I use rEFInd as my EFI Boot Manager. This post is about taking some extreme measures to achieve best possible boot experience across all my machines - both servers, PCs and laptops. Why bother about boot? For me it is important to have the following features available: Some pre-boot environment that might be useful, if I brick my main OS. Ability to boot alternative syste. EFI partition I decided to always reserve 1 GB for EFI partition....

➜ ~ sudo nmap -p - -6 paris.prokop.dev Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-11-21 23:04 GMT Nmap scan report for paris.prokop.dev (2001:41d0:e:514::1) Host is up (0.062s latency). Other addresses for paris.prokop.dev (not scanned): 5.196.72.20 Not shown: 65518 closed tcp ports (reset) PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 25/tcp filtered smtp 5355/tcp filtered llmnr 6660/tcp filtered unknown 6661/tcp filtered unknown 6662/tcp filtered radmind 6663/tcp filtered unknown 6664/tcp filtered unknown 6665/tcp filtered irc 6666/tcp filtered irc 6667/tcp filtered irc 6668/tcp filtered irc 6669/tcp filtered irc 6670/tcp filtered irc 6697/tcp filtered ircs-u 7000/tcp filtered afs3-fileserver 9999/tcp filtered abyss Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 119....

The Google Cloud Shell is fantastic power tool. Unfortunately for me it comes without Ansible preinstalled. Google Cloud Shell is basically Debian, so Ansible can be easily added using apt-get command. However it has drawback of any changes to underlying VM being wiped-up frequently as underlying machine is ephemeral one. Installation There is a better way, though. Use pip. python3 -m pip install --user ansible Collecting ansible Downloading ansible-6.6.0-py3-none-any.whl (42.3 MB) |████████████████████████████████| 42....

In this post, I will cover my learnings from installing Arch Linux on OVH dedicated server. I’ve also shared what I learnt on Arch Linux on a VPS. Installation procedure Prerequisites: Obviously a dedicated server from Kimsufi (any OVH dedicated server should be fine). You also must have public SSH key to SSH to the server after installation is completed. Steps below covers installation of “Cloud Ready” images, that are available here....

Passphrase I wrote small utility to generate BIP-39 compatible passphrases. One needs Java runtime to run it. # Note - when downloading, check for latest version $ wget https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/dev/prokop/crypto/crypto-bips/1.0.2/crypto-bips-1.0.2-standalone.jar $ java -jar crypto-bips-1.0.2-standalone.jar bip39 -l 512 trim mango orphan craft together topic unique merry autumn little economy actress brief dog deny syrup turkey mother slab detail crucial doll water rug original trash course bid option assume pulse witness upon steak ranch whisper great beach enhance delay junior couple twelve bargain rib mass hazard panther The above uses 512 bits for seed and then convert it to a pass phrase....