Local ISPs & cable vs. fiber

We all know how much fun it is to hate the folks that provide us internet service. My experience is probably much the same as others, speeds at less than a 10th of what I pay for, service windows that require missing an entire day of work, off shore call…

Politics and Data

Politics suck. Data is beautiful. Being a citizen of the US right now is not too much fun (but after Biden getting elected, things might be looking up). Corporations have more power than the citizens and that's mostly due to complicated terms of service and apathy from users. I commend…

Pfsense for fun and profit

Ok, so not so much profit in this post but if you are able to get this working properly you could save a bundle of money for your business and home networks and perhaps gain the experience to land a decent paying job. Pfsense [https://www.pfsense.com]is an…

Backing up $HOME

I saw a post today on reddit where someone asked for help diagnosing a problem with their system that wouldn't boot. The error messages looked like this. Error reading block 128624319 (Input/output error). /dev/sda2: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY (i.e. without -a or -p options) fsck exited…

Installing OpenVPN community edition

This post is for installing OpenVPN CE on Ubuntu 18.04. The instructions are for a brand new install of the OS so if you are following along on a server that has been up for a while, it will most likely still work but you may need to do…

xrandr - Configuring monitors without a DE

First let me start out by letting you know that this is purely for my own benefit. I hate having to lookup things I set once and rarely use again so if this doesn't work for you or you find errors, understand this is what I did to get things…

fail2ban-client

In my previous post about installing and configuring fail2ban, I went over the installation and configuring it. I will now go over the handy tool, fail2ban-client, that comes with fail2ban. Sometimes fail2ban will block someone that has a legitimate need to login to the server or you want to ban…

fail2ban or How I Learned to Love netfilter

If you have ports open to the internet you need to use Fail2ban [https://www.fail2ban.org]. It has been around for a long time and it's pretty ubiquitous in Linux systems exposed to the public. This article is going to walk you through the process I use to setup…