I decided I wanted to do more advanced stuff with my home network - PXE booting, DHCP options, hostname allocation, blocklists, VPN etc. Most of which meant getting rid of the BT SmartHub2, which in turn means I can’t use their Digital Voice for my landline or BTTV for Freeview, at which point I figured I may as well ditch them for mobile too! So I looked into other FTTP providers and found Zen Full Fibre Max which offered a few upgrades - a static IPv4, a /48 IPv6, reverse DNS and 1600 mbps instead of 900.

It’s been almost 3 years since my last post it seems, so I thought I’d fire up VSCode and write something new. I wish I hadn’t now, as I had to hack around with my Hugo theme to get it to work again!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I bought an OrangePi R1+ to use as a router for my work laptop. Well, I received it the other day and its great! It does run hot, even with the CPU/RAM heatsinks I added it hovers around 65c, that’s partially due to the case it seems, which maybe could have some more air holes. The thing is tiny - about half the length of a RPi.

I’ve recently been updating various Debian Buster boxes to Bullseye. I’ve got a couple of laptops to do yet but the rest run Sid. On my headless servers, the update mainly consisted of - make sure you’re running the latest kernel and latest Buster packages, add the new Bullseye repo’s, update, remove old packages and configs, reboot and then remove the old kernel: apt update && apt dist-upgrade cat << "EOF" > /etc/apt/sources.

Been doing a lot with Kickstart recently, as I’ve had to build some airgapped VM’s in a hurry and have gone off Ansible again. Been templating the more complex bits using j2cli and YAML, so its a bit like Ansible without the SSH - and its ready at first boot rather than afterwards. I’ve uploaded my RHEL/Alma/Rocky/CentOS 8.4 CIS-hardened kickstart to github Oddly enough I’ve found that the SLES install being so slow in esxi appears to be SUSE (or AutoYAST?