Author: kristjank
-
Obtaining education by loud incompetence
Lately, I’ve been reminiscing about my past experience in the school system, and one of the common themes that I keep coming back to is the sheer tolerance of prideful incompetence, e.g., being wrong in a loud way. Arguing loudly when you’re wrong is, in a way non-threatening to the teacher, they’re right at the…
-
Alacritty and dynamic theming
Alacritty is a modern accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust. It consistently beats XFCE terminal in latency, while also storing all preferences in a git-friendly YAML configuration file. Dynamic theming, however, needs to be implemented separately. About a year ago I started working on synchronizing most of my terminal-based workflow between my numerous computers. Using…
-
SynergyCP quirks
I’ll document my experiences with SynergyCP on my blog to help future network- and sysadmins with their SyCP mishaps.
-
Conditional Routing with PF
Public IPs have been replaced with TEST-NET equivalents for obvious reasons. Enjoy! I have a rather nice ISP which allows me to use two public IPv4 addresses: one is dynamic and routed through their gateway at 192.168.64.1 and the other one is static, bridged directly to the internet through an extra port on the modem.…
-
Proventia GX4004 firewall: teardown and OpenBSD install
Firewalls aren’t as special as they’re made out to be in the business sphere. Sometimes salesmen will try to convince you otherwise, claiming their network appliances use application specific hardware, but teardowns often disappoint. This teardown of the IBM Proventia GX4004 is no different, as the firewall appliance turns out to be a very ordinary…
-
Tidalwave PS-1000: a delightfully obsolete palmtop
As smartphones came to be, many common portable devices such as netbooks, palmtops and pocket organizers became obsolete. Today I will present to you one such device – a Tidalwave palmtop computer from 1992.
-
HP ML110 G6 iLO password reset
A really quick post to help others that encountered the same problem as me. The iLO 100 remote management system on the HP ProLiant ML110 G6 server can’t be password reset with a jumper or a similarly simple measure. It involves a DOS boot disk and a certain ipmitool command that resets the username “admin”…
-
Run an outdated cluster with diskless OpenBSD and cute little green boxes (part 3)
In the previous part, we set up DHCP, TFTP and RARP servers and successfully booted the OpenBSD ramdisk install kernel on old Soekris hardware over the network from a repurposed Cisco IDS. In the last part of this series, we will add NFS shares to the mix and install OpenBSD to them, making our PXE…
-
Run an outdated cluster with diskless OpenBSD and cute little green boxes (part 2)
In the first part, we became familiar with the hardware we’ll be working on and gathered the needed information. In this part, we focus on making PXE work up to the point we’re able to get to the boot loader and load a kernel.
-
Run an outdated cluster with diskless OpenBSD and cute little green boxes
Does anyone remember Soekris Engineering, the company that made network hardware and somehow also audiophile equipment? The first part of the company has unfortunately closed down in April 2017, while the latter still persists today. However, we won’t be focusing on high-fidelity audio in this guide, but rather on squeezing the last bits of life…