Hans Fernhout's Blog

In a previous blog, I used a polling to loop to detect and configure an audio device that might become available only after boot. The better approach is to trigger the configuration from the kernel directly using a device manager. Alpine Linux uses Busybox' mdev as device manager. This blog explains how to use it.

In our lving room we have a homeserver, TV, and an amplifier with a 5.1 speakerbox setup. That is great for listening to music there, but somethimes we might want to listen to music in the dining room. Then the music is too far away. With snapcast is possible to have the same music playing synchronously at multiple places.

Gentoo already contains many packages, but not all. Installing packages that are not (yet/anymore) part of the official Gentoo repositories can of course be done outside of the Gentoo package manager portage, but that might mess up things. Luckily, Gentoo allows for local repositories that can work in the same manner as the standard Gentoo repos.

In a previous blogpost a setup of Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRDB) using local computers was described. This blog post is about DRBD on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI.

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...