I want to do with the setup, and how to make it more clean for the new services....

August 26, 2023 · 13 min · Ivan Tomica

My Password Managers Journey

These days there are plenty of password managers out there, all providing the same base promise; making you more secure by using random password for each of the accounts you have. Obviously this has one caveat, where you have “all eggs in one basket”. If this account gets compromised, attacker would have access to all of your credentials. Debating pros and cons and what is best for general population though is beyond the scope of this article....

August 28, 2022 · 5 min · Ivan Tomica

Detect System Theme in Emacs

Since I’m using MacOS again for the work, and obviously, I still use Emacs, I wanted to have a functionality which would detect which system theme is being used and load the correct one during Emacs startup. Previously, I have hacked together just a simple script which depended on GTK theme. Basically, If command returns string Adwaita, load light theme, if it returns Adwaita-dark, load dark theme. Later I learned that this might not be the good approach at all, even more so since GNOME developed concept of having Dark and Light theme....

August 28, 2022 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

1Password on Linux

These days there are plenty of Password managers out there, all providing the same base promise; making you more secure by using random password for each of the accounts you have. Obviously this has one caveat, where you have “keys to the kingdom” scenario where you only have to watch that one account, and if it gets compromised, attacker would have access to all of your accounts. Going into that debate though is beyond the scope of this article....

June 21, 2021 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Cleaning Flatpak Data

So today I’ve been looking at the disk space usage and observed rather peculiar thing; my ~/.var/app/ folder was around 30GB in size. Upon further examination I’ve observed that the disk space usage is generated by the Lbry flatpak application which stored its cache of downloaded videos there. What’s rather weird is that this app was removed from my system like month ago. It turns out that, by default, when you uninstall the app, its configuraiton and cache will stay behind unless you specify --delete-data flag....

June 13, 2021 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Secrets of the Linux process - ProcFS

You’ll be amazed how much things you can learn about the process on the Linux system by exploring and poking around /proc/. ProcFS in Linux is a special filesystem that contains various information about the system, processes running on the system and allows you to adjust some of the things by writing directly to those files. Among many other things it contains folder for each process running on the system, named by its PID....

March 27, 2021 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

BTRFS - Perfect Filesystem With Trust Issues

BTRFS - the filesystem that was first introduced in 2009, back in the days of Linux 2.6.x kernel. It came with a promise of being this modern filesystem, for the modern age. Packed with all sorts of features that were traditionally being considered as part of the “Software RAID” or “Volume manager”. To this day, it is being considered by many, as a “ZFS for the Linux world”. My first encounter with this filesystem was way later, when it was already considered pretty much stable....

February 7, 2021 · 8 min · Ivan Tomica

OpenSUSE – great distribution for someone that’s not me

Last month/year I decided to challenge myself and embark on the journey of using OpenSUSE to give it a fair chance to become my daily driver. It is really hard to say if I’ve given it a fair chance, but during the journey I’ve learned OpenSUSE is not the right distribution for me. I have tried both Leap and Tumbleweed release, and long story short, Leap is using rock-solid packages which are also quite old, while Tumbleweed is on the bleeding/cutting edge, and oh boy, did it bleed!...

January 23, 2021 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Spicing up main desktop

Yesterday I decided to give Cinnamon a try on my main desktop. My main desktop runs Fedora 33 Workstation edition and I have been fully enjoying GNOME on it. It is modern, simple, and yet, quite fast on my machine. So, why the change? Things got boring. This is great on machine that has to be rock-solid, and Fedora Workstation edition has been just that for me over the years (ever since Fedora Next - around release version 20)....

January 16, 2021 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica