Welcome in Take Back Your Cloud

Two months later, I’ve managed to update my NixOS configuration files to incorporate the Disko “tool.” For anyone who missed my previous post: I recently came back to NixOS and spent some time studying and developing my personal configuration files, using the official manual, YouTube videos, and GitHub repos from other users as references. Seeing how useful those examples were inspired me to publish my own. I’ve structured these files to fit my needs, intentionally without using Flakes or Home Manager, to keep everything as simple as possible. Then I shared them as a “template” in my repo Another NixOS Configurations Template. ...

Returning to Linux as my daily operating system, I wanted something stable, secure, and easily replicable – allowing me to get a workstation up & running in the shortest time possible from a fresh HDD. I also needed an OS that could handle client machines in a business context, replicating the same environment except for user-specific details. If NixOS came to mind while reading, keep going. I first tried NixOS a couple of years ago, then left it for Fedora due to time constraints. Since late December, I’ve come back to it, focusing on dotfiles and configuration. I consulted the official manual, watched some YouTube videos, and examined various GitHub repos from other users – their examples inspired me to publish my own approach. ...

Hello. Many routers have an integrated “print server,” that is, the ability to connect a printer via USB and share it on the network. In case your router doesn’t have this capability, we could always use our Raspberry as a print server with Cups apt-get install cups we enable administration from the web interface cupsctl –share-printers –remote-admin –remote-printers and add our user to the “lpadmin” group usermod -a -G lpadmin our_user ...

Hello. A torrent client can always be useful (naturally only for legal purposes), so let’s proceed sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon By doing this, we’ll install a daemon (always active), to stop it sudo service transmission-daemon stop Once stopped, let’s take the opportunity to configure it sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json where “download-dir” = full path where to save your downloads “download-limit” = number of simultaneous downloads “download-limit-enabled” = number of downloads, 1 enabled, 0 disabled ...

Hello. After installing Squid, SquidGuard might be useful, a “plugin” for Squid to control and redirect URLs processed by Squid, useful for blocking malicious and unwanted sites. Let’s proceed with the installation sudo apt-get install squidGuard and of course immediately after with the configuration sudo vi /etc/squidguard/squidGuard.conf where you need to add/modify these lines dbhome folders_path logdir /var/log/squid3 # DESTINATION CLASSES: dest ads { #location of blacklists, domains, urls, expressions. domainlist folder_name/ads/domains urllist folder_name/ads/urls expressionlist folder_name/ads/expressions } ...

Hello. Let’s share a folder on Raspbian with a Samba server. Let’s install sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin and let’s configure it by changing the parameters in its configuration file sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf Uncomment workgroup = WORKGROUP wins support = yes where “WORKGROUP” should be replaced with your network’s workgroup and “wins support” is for Windows systems support (if you’re not interested, you can leave it unchanged), ...

Hello. On a Raspberry used as a NAS, it’s essential to have an external hard drive (or a large enough USB drive), and usually these are formatted in NTFS, the file system used by Windows. To mount it, we need to install “NTFS-3G” sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g once done, we look for the UUID of the hard drive sudo blkid Once you’ve found the UUID corresponding to the partition of interest, edit the /etc/fstab file ...

Hello. Have you configured Squid ( how to do it) and now want to add a blacklist? Very simple. Create a text file containing the addresses of the sites you want to block and add in the Squid configuration file (/etc/squid/squid.conf) acl urlblock dstdom_regex “full_path_to_file” http_access deny urlblock where “full_path_to_file” means the path+name of the file you just created. Warning: http_access deny urlblock must be inserted before the “allow” statements. ...

Hello. Let’s see how to install a proxy server like Squid with web cache. Installation apt-get install squid Simple, right? All the configuration is missing, the file of which we can find in /etc/squid/squid.conf sudo vi /etc/squid/squid.conf First of all, we need to enable our network, so under the string acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network we insert the acl called “mynetwork” with the static IP address of the computer from which we want to use the server: ...

Hello. Want a browser different from the one on Raspbian and more specifically Chrome? Well, Chrome isn’t available but there’s Chromium, which is an open source web browser from which Chrome is derived. To install it sudo apt-get install chromium Bye! ! :) !