Posts in category #tutorial

This category contains instructions to do (un)usual things to your own system.

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    • 5 minute read

    Next.JS is a fairly nice way of building a multi-page, mostly statically rendered website with React and making it make sense. It actually solves the problem of “what if a React app was not a Single Page Application” pretty well, but it’s somewhat particular about how it wants to be deployed.

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    • 10 minute read

    By no stretch of imagination am I a frontend person. Graphic design is not my passion. I even got the colour blindness perk. I do like this little website I’ve written over the years and I kind of want it to look nice. And while the design I had created a few years ago still works, it’s also dependent on an outdated version of Jekyll, and it has a few technical issues. So please, follow a long, as a DevOps engineer tries to explain how to make a nice-looking website.

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    • 8 minute read

    While it may not always feel like it, two years have passed and and a new Ubuntu release somehow has rolled around. That means it’s time for me to upgrade my VPS again. Contrary to last round, the first point release actually lined up with my planned time off quite well, so I got to upgrade straight away. It went quite smoothly this time, but I’d like to go over the peculiarities that happened.

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    • 10 minute read

    After about 13 years of service, my trusty laptop finally gave out and it was undeniably time to get a new one. I am personally of the opinion that all money spent on laptops is wasted, but now I found something that was nice enough to do the bare minimum and sufficiently on sale to justify. And because the CJEU continues to disappoint it came with a Windows license. While I don’t really need Windows on my laptop I am also way too Dutch to destroy something I’ve paid for so now I this machine will be a dual boot. The last time I’ve set Windows up on a new machine was back in 2014, so let’s see how things have changed.

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    • 8 minute read

    It’s not unusual for a service to need access to some kind of configuration, or for that configuration to contain passwords that you’d prefer not to leak. The solution is simple: create a configuration file somewhere, make sure that it’s only readable to the user the service runs at, and you’re done. And then you find out about DynamicUser services, which is where the fun begins.

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    • 7 minute read

    Aside from all the terrible things that are associated with the current year, it is also an even year, and it’s past April, so that means we got a new Ubuntu LTS release: Focal Fossa. A few weeks ago, after much anticipation, the upgrade path from Bionic was released which meant it was time to upgrade my VPS. In this post I’ll go over how it went, what went wrong, and what went right.

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    • 15 minute read

    WireGuard is the new kid on the block for creating a secure and maintainable VPN wherever you are. Contrary, to OpenVPN, set-up is relatively easy: you don’t have a thousand nobs to configure, it handles reconnects well, and it also claims to be faster, although I never really ran into issues in that regard. The superlatives don’t stop.

    As always, it turns out that the devil is in the details, and if your set-up is a bit different than everyone’s cup of tea then suddenly all the tutorials out there don’t really work for you anymore. I tried to set it up on my Raspberry Pi but I found that a combination of factors (not running Raspbian, not using iptables) made my life a bit more difficult. Every tutorial out there seems to assume that you do, but thanks to some wonderful resources I managed to figure out a way that works for me. In this post I’ll be going over how to install and configure WireGuard on a Raspberry Pi (running Arch Linux Arm) using nftables as our firewall.

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    • 11 minute read

    As my old mailserver crashed a few weeks ago for reasons related to it being a Raspberry Pi, I’ve had to quickly recreate one to receive a very important email in an hour. I found that most of the online tutorials to set up a proper mailserver are quite incomplete and outdated, so here’s my take on how to set it all up.

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    • 6 minute read

    A client that will remain nameless has a brand new Prestashop (don’t mind the pixels in the logo) that he’s really happy with. He’s been able to set it up mostly by himself, except for the mail server, which was being rather fussy.

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    • 6 minute read

    If you’ve ever done something like ls -la ~, then you must have noticed that your home directory is a mess of hidden files. This annoys the inner perfectionist in me, as I never have more than a few files in any folder. Everything is a nice tree structure.

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    • 4 minute read

    I recently got myself a Raspberry Pi b+, and I figured I’d finally make some use of the spare external harddisk I had lying around to set up ownCloud for myself.

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