I’m switching to a new format, combining game reviews into monthly posts. I’ve been keeping up with writing reviews, but have fallen behind at posting them. I finished a couple of PC games back in October. Runner 3 was a game I started years ago and finally picked up again to finish. LEGO Builder’s Journey is a recent title I purchased mainly for the RTX graphics. Frost Punk is a game I’ve wanted to play for a while, and finally grabbed while it was on sale.

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I’ve been using ZFS for years on my Linux storage server. Recently I upgraded from Alpine 3.12 to 3.14, which included a ZFS 0.8 to ZFS 2.0 update. Not soon after, I started getting random file corruption issues. I didn’t see any SMART errors on the drives, but still assumed that my hard drive could be going bad. My storage had outgrown my previous backup drive anyway, so I purchased an additional drive. When I attempted to sync snapshots to the new device, I started to see I/O errors and kernel panics. I took a long journey through ZFS bug reports, attempted to switch to Btrfs and even migrated my storage to a different computer. In the end, ZFS saved me from what could have been disastrous amounts of data corruption due to faulty hardware.

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I’ve been administering e-mail servers since the early 2000s, for both my myself and for various jobs. For a brief period I stopped hosting my own e-mail, but returned to running my own stack due to the revelation of domestic spying in 2013. Even though the larger providers have made e-mail less reliable than it once was, I’m still glad I host my own e-mail. I had been using an OpenBSD 6.3 VM for e-mail, and couldn’t upgrade to OpenSMTPD 6.4+ because of some big configuration file changes. Thanks to many good 6.3 → 6.4+ tutorials, I finally tackled this lingering piece of technical debt, and migrated my e-mail from an OpenBSD VM to my standard Docker infrastructure.

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I’ve owned a lot of smart phones. I started off in the PalmOS world and have been solidly in the Android camp for the past several years. Although I’ve used a lot of custom ROMS, I typically still install Google Apps and services. As my concerns over privacy have grown, I’ve started looking at microG, a bare-bones implementation of Google Services that limits personal and location information being continually sent to Google. I purchased a Sony XA2 a few years ago as a backup device, and decided to try out the Lineage for microG project on this device. Although flashing a new operating system on a phone should be a common affair by this point, I ran into issues that left me digging through forum threads for help. Hopefully documenting the errors I encountered, and my solutions, will help others with similar devices.

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On the other side of an apocalypse, survivors emerge to build a new world. Their weapons are duct taped and welded together; bizarre amalgamations from a fiery past. Remanence of an old cult can be found along the countryside, as well as new villains who control the highways and like to paint everything bright pink. They game was marketed as a light sequel for Far Cry 5, about half the playtime of a full length title and priced appropriately. It has some beautiful visuals, questionable dialogue choices and all the guns and explosives that are expected from any Far Cry game.

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It’s fairly straightforward to build your own router, and there are a number of tutorials for setting up IPv4 forwarding and NAT rules on Linux. However, IPv6 is a bit more complicated. There are many BSD and Linux based operating systems like pfSense and OpenWRT, which have web management tools to make setting up IPv6 straight forward. However, if you like to run your own custom Linux distribution on your home router and control everything from the command line, this tutorial will take you through configuring dhcpcd, dnsmasq, unbound, iptables and ip6tables for full IPv6 support on your local network.

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In late 2020, I was waiting in a dentist’s office. The Today Show was on, with hosts spouting the most absolutely insane stories that could only be classified as fear porn. When I got home, I talked to an old friend asking her, “Is this what people are watching? Is this why the world has gone insane?” I have avoided traditional news media for over a decade. In 2007, I wrote about the deceptiveness of main stream media when it came to reporting on various contentious topics such as the Bush torture memos, the war on terror and the 2008 financial collapse. Since my return to America, our main stream media has only gotten worse, spreading fear and anger, both domestically and abroad.

There has been a large rise in independent media. A new era of reporters, interviewers and analysts are opening up the landscape of news and punditry. They are changing things in a big way. To those whose eyes are open; those who are paying attention: What we used to call Main Stream Media is clearly nothing more than propaganda networks funded by advertisers. Large industries have tremendous influence over both government officials and news narratives. Fact checking websites have arisen to fuel the industry that has been actively misleading us for our entire lives. We are at a crossroad where people will either embrace the orthodoxy of globalist narratives, or turn their attention to those who present more complete breakdowns of the complicated topics that are in the social consciousness of today.

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I recently picked up a Lanner FW-7541C off eBay for $88.31 (including shipping). This industrial device has a 2-core/4-thread Atom D525 processor, a 30GB SATA SSD, 4GB of DDR3 ram and six independent Intel gigabit Ethernet adapters. It’s a well built little device I bought to replace my custom Linux router. However, it has no video output ports. It took some work, but I was able to setup and install Void Linux on this device using the serial port console. This guide goes through building the installation media with the custom parameters needed for a serial console. It also goes through the post installation steps that will keep a login prompt active on the serial port after install.

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For the past few years, my gaming rig has been an MSI Trident-X, a prebuilt PC that uses standard ITX components. It replaced my previous gaming laptop, which I also upgraded a few years ago. The Trident-X case does fit a standard PCI-E video card, so I thought it would a good future-proof system. I’ve upgraded the storage of this unit, although not without issues. Back when the current generation of nVidia and AMD graphics cards were announced, I noticed most of them were over 2.5 to 3 slots wide, and likely wouldn’t fit in the current Trident-X enclosure. I watch way too many tech reviews, and found myself pre-ordering an SFF Time P-ATX V2 case. I had the intentions of moving the guts of my gaming PC into an enclosure that could support newer video cards, sometime in the distant future. I placed a pre-order in February, and the case shipped fairly quickly in March. However, it was held up in shipping due to the pandemic, and didn’t arrive until recently. The far future turned into this summer. I moved my gaming PC components into this very nice small form factor case, while adding a few upgrades.

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Fancy Docker orchestration systems, like Kubernetes or DC/OS, have networking layers that can be setup for complicated ingress and load balancer configurations. But what if you just have a single Docker daemon and multiple IPs assigned to a single server? How do you bind individual containers to specific public IP addresses? It’s fairly straight forward to bind a service running in a container to a specific IP listening address, but getting outgoing traffic to egress via a specific IP address takes additional work. If you’re attempting to use Docker with IPv6, you’re in for a world of very counterintuitive configuration. In this post, I’m going to take you through setting up Docker to work with IPv4 and IPv6, using isolated networks, so all incoming and outgoing traffic are restricted to specific IP addresses.

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