Last week I converted myself to wireless earphones. I don’t consider myself an audiophile, I don’t have any deep knowledge of music but I kinda enjoy listening to it. Because of this I have had a few decent pairs of headphones, earphones and monitor speakers in my life; they all shared a thing: cables. Last week I pulled the trigger and bought myself my very first pair of wireless earphones: Sony WF-1000XM4. …

For the most part I never cared much about upgrading firmware because if it works don’t mess with it is usually my rule. I also don’t care much about having installed the latest version of Intel “““NSA botnet””” Management Engine, it is a piece of trash anyway so I might as well not have the latest updates. But since I have some issues with the NVME drive (very slow reads, it is most definitely dying) I figured a system wide firmware upgrade wouldn’t be a bad thing. …

Wireguard is an open source software and communication protocol which aims to provide a simpler and safer alternative to OpenVPN. Compared to OpenVPN both client and server configuration are much simpler and mantaining a PKI is also not required. Performance wise Wireguard is also faster than OpenVPN. SERVER: Debian 10 (Codename Buster) As of today Wireguard is not included in Debian 10 stable repos, so it is required to enable backports to install it: …

After the CentOS fiasco (good job Redhat/IBM) and since we are more or less in lockdown I decided to invest a couple of days to migrate my home infra from CentOS 7 to Debian 10. One of my physical machines, which was also CentOS 7 based, is used as ISCSI target. Debian 10 - Server A.K.A. Target Install the required packages: $ sudo apt-get install tgt dkms Create a device backstore: …

Last year I blogged on how to remotely unlock a full disk encrypted Fedora/CentOS server. The software I used, dracut-crypt-ssh, is not supported anymore and stopped working for me on Fedora 32 and 33. A quick DDG search pointed me in the right direction and made me find a similar software that accomplishes the same task: dracut-sshd. $ sudo dnf install dracut dracut-network openssh libblkid-devel gcc $ git clone https://github.com/gsauthof/dracut-sshd.git $ cd dracut-sshd $ sudo cp -ri 46sshd /usr/lib/dracut/modules. …

Since the whole COVID19 pandemic hoax started a couple of months ago, working from home has become the new hip thing every company brags about on every social media known to humankind. The first step to be able to call yourself a proper COVID19 ready(tm) company is the ability to bother every employees with just a few mouse clicks. So here we are, with Microsoft Teams(tm) and a lot of other not very secure and massively bloated software elected as the center of the office life. …

Most Western Digital hard drives’ firmware let the heads park themselves after a certain amount of seconds in case the disk is not actively performing any operation. This might be useful to keep power consumption under control but is actually harmful for disks that run 24/7 (WD Red for example). Luckily there is a way to disable head parking, this can be done directly from Linux using a tool called idle3ctl. …

PCI passthrough is the process of attaching a PCI-E device directly to a VM; CPU support (namely VT-D for Intel and AMD-V for AMD) and motherboard support (IOMMU) are required for PCI passthrough to work properly. Hardware configuration used: AMD Ryzen 1700x Gigabyte X370 K7 Nvidia Geforce GTX260 32 GiB of RAM and a few HDDs Fedora 29 as host OS The system only has a single graphic card because it is normally used as headless compute server for which a GPU is not really required; the graphic card is also very very old Nvidia Geforce GTX260 with a standard non UEFI BIOS. …