A Nerd’s Ramblings

Preface I’ve wanted to setup transmission on my server for a while. I just wanted to make sure no one could see the linux iso’s I was downloading. I’ve tried before but for some reason always struggled. I mean I had it working a few years ago but that was without docker. Now I have a little bit of a diffrent approch. I want to talk about that today. Introduction Torrenting over a VPN is fairly simple, it is the seeding that is the problem. Lots of VPN services either block outright the ability to see or open a random port that you have to figureout and add to your client. The worst part, it changes when you restart the VPN. So… how do I go about fixing that? I will be using the LSIO container for transmission. LSIO has the amazing ability to run “Private Custom Services”. This allows you to run a script along side what ever service is starting. So lets start some of the configs and scripts. ...

Introduction Recently, I posted about a new blog artical on Mastodon and got a response which made me think maybe I should add comments to the articals I am writing. Now I didn’t just want to add some random box that anyone can post in, rather I wanted to display any comments I get Mastodon on my website. One thing to note, I am using Hugo with the PaperMod theme. This guide will be dependent on PaperMod as it has a built in way to add comments, it might work on other themes but you will need to check. ...

Preface A little while ago I wrote a guide on how to deploy a k8s stack using Terraform and Ansible on a XCP-NG host runnign Xen Orchestra. While I think the guide was OK, I did cut quite a few corners on it and I want to put that right. Also, I was working ok K8s stuff again and wanted something that was a little easier to re-deploy, just incase I messed something up real bad. Like setting the pods network to my home network’s subnet causing the servers to stop responding… Doh. ...

Preface Firstly, this isn’t a guide and if you don’t know how to be safe with mains electronics then I do not recommend trying this your self. Electric is dangerous and if dealt with improperly can hurt or even kill you. If you missed the previous post about this topic, you can find it HERE. Ok, this took me a little longer to get to than I wanted, but I have now completed my desk lamp and my partner’s desk lamp. While small victories, it can be really useful. I no longer have to get up to turn off my desk lamp when I am on the couch, nor do I have to reach round the back of my desk to turn it off. When I don’t want to open home assistant to turn on a light, though, it is supper easy to use the switch as normal. With my partner’s lamp, I had to make two custom models which I will go into a little more detain on. ...

Preface In this article I am not going to be going through all the ports you need to configure on your firewalls, for ease of following this guide I recommend disabling the firewall. That being said, you should never do that for production! I want to focus on the k8s stuff here, so decided to skip this for the sake of brevity. Flannel Setup First we are going to set up the network stack. There are lots of different choices, but I went with Flannel due to the ease of setup. You just need to apply the file from the URL. If you want to change the default subnet from 10.244. 0.0/16 you will need to download the file first and edit it. That being said, for most people that shouldn’t be required. ...

After a long time of leaving my beloved Thinkpad X230 in a draw I was forced to bring it back out. Since the political changes in the USA, me and my partner thought it best to leave our personal devices at home and bring wiped ones. Also, I wanted to run the open-source BIOS replacment HEADS, so like two birds one stone. My x230 was the perfect fit! I dusted it off and hit that power button, after realising it was dead on battery and plugging it in, it just powered up! Fans spun up, and the screen… well. If you have read my previous X230 blog post you will know originally I had issues getting it to work reliablly. It did work for a while but eventially just died on me. ...

Smart lamps are expensive and there are very few out there! Throwing smart bulbs in might be great but when someone turns off the light at the switch it makes them useless. Since starting the home automation adventure, I have wanted to find a relatively cheap solution to this problem. Armed with a 3d Printer and some Shelly 1 Plus devices, I think I have found the solution. Lets start with a warning though, this is a fairly simple process, but you will be touching mains electronics… if you mess up you could have 240v running through you. That can seriously hurt you or even kill you. While I will be walking through the process, this is not intended to be a guide and I take no responsibility for any harm or injury. I am just an idiot with no respect for my own safety. ...

Plausible is a fairly simple analytics company. Unlike google, which takes every scrap of data they can, plausible respects their customer’s visitors. They are an open-source and affordable provider. I started using them recently to see who is visiting my site and from where. The only problem most of the people that go to my site are nerds like me… so they run an ad-block. Most ad-blockers unfortunately block plausible. ...

DON’T USE THIS GUIDE I wrote this a little while ago, in a bit of a rush and have since updated it. You can follow basicly the same guide HERE In this guide, I will show you how to automate the deployment of k8s on a XCP-NG server. We will use Terraform and Ansible to deploy and configure the hosts. This guide still largely applies to other distributions of Linux, the main section you would have to change is the adding the repos and installing the packages. You will need to find the repos and the package names might be slightly different. If you search for Ansible repo/package management for your distribution, you should find it with little issue. ...

A quick side note, this was a artical I started writing back in Febuary last year when returning from Fosdom 24. I have worked on it since some about but this is more a capsual of what my brain was thinking and isn’t a complete argument. There is lots more I want to say on the matter which I maybe will someday. For now, I thought I may as well post it. ...