Several admins and developers like automatically updating their servers with new builds as they become available. Commonly known as “CI/CD”, this process allows teams to iterate much faster and speed up product development. Often, this is simply pulling from a repo and running a couple docker-compose commands, which is very easy to automate. A bad way to do this is using a cron job that runs every 10 minutes to pull from the repository and execute any commands.

This guide is for an advanced Debian GNU/Linux installation using the ZFS storage system with an encrypted root volume for security and privacy. It will also be upgraded from the current Stable release (Bullseye) to the rolling-release Unstable version (Sid). ZFS has long been considered the last word on advanced storage developments. With its advanced safety, efficiency, and performance mechanisms it’s easy to see why it’s popular in the storage world, DIY and enterprise alike.

If you’ve put Redis on the internet you’ve probably had your box hacked one way or another. Unfortunately, the service has very weak defaults with no authentication, encryption, or meaningful access control. While it’s true that redis is a back-end service that should only be used between servers, it’s often misused and abused. For example, there are about 40,000 redis instances indexed on shodan.io, about half of which are not in protected mode.

Since late 2018, I had been a full-time Arch Linux user. At that time, it was worth it for me to spend the extra time dealing with Arch’s quirks, meticulously updating my AUR software, fiddling with all-manual configuration, and manually migrating any software between major versions whenever Pacman updated them. It was both a great learning experience, and… well… A bit of a waste of time ;) Needless to say, things have changed in my life since then, and I now place a much larger emphasis on ‘boring’ stuff.

I have an odd fascination with radiation… Not to the point that I’m buying “Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials” (or NORMs for short) on eBay, but certainly to the point that I own a digital geiger counter and regularly measure… things… Recently, I discovered https://radmon.org, a site where users can connect a counter to their API and send data to the network of scientists that study background radiation in real time.