A few months ago, I wanted to add in a 10G Ethernet card to my primary development box. Since it’s an ITX build, I only had one PCI-E slot that was occupied with an old AMD RX 550 video card. Even though the Ryzen 2700X processor it held was more than powerful enough for my needs, I switched it out with a Ryzen 5700G so I could free up the PCI-E slot for 10G networking. Unfortunately, X11 started crashing recently with the integrated graphics. Sway/Wayland seems to run stable. I currently use Sway on my personal laptop, so I attempted to take the plunge again and see if I could switch to it on my primary machine. I jumped in with an open mind, and found replacements for many of the i3/X11 tools that do not work with Sway/Wayland. The following is a summary of what worked, what didn’t quite work and what’s still broken. The version of Sway I’m using is 1.7 on Gentoo.
I’ve been on Cricket Wireless since I returned to the United States. Cricket is owned by AT&T and uses its cellular network. Until this year, Cricket worked perfectly and without issue. A few months ago, my phone randomly stopped being able to accept or make calls. Data and texting still worked, but calls were impossible. Cricket support had me change my settings, so my phone defaulted to 4G instead of LTE. They claimed this wouldn’t reduce my speed (which I don’t think is correct), but I was able to make outbound calls. The fix only worked for a few months. AT&T seems to be upgrading their phone networks. In either pure incompetence or an intentional push to force customers to buy new phones, they have made several old devices unusable on all their partner providers. Thankfully, my device still works on the T-Mobile network at full LTE speeds, so I said goodbye to Cricket/AT&T and trashed my old SIM card.
In 2000, the world survived Y2K only to be hit by the dot com crash. Some of us who were still in university wondered what the job market would look like when we graduated. We heard tales of recruiting parties, in major tech hubs, where people handed out resumes. The lead up to that bubble came from companies that believed they could sustain themselves with services that were free to consumers, and supported by advertisements. Services like Juno provided free e-mail and dial-up in exchange for displaying ads. Long before the blockchain, we had useless currencies such as Beenz.
The early 2000s led to a lot of consolidation in tech industries. Some of those companies are now turning into venture capitalists, investing in newer startups to hedge their bets against the next big thing. We are in an era of overvalued companies, that are heavily leveraged with investment or debt. When this house of cards eventually does collapse, those venture capitalists, along with angel investors and startup incubators, will be in the unique position to cut off anything they view as non-profitable or unsustainable. We may see large tech investment firms getting to decide which companies will live and die, similar to banks in the 2008 financial collapse.
I created dav-xmpp-sync as a way to sync my contacts between my CardDav server and an XMPP/SMS Gateway, in order to migrate from Google Voice. I’m happy to announce the release of version 1.0. dav-xmpp-sync is now published to PyPI, as well as docker hub. Many of the features and bug fixes for this release wouldn’t be possible without all the various contributors, both for bug reports and code patches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sep 13, 2021
SFF Time P-ATX V2 case with an i7-9700KF and a 3080-Ti
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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