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Showing posts with the label linux

Setting up wireguard

 Time has come to explore a new (well, it's not that new anymore, it was introduced in kernel 5.6) VPN technology that is more lightweight and faster on single-board computers (SBCs) than something like OpenVPN. I'm talking about Wireguard . The key takeaways for why Wireguard might be better than other VPN technologies (like OpenVPN, or IPSec) are: very small code, easier to audit runs in kernel space, not userspace  configuration can be done with standard linux tools (like ip, iproute, iptables), but there are some helper scripts that simplify setting up/starting up doesn't support cypher negotiation (thus preventing downgrade attacks) is quiet by default and doesn't reply to random packets from the Internet (difficult to scan for wireguard concentrators and try brute-force attacks) has better performance than userspace encryption (to be tested) All good network tutorials begin with a network diagram and end with a packet capture. So, let's say you want to host a ...

Installing Home Assistant Supervised on an old 32bit HP laptop

 I've received a challenge from my former boss: an old HP laptop that was born in 2005:  an HP-Compaq NC6220 ( https://www.pocket-lint.com/laptops/reviews/hp/68181-hp-compaq-nc6220-notebook-laptop/ ). The specs are abysmal: So, i386, 1.7GHz single-core CPU (remember those?), 1G of DDR2 RAM (2x512M) and a 40GB ATA (not SATA!) drive. But hey, at least it has a serial port!  The challenge is to install HomeAssistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io/ ) on it so that he can monitor some Zigbee temperature sensors and relays (via a gateway). The first hurdle was to remove the BIOS password - following this nice guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaGKyb0ntSg Next-up - install HASSOS. Unfortunately, it doesn't support i386, but only x86_64... So, I went the Home Assistant Supervised route, and installed Debian 11 i386 edition from a netinstall USB ( https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-11.6.0-i386-netinst.iso ).   Once Debian was up and run...