What is IEEE 802.1X anyway? More and more companies run a shared desk strategy. Combined with the possibility of home office this often means that employees use their laptop both at home and at the office. The shared desk strategy however forces them to work at different work spaces (and connect to different network ports […]
Author: Marcel
Haproxy map debugging
During haproxy configuration I sometimes couldn’t figure why some of my configs weren’t working. Trying to debug those things proves challenging sometimes. Using admin socket Most of haproxy‘s configuration can be read and modified using its admin socket (if enabled). Look for the stat socket option in your configuration to find the right path: Once […]
Recently I got access to an Openstack system and did my first steps on it. Maybe some of the things I learned so far are of interest to others. Using cloudinit for customization Cloud providers offer the possibility to alter the configuration of their VM images in a standardized way: cloudinit. This uses a simple […]
As shown in my last post using wireguard over TCP (with a little help of proxyguard) isn’t that hard (once you understood how things work). However most VPN solutions come with certain limitations: They often use their specific ports and protocols and therefore can be filtered by firewalls (either by choice or even sometime by […]
Some time ago I tried to get eduvpn working with wireguard over TCP. As you might remember I wasn’t able to make it work reliably so I skipped that attempt for the time being. Now some time has passed and I decided to start over with a more basic approach to get a feeling about […]
Introduction to BTRFS and ZFS
Last week I had a little chat with a very good friend of mine. We were talking about how to best configure his new home server. One of the topics was the choice of filesystems which resulted in a longer discussion with some other friends (all long term IT people and Linux enthusiasts). So I […]
For some tests with a large language model (LLM) I needed a test system with docker and a Nvidia card (for faster AI processing). Here’s what it takes to convert a basic Ubuntu 24.04.1 installation into a docker based LLM test machine: First let’s have a look at our hardware: Next: Install basic Nvidia drivers: […]
OpenZFS and the state of block cloning
What’s block cloning? Block cloning allows to copy files (or parts of it = blocks) without allocating extra space (besides the metadata required for filename, attributes, or the references to existing on disk blocks). Similar techniques are used to implement things like snapshots or deduplication in filesystems supporting them. In practice this feature is very […]
Wireguard is a very nice and fast VPN solution, however it comes with some drawbacks: Most of all it only supports UDP traffic. On an open network this is not a problem, however some networks may deny UDP traffic or may even allow only very specific traffic (like (TCP based) http(s)). So to increase the […]
Rspamd for spam filtering
Why rspamd and not spamassassin? I recently got more and more undetected spam mail, so I was looking around for improvements of my current spamassassin configuration. While doing so I found several articles about rspamd and its ease to set up. So instead of improving my spamassassin configuration I decided to give rspamd a try. […]