181
Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
Feeling like a kid in a candy store, once more
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,839 posts.
Infrastructure & DevOps
Any year
182
Nix Derivation Madness
I’ve written a bit about Nix and I still face moments where foundational aspects of the package system confounds and surprises me.
183
Linux VM without VM software – User Mode Linux
Quick demonstration of using User Mode Linux (UML) to run a Linux VM inside Linux's userspace, without additional VM software or even root permissions
184
More than DNS: Learnings from the 14 hour AWS outage
A thorough review of a major cloud outage.
185
Making a micro Linux distro (2023)
A guide on building a simple Linux distribution from scratch. Detailed guide on building the kernel and the init process. Finally, a little distribution is built with u-root that is capable of connecting to the Internet.
186
What I Self Host
I’ve always liked reading blogs, and have used several feed readers in the past (Feedly, for example). For a long time I was thinking it would be fun to writ...
187
How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services
So, I originally planned for this to be on my premium newsletter, but decided it was better to publish on my free one so that you could all enjoy it. If you liked it, please consider subscribing to support my work. Here’s $10 off the first year of annual.
188
K8s with 1M nodes
This is an effort to create a fully functional Kubernetes cluster with 1 million active nodes.
189
Why did containers happen?
Autumn update This is what it is looking like around here at the moment. DevOpsDays London I gave a talk at DevOpsDays London recently. It was a nice...
190
A Guide for WireGuard VPN Setup with Pi-Hole Adblock and Unbound DNS
I’ve used Mullvad as my VPN provider for a few years. Their service is good, they provide keys for 5 devices, rely on the Wireguard protocol, and offer alternative configurations as well. Despite that, my needs have changed and I wanted to be able to have granular control over DNS queries and the ability to connect my…
191
Why Self-Host?
Let me make the argument why you should start self-hosting more of your personal services.
192
Why is everything so scalable?
I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve…
193
Putting a dumb weather station on the internet
After all, why not? Why shouldn't I put a dumb Temu weather station on the Internet?
194
More random home lab things I've recently learned
From my series of "Christian's Home Lab adventures", here's some more things I've recently learned / discovered and figured are worth sharing: NVMe SSDs on a Raspberry PI, ARM64 adventures, more zfs troubles, and some cool tools you should try.
195
Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
Since a years we know, or might suspect, our chats are listend on, our uploaded files are sold for advertising or what purpose ever and the chance our social messengers leak our private data is incredibly high. It is about time to work against this.
196
Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
It has been 0 days since the last change to my home server.
197
Beginner Guide to VPS Hetzner and Coolify
I set up my own VPS, documented every step, and ended up with a repeatable deployment pipeline. This is both a checklist for my future self and a guide for a...
198
Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop and disks
About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3 . I was working on AppGoblin’s SDK tracking of the top 100k Android and iOS apps so was wanting a lot of space, but for cheap.
199
Self-hosting email like it's 1984
Notes from setting up a truly minimal self-hosted email server with Postfix and OpenDKIM. Covers TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNS, reverse DNS, multiple domains, and delivering to Gmail.
200
WireGuard topologies for self-hosting at home
I recently migrated my self-hosted services from a VPS (virtual private server) at a remote data center to a physical server at home. This change was motivated by wanting to be in control of the hardware and network where said services run, while trying to keep things as simple as possible. What follows is a…
201
Systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
202
Tinycolor supply chain attack post-mortem
Lessons learned from becoming the unexpected face of a npm supply-chain attack.
203
If all the world were a monorepo
The R ecosystem and the case for extreme empathy in software maintenance
204
How Container Filesystem Works: Building a Docker-Like Container from Scratch
Learn how Linux containers are built from the ground up. Starting with the mount namespace and a root filesystem, see why PID, cgroup, UTS, and network namespaces naturally follow - and how this foundation makes concepts like bind mounts, volumes, and persistence in Docker or Kubernetes much easier to grasp.
205
Keeping secrets out of logs (2024)
There's no silver bullet, but if we put some "lead" bullets in the right places, we have a good shot at keeping sensitive data out of logs.
206
Some thoughts on personal Git hosting
As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested…
207
My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4
“It’s always DNS” is a famous meme among network people. Name resolution is technically quite simple. It’s “just” translating a hostname like jan.wildeboer.net to an IP address. What could possibly go wrong? I am a radical optimist and detail-obsessed knowledge collector, so I decided to find out. As part of my goal…
208
I ditched Docker for Podman
Podman offers better security, uses fewer resources, and integrates seamlessly with Linux and Kubernetes, making it a superior Docker alternative
209
How to install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi
Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi. I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My…
210
The Limits of NTP Accuracy on Linux
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a…