Hans Fernhout's Blog

Most of this blog has actually been about on-prem stuff, but hey, it is 2024 so let's do something in the cloud. Let's try to put Gentoo Linux on OCI.

Storage on a personal computer, or laptop, is always tied to the physical machine. It would be nice to have it synchronised between all of my computers. Linux has this possibility with a Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRDB).

A quick guide on how to encrypt a complete Gentoo Linux system. By now I have encrypted all my laptops and my little home server. This blog is just a reminder on how to do it, from A to Z. Perhaps it is beneficial for others too.

After upgrading my Gentoo based home server, the e-mail client on my laptop could no longer make a connection to the IMAP server. It seems that Dovecot v2.3.20 requires stronger encryption.

Sometimes I get struck by a sense of security consiousness. This time I realized I have all my content on simple btrfs formatted disks, without any encryption. That's not very secure, is it?

Of course I hope I never need a backup, but just in case...

I have a little home server that I use to store media, email, as a NAS, and as backup storage device. One of the disks was getting quite full, so I decided to add a disk in RAID-0 mode (striped). Luckily this disk was formatted with btrfs, which supports various multiple disk architectures.

Alpine runs in memory on the Pi, which is great for performance, security, and for minimizing wear on the SD-card. The downside is that it has no persistent storage. Everything done on such a system is cleared out on reboot.

I started this blog with the default theme, but after a few articles I think it is time for a more practical theme.

I already said that I like Gentoo Linux, but it can take some effort to keep it up to date, especially on less capable hardware. I tried to install Gentoo on a Raspberry Pi 4B and found a way how to do that, years back. However, that project is dead now, and the successor project on the Gentoo Wiki looks a lot more complicated. I have done those cross compile excercises in the past, and found that it requires even more maintenance than regular Gentoo. No thanks.