linux

Wireguard and pi-hole

For some time now I've had a setup with OpenVPN that provided connectivity back to my house and allowed me to optionally send my internet traffic through the VPN tunnel and my house. Wireguard is an interesting project that provides a simplified peer-to-peer VPN tunnel capability that I've been interested in trying out. Pi-Hole is a project that provides "network wide ad-blocking" by providing a caching DNS server and blocklists.

Digitalocean and Nextcloud

I've been listening to a few Linux podcasts lately and heard some rave reviews of Nextcloud. Dropbox has recently introduced some new charges for their services and this prompted me to take a look at my options to see if I want to continue using Dropbox and start paying for advanced services (more storage, more devices, etc) or do something different. Nextcloud presents an alternative with a lot of the key features and benefits of Dropbox and similar services with the added benefit that I own the service myself.

The USE method for troubleshooting

Julie Evans (@bork) has been posting fantastic little cartoons describing different UNIX commands. I learn a little something new from every single post along with its comments. She posted this little gem about the top command: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="und" dir="ltr">top <a href="https://t.co/RV51i3K65n">pic.twitter.com/RV51i3K65n</a></p>&mdash; 🔎Julia Evans🔍 (@b0rk) <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1022331694811099137?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 26, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> She then followed that up with a link to one of her sources for understanding top and in particular what the "load average" represents on Linux.