I do not have much to say today except that it is simply too hot to function properly. Even my Lenovo Thinkcentre, my Alpine Linux KVM host, decided it wanted to shutdown because of the heat. I live in a second floor apartment that is cooled by two window units which really only take the…
Quest to Learn More About Disk Images
After my recent discovery about easily using dump, restore, and dd to clone my OpenBSD cloud VM’s hard drive, I decided that I would expand upon this learning a little bit more. It began with some curiosity about how virtualization utilities like virsh and virt-manager manage to create a raw disk image so damn quickly….
A KVM Issue
Yesterday I had an interesting issue with my Alpine Linux KVM host while I was implementing IPv6 locally on my LAN. Since IPv6 hasn’t yet been rolled out to my apartment complex’s internet connection, I have to use to use a Unique Local Address (ULA) IPv6 address. Everything appeared to be working correctly. My Windows…
Easy Remote Backup
The genesis of this article comes after some recent dissatisfaction with my cloud hosting provider. In a not so cleverly disguised move, they purposely make it so that you are unable to download snapshots of your virtual machine to your own desktop. I guess they don’t want to make it easy for you to change…
Net Academy Frustrations
Over last weekend, Cisco rolled out its next iteration of Net Academy and I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out why I was able to login but not access course material. Finally, I called Cisco only to be told that nobody handles technical support for the website over the phone. Cisco is a…
An Awesome SSH Trick
Last night I decided that I wanted to create an image from my OpenBSD Vultr Compute Cloud instance so that I could do some local experimentation without potentially screwing up my production system. My production system powers this blog and I would really like some better uptime. Even though this is a personal website, I…
Unbound as a LAN DNS Server
Today I needed to take a break from studying because I was just too tired to muster the effort to hit the books. Instead, I decided to play on my home lab and try out a few things. One of my favorite social networks is Mastodon so I spent some time on it while considering…
OpenVPN For Remote Access to my Home Lab
This morning I decided that it might be nice to be able to remotely access my home lab. I have used OpenVPN before to but only to provide security for when I decide to use publicly available WiFi. Of course OpenVPN can be used for so much more than just that. In my case, I…
Lab Setup Complete
Yesterday, I spent all day getting my computer lab all setup. Prior to yesterday, all of my machines were directly connected to my apartment complex’s free WiFi. It’s actually very well setup and deployed because there are enough access points to make it very speedy. I have routinely seen speeds of around 30-50mbps which is…
Mental Illness Should Not Be Taboo
Today I have had a lot of time to reflect on mental illness and wonder why, in today’s supposedly learned times, mental illness is still something that is feared, loathed, and misunderstood. I have Major Depressive Disorder with mania and Autism. It’s not that I am not trying hard enough, or perish the thought, not…