Linux

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. Last week I opened up my Nextcloud instance for external access. Now, since my brother’s RPi4 was already exposed on the same network, I had to setup a reverse proxy on another RPi3 to access both simultaneously behind the router. Here’s the current setup: Proxy server: An RPi3 running on Raspbian Buster Lite with HAProxy installed to handle the reverse proxy. Here’s the gist of the code that’s handling all the heavy lifting. Since SSL is handled by the other servers themselves, all I needed was a quick pass-through handshake from HAProxy. ...

Meena and my family gifted me an Odroid XU4 SBC earlier last month as a Christmas/B-day gift. One of my projects during the year-end holidays was to setup a robust home server; Essentially getting my webservers home from Digital Ocean, where they are currently hosted. This would be a terrific companion to the nextcloud fileserver that I setup earlier using a raspberry pi. Earlier this week, I chanced upon DietPi and decided to launch it on the eMMC chip. One of the first things I did was to install Pi-Hole. With uBlock addons’ that should be some good riddance to ads across my home network! Would be interesting to keep track of these network pings to see what devices are needlessly calling ‘home’. ...

Last year, I procured a Nextcloud box and moved part of my data to it. I’d just heard about Ubuntu Snappy Core OS and was keen on porting my install to that setup. I finally got around doing that last week and thought I’d quickly jot down the install steps for reference later. Essentially, I installed the Core OS on a 32GB microSD card and installed Nextcloud as a snap. Two 1TB hard drives service the Pi3 and are synced with rclone. Below is a crude outline of the setup: ...

After a few rough beta installs of the OS, I decided to do a clean install of Freya. It’s been a smooth sail so far but for the intermittent WiFi disconnects. For some reason the WiFi gets soft disabled at times. Until I figure out what’s causing this to happen and for future reference here’s a nifty work-around: Determine the current state of the radio transmitters using rfkill. You’ll be able to see immediately If any of your devices are soft blocked. [code] $ sudo rfkill list all [/code] ...

Hosting more that one OS on your hard disk can be a pain if you’re not really sure on configuring the boot loader. I’ll confine the scope of this post to parenting only Debian based Linux OS ( Ubuntu ) and WIndoze. Because for the most part of it, I’ve only worked on them. Why would you have to Install / reconfigure Grub in the first case? You had to install Windows after you installed Ubuntu/Linux which led to the Grub ( Previously installed by Ubuntu ) to be over written by the Windows Boot loader. ...

Just ten minutes before I was supposed to leave for work yesterday, I had this remote urge to get back Hardy running on my desktop. I had it installed but because of a windows re-install, the GRUB boot menu was overwritten. So all that I had to do was to re-install Grub! Powered the CPU , inserted Gutsy’s Live CD, logged into the desktop and fired a few commands in the terminal. The shell gave in a success message and I quickly rebooted to check if the Grub was installed. And boy, it did get installed right in the first go :-) ! ...

The Ubuntu family has now doled out their latest OS - Ubuntu 8.04 code named - Hardy Heron. This release is more than different when compared to it’s previous releases. Majorly because it’s got a Wubi installer which facilitates installation directly from a Windows platform. The OS gets installed on the same partition just like any other software application, thus relieving a linux noobie from all the hassles of partitioning a drive. It can also be uninstalled just like any other app. through the Add/ Remove programs. :-) ...

I’d ordered the Solaris 10 DVD from a third party agent a few days back. It did avoid the hassle of downloading the code from the website and burning it on to a ROM and the service by Rainbow Computech was pretty good. I got the DVD delivered to my home in three days with regular updates from them regarding the shipment. Wish the install was as easy as this! :-( ...

Just installed WIne on Ubuntu a few minutes back. Installed a couple of other windows based softwares too! Now they really work :-) . Haggard installations are now things of the past. Probably it’s time I move over to something more challenging.

Finally, Installed Gutsy on my system today! :-)After failed attempts to install it last weekend, I was a bit apprehensive this time. But today, two minutes into the install I realized where I was faltering. I’d created four partitions on my Hard disk of 30 Gigs each for Windows. Fiesty was running on the remaining 40Gigs. Last week during the installation I’d configured the setup to create a Primary ext3 partition instead of making it a logical one.That was what was leading the setup to freeze! Surprisingly I was never warned during the initial stages. Anyways, I fortunately happened to notice the goof up this time and then the rest of the Installation was a breeze! Flat 10 minutes and I had Gutsy live and kicking! :-) ...