Tutorial

I just moved my server into my server rack. This sounds silly, but it was a desktop-like enclosure, not a rack mounted one. I do have a rack mount in my basement, but it mainly held switches and the likes. Now it also holds my server and it’s amazing. The reason for posting this, apart from celebrating the joy of having done this and getting rid of the server sounds in the office, is that I figured there’s a tip to be had! ...

This is going to be a long one. I have spent countless hours setting up my Proxmox VE and the VM’s and LXC containers on it. It occurred to me that it might be wise to have a decent backup solution for this, in case something goes catastrophically wrong. Luckily Proxmox provides a ready-made solution for this and it is called Proxmox Backup Server or PBS for short. This post will go through how I set this up on my system. ...

I’ve mentioned before that I have my website’s repository mirrored across multiple Git hosts. Well, it is not just the website; it is all my repositories. I have four hosts, namely: GitHub1, GitLab2, Codeberg3, and Bitbucket4. This is overkill, I know. I really like it, though. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing my precious crap is safe. If one host goes down, I’ve got three others. If two go down, there are still two left. And if three go down… well, there’s probably something far more serious going on, but let’s not get distracted. ...

Extracting archives is a pain on Linux. There are just so many types and so many programs to extract each type. A .tar.gz file is extracted using the program GNU tar1, but for a .zip file, you’d need unzip2. What’s that? You’ve got a .7z file? Yeah-no, can’t use either of the before mentioned extractors, you need 7-zip3. Got a .rar, you’d need… well, you get the point. What’s more, some of these programs require flags you’ll need to use to actually extract an archive. For example, to extract a tar file, you might do something like tar xvf <filename>. For a 7z file though, it’d be 7z x <filename>. Other extraction programs don’t require flags at all though, just the name of the extraction program followed by the file to extract. This sounds simple enough, but wait… what was the name of the program to unzip .bz2 files again? ...

In many languages there’s a need to add decorations, or glyphs to characters, like for example é or č. These are called diacritics1. These characters don’t exist on a US Standard qwerty keyboard. There is the US International version with dead keys, which allow for crafting these special characters by pressing the desired diacritic key followed by the character to apply it to. So for example pressing ~ followed by n results in an ñ. ...

I have a homelab, or more simply a personal server I run at home. It’s a small square black box that sits in my office, humming away. This server runs Proxmox VE1, a hypervisor. This controls pretty much everything that goes on, on this server. It has the ability to spin up containers, which it calls LXC’s. These are somewhat akin to Docker containers. Anyway, the process of spinning one of these up is super simple. Click a few buttons, allocate some space and there’s your ‘container’. ...