Linux - Spans' Blog

My take on a Raspberry Pi kiosk dashboard

Like everyone and their mother-in-law, I have a local Grafana instance with a bunch of dashboards filled with graphs and bar gauges about things in my network. I have a

Networking

I thought PiHole was kinda bad so I made my own

TL;DR: it's a Rust binary called Singularity (because of the gravity lists, domain blackholing? it sounds cool don't judge). You give it sources for malicious domains and it outputs a Lua script that the PowerDNS Recursor uses to automatically respond with a null

Linux

Transforming an Ubuntu installation into systemd-boot + XanMod + LUKS + LVM

My laptop's been running standard Ubuntu 19.04 for some time now. I had the idea of swapping its bootloader, GRUB2, for systemd-boot, using the XanMod kernel and swapping its bunch-of-GPT-partitions into LUKS + LVM. Motivation? I was bored as fuck during this self-imposed quarantine.

Networking

Why I'm not recommending VyOS anymore and how I built my own

I used to like VyOS quite a lot as a general-purpose lightweight Linux-based easily virtualised router appliance. It didn't really have anything to complain about, other than the fact that the latest build for its version 1.1.8 was released late-2017. Starting October

Homelab

Installing Debian in LVM on an USB drive (and EFI booting it!)

This post is largely based on Will Haley's post over here. I've combined it with various Google searches to show how I built a minimal Debian image, ready to be written to an USB drive and booted off. We'll be using LVM as a

Linux

Solving De-ICE S1.110

The De-ICE S1.110 is an entry-level vulnerable live CD image, meant for learning the very basics of penetration testing. I, being an absolute beginner in such, decided to tackle the challenge. I started with the De-ICE S1.100 image, but ended up following