Category: Home Server

VirtualBox to LXC migration.

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It has been quiet the last months here, but there were reasons for that. The most time consuming reason was that I started to brew beer, but there were some other projects too.

The home server project got some big changes. The virtual machines were migrated from VirtualBox  to LinuX Containters. This makes the system a whole lot faster, and makes that you can use lighter machines to run this project. The new Raspberry should do fine. Anyway, it took some time before I could document it all, but now it’s ready (I hope).

The firewall configuration is replaced. I used to use firewallbuilder, but that project was abandoned. So I decided to write some scripts that generates the firewall rules using some configuration files. These are available as Slackware package too.

Protection against spying TV’s with the homeserver project.

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An interesting thread can be read at DoctorBeet’s Blog about LG smart TV’s sending private information to several Internet sites. In the article about the basic network setup I did create a hook in the setup of dnsmasq, the name server for your internal network. The setup has the following line:

conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d

 

This means that any file dropped in that directory is read when dnsmasq starts. To block the sites mentioned at DoctorBeet’s Blog, create the file /etc/dnsmasq.d/80-lg-block with the following contents:

#
# LG smart TV spy networks
#
address=/ad.lgappstv.com/127.0.0.1
address=/yumenetworks.com/127.0.0.1
address=/smartclip.net/127.0.0.1
address=/smartclip.com/127.0.0.1
address=/smartshare.lgtvsdp.com/127.0.0.1
address=/ibis.lgappstv.com/127.0.0.1

 

The restart dnsmasq using /etc/rc.d/rc.dnsmasq restart. If you use the IP address of your home server instead of 127.0.0.1 you can see all these requests in the log of your own internal web server. But if you use 127.0.0.1 you won’t see a thing, the TV will be talking to itself.

This option is also useful to block sites you don’t want to contact such as these irritating popup (poker/sex) sites.

Updated the menus

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It is a long time ago when I last updated this site, but here are some new updates. One of the projects hosted on this site is the MBSE BBS package. I was still running a Fidonet connected BBS but I finally decided to shut it down because I almost never used it and the MBSE BBS package is 99% finished. I have been a member in Fidonet for about 20 years, but today other media are more used by me. All pages for the MBSE BBS software and related pages will stay on this site.

Something different, we now have a tablet in the house. So when I used it to navigate on this site I found that it was very difficult to use the pull down menus when they were more than one level deep. I already had the extra links in the top articles for those who had a broken javascript, so this site was still usable on a tablet. I decided to make that more permanent by restricting the pull down menus to only one level deep (pull down, no extra levels) and to move the extra levels to the right sidebar. Here they are dynamic loaded when appropriate.

Progress migration to Slackware.

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All articles original written for Arch Linux are now converted to Slackware, or are now more or less universal articles. Only the article about VoIP base installation needs more work. Most Slackware based packages are available now on the Slackware extra download site.

I am planning to add a whole new series of articles, Sound engineering and Sound on Linux. For a bit over 40 years I do things with sound, music and bands. That means I have seen everything from tubes to digital sound processing. Computers, and so Linux too, are becoming more important on sound production. In the studio this is already for a few years, but now it is more and more used for live sound as well.

New download site for my Extra Slackware packages.

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All Extra Slackware packages are removed from this site, and hey are now available from it’s own site. This makes the sources for the packages available too and it looks more like a general Slackware packages tree. This move removes some load from this site, it became too slow because the file database was getting big.

In the meantime, most articles are rewritten for Slackware again, just eight to go and they are done.

Happy New Year and some updates

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First of all, a happy new year to all our readers. The site has now a facebook page, so FB users can now more easy follow a number of changes on this site. Use the like buttons or the button in the header to go there.

Syslinux boot

Syslinux boot

The reworking of the existing articles from Arch Linux into Slackware Linux is making good progress. It’s a good opportunity to make some articles more or less distribution independent.

Today I wrote a new article to finish the basic system installation using syslinux as boot loader and so that the basic installation is now a more complete story.