Hans Fernhout's Blog

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.

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 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.