Linux

One of the items I had on my NixOS adoption checklist was enabling Secure Boot. It’s not something you get “out of the box”, so sooner or later you have to deal with it. Now that NixOS is my daily driver, some things stop being a nice to have, especially when they’re security-related. That’s why it became a priority, and why I put together a reusable, documented configuration here: https://github.com/palumbou/another_nixos_configurations_template/tree/master/nixos_configs_template/hosts/secure_boot ...

As Queen used to sing, Another… bucket of tools instead of “one bites the dust”: I’ve published a new repository, another_bucket_of_tools. The repository will contain a collection of shell scripts developed with AI, recreating commonly available utilities with custom improvements tailored to my specific needs. These are shell scripts that can already be found on the Internet but are developed again from scratch based on my requirements, starting with the idea of not writing a single line of code myself but learning to write prompts to have the AI do it as accurately as possible and with as few queries as possible. ...

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. 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. 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! ! :) !

Hello. To install No-IP, download the package from the official website, extract the content, compile, and install it sudo make sudo make install During the installation, you will be asked which network card to use (in case of a Wi-Fi card as well), to enter the email address and password of your account, and for which host you want to update the IP address. To start it sudo /usr/local/bin/noip2 ...