On my Windows machine, I’ve mostly moved from using separate virtual machine products like Hyper-V or Virtualbox to have access to a Linux machine to using WSL. The PC is dual-boot with a separate Linux install anyway, but sometimes I just want to quickly fire up a Linux machine, take care of a couple of quick tasks and go back to Windows.

WSL installs Ubuntu by default, but I tend to want a different distribution like OpenSUSE, Fedora etc. To not end up with a “spare” Ubuntu install, you can eitehr install WSL on a fresh Windows install without specifying a distributuion using wsl --install --no-distribution or by installing a different distribution immediately using wsl --install -d <distro name>.

Update 2021-12-18: It looks like the rdiff-backup port has been removed from the FreeBSD ports tree, so installing it via the port is definitely not an option anymore. Also, the method described below works on FreeBSD 13.0 as well.

My main PC workstation (as opposed to my Mac Pro) is a dual-boot Windows and Linux machine. While backing up the Windows portion is relatively easy via some cheap-ish commercial backup software, I ended up backing up my Linux home directories only very occasionally. Clearly, Something Had To Be Done (tm).

I had a look around for Linux backup software. I was familiar with was Timeshift, but at least the Manjaro port can’t back up to a remote machine and was useless as a result. I eventually settled on rdiff-backup as it seemed to be simple, has been around for a while and also looks very cron-friendly. So far, so good.

I’ve blogged about setting up a WireGuard VPN server earlier this year. It’s been running well since, but I needed to take care of some overdue maintenance tasks. Trying to log into the server this morning and I am greeted with “no route to host”. Eh? A quick check on my Vultr UI showed that the VPS had trouble booting. The error suggests a corrupted boot drive. Oops.

Guess what the maintenance task I was looking at was? Creating an Ansible script so I’d be able to stand up the server from scratch in case something like this happened. And yes, the irony of being the guy who regularly preaches to his clients about the need for backups doesn’t quite escape me.

As an IT consultant, I travel a lot. I mean, a lot. Part of the pleasure is having to deal with day-to-day online life on open, potentially free-for-all hotel and conference WiFi. In other words, the type of networks you really want to do your online banking, ecommerce and other potentially sensitive operations on. After seeing one too many ads for VPN services on bad late night TV I finally decided I needed to do something about it. Ideally I intended to this on the cheap and learn something in the process. I also didn’t want to spend the whole weekend trying to set it up, which is how WireGuard entered the picture. I only really needed to protect my most sensitive device - my personal travel laptop.

As I’m already a customer at Vultr (affiliate link) I decided to just spin up another of their tiny instances and set it up as my WireGuard VPN server. Note that I’m not setting up a VPN service for the whole family, all my friends and some additional people, all I’m trying to do is secure some of my online communications a little bit more.

I also decided to document this experiment, both for my own reference and in the hope that it will be useful for someone else. Readers will need to have some experience setting up and administering Linux server. Come on in and follow along!

My adventures with Manjaro Linux continue and I’ve even moved my “craptop” - a somewhat ancient Lenovo X240 that I use as a semi-disposable travel laptop - from XUbuntu to Manjaro Linux. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Today, I wanted to write about package download performance issues I started encountering on my desktop recently and how I managed to fix them.

I was trying to install terminator this morning and kept getting errors from Pamac that the downloads timed out. Looking at the detailed output, I noticed it was trying to download the packages from a server in South Africa, which isn’t exactly in my neighbourhood. Pamac doesn’t appear to have an obvious way to update the mirror list like the Ubuntu flavours do, but a quick dive into the command line helped me fix the issue.

I’ve been a Xubuntu user for years after switching from OpenSuse. I liked its simplicity and the fact that it just worked out of the box, but I was getting more and more disappointed with Ubuntu packages being out of date, sorry, stable. Having to rebuild a bunch of packages on every install was getting a little old. Well, they did provide material for all those “build XXX on Ubuntu” posts. Recently I’ve been playing with Manjaro Linux in a VM as I had been looking for an Arch Linux based distribution that gave me the right balance between DIY and convenience. I ended up liking it so much that I did a proper bare metal install on my main desktop. The install was pretty smooth apart from a issue with getting my AMD RX 470 graphics card to work.

I normally don’t play much with hardware, mainly because there isn’t/wasn’t much I want to do that tends to require hardware that’s not a regular PC or maybe a phone or tablet. This one is different, because no self-respecting geek would want the usual rotary control “programmable” timer to run their sprinkler system, would they?

We do live at the edge of the desert and we have pretty strict watering restrictions here. I’m all for it - water being a finite resource and all that - and I want to improve our existing sprinkler system at the same time. It doesn’t help that the people who set up the sprinklers were probably among the lower bidders, to put it politely. OK, to be blunt they seem to have failed the “giving a shit” test when they put the system together. I’ve spent a lot of  last year’s “gardening hours” just trying to make it work somewhat. Not well, just “somewhat”. Time to fix that.