The plan is to finally ditch a bunch of the cloud storage bills I’ve been paying (Amazon, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Photos) and bring things to my home lab. Saving some cash and taking control of my data sounds like a win.
How about you guys? What projects are on your plate this month?
I’m not working on anything right now… been too busy at work, with other things happening at home as well.
I am introducing my 17-year-old son to Linux, so maybe that counts. He took a collegel tour the other day and attended a Linux class… now he’s interested.
Getting your son into Linux is a milestone in itself. Or rather, having a son who’s interested in getting into Linux: THAT’S a win! Congrats!
Honestly, I sometimes wish I could go back and experience the first steps into Linux all over again. It’s such a fun, and full of discovery and so many paths!
Yes, it’s cool. I told him I can create a VM for him and he can do whatever he wants. Then if he breaks it, we can create a new VM.
I still remember walking down the hall in the university dorm before classes began, freshman year, August 1989. I saw a command prompt on a guy’s screen, and I knew it wasn’t DOS or OS/2. I asked what it was… SunOS 4 on a server across campus.
What’s SunOS? How are you connecting to it? What can you do with it?
I was hooked immediately, and I have never left my main focuses – Unix and networking.
My main work as freelancer that kept me busy last 3 months is a website for a musical group with admin area and a managment software in which registred users can dowload the musical sheets for their specific instrument.
Technology I used are php 7 with a hadncrafted tailored mvc, mysql, and vue.js for the backoffice area.
For the rest I’m busy programming xul client user interfaces and a C# / windows form frontend gui.
And I should start a new job at mid october, I’m still not sure what I’m going to do, but I think I’ll do some php or java with springbot.
That’s all, ah yes! Since when I’m full time on Linux (Fedora) I saw incredible amount on stability and productivity.
That sounds like a really solid mix of projects! The sheet-management feature for musicians sounds especially useful, being able to grab the right music for their instrument directly is a nice touch.
Interesting choice sticking with a handcrafted MVC in PHP 7 too; sometimes that level of control makes life easier than fighting with a bigger framework. Thought’s on PHP 8 as PHP 7.* are EOL.
Cool to hear you’re dabbling in XUL and C# WinForms on the side, that’s quite a spread of tech stacks. Good luck with the new role in October, whether it leans more toward PHP or Spring Boot. And Fedora’s stability is no joke… it’s great how much smoother things feel once you’re fully on Linux.
@ricky89 The music website sounds like such a cool project!
I run an HP Procurve J9049A 2900-24G switch, which I just had to replace a couple months ago. The original one I received after a company I was working for decommissioned it. They were going to throw it away! Thankfully I knew the IT guy and got to take it home. One day, the orange fault light started flashing but the switch kept running. It wasn’t until a power outage that I would learn that was a bad thing. It won’t boot past the flashing orange light and a flashing Test indicator. I found a Serial to USB cable and am going to learn to use Serial and try to debug and repair the switch. Even though I have a working one now, it’s always nice to have a backup and not need to wait 3 days for a eBay shipment to arrive!
I also host a Minecraft server for my family and I to play on together, and I am working on a Python script to parse the stats files and push that data in to Prometheus so I can build Grafana graphs of all the stuff we do.
Finally, we don’t have cable or TV. Instead, I have a Zorin 16 box with a 1660TI hooked up as the “TV”, and then we watch Netflix/Youtube/Twitch/Jellyfin/etc from that. I need to upgrade to Zorin 17, but, I did quite a few tweaks to this install to make GPU transcoding in Jellyfin and ffmpeg work, surround sound for my sound bar and TV work, plus the Nvidia drivers still scare me. I’m hesitant to upgrade for fear of breaking something that “just works” right now. But I’d like to get to Zorin 17 b/c I don’t like being super behind on security updates. I haven’t found a reliable way to “test” this upgrade so I’m open to thoughts/pointers/suggestions on what to do here. Can’t let my wife miss her documentaries for too long!
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on OpenPanel: a Docker-based control panel. But ever since ConfigServer shut down, I’ve been learning Perl to maintain a CSF fork, named it Sentinel (in the lack of better name). Our infrastructure relies heavily on CSF, with integrations like a WHMCS unban plugin, control panel firewall, Shoutcast service automations.. Switching to an alternative, testing it, and reliably reimplementing everything i production would be a massive task. So, the plan is to maintain a CSF fork - and since I’m already doing that, why not make it public and open-source
For years I used Redfox AnyDVD HD on Windows 10 running as a QEMU-KVM guest using USB Redirection attached to external optical drives. Redfox went out of business, and that meant that my final Windows application was no longer supported. I was sad to see AnyDVD HD go, but it was good to finally get rid of Windows. No longer running Windows, I can also shut down the Linux Mint ‘server’ running the whitelisting proxy Privoxy–the way I kept Microsoft from spying on me.
I replaced all that with GuinpinSoft MakeMKV on Linux Mint with a similar virtualized configuration. Works great!
Reverting to a snapshot would keep you from having to create a new VM. On the other hand, for a new user who would benefit from some repetition of the right ways to do things, you are probably right.
I love the serial console way. I have a few Netgate router/firewall devices that have no video or keyboard input–only serial console. Command “screen” is simple and has worked well for me.
