I had an older PostgreSQL 12 install using FreeBSD jails and ZFS. It was setup using iocage on FreeBSD 12.1, and I wanted to upgrade to FreeBSD 13.0 and PostgreSQL 14. I could have done a normal freebsd-update but that would end up wasting a bunch of space on top of the clone that iocage creates. Doing that is fine for minor updates but in this case it is better to delete the jail and recreate it using the new FreeBSD release and PostgreSQL version.

The day started with a plan. I would upgrade to the latest OpenWRT release with minimal disruption to the home internet, planning out the steps beforehand, and being careful not to totally mess things up. And as always reality had other ideas about how the day would go. The Original Plan I’m running OpenWRT on a PC Engines APU4 with way more disk space than it needs. The APU4 boots from the SSD like a traditional PC, not like a router booting from dedicated Flash storage, so I wasn’t sure exactly how the OpenWRT upgrade procedure would work and I wanted to make sure I had a working install to fall back on.

A while back Jessie Frazelle wrote a neat blog post on running desktop applications using Docker containers. It ends up that it isn’t too hard to run X clients in containers using podman or Docker . Now that I have Alpine Linux running on my laptop I need to get rootless podman setup so I can run applications that aren’t included in the Alpine distribution. Podman is a Docker compatible container engine that doesn’t require a daemon, and can run as a user without any need for root access.

The Ansible playbooks for this article can be found here I have a laptop that I use for experimenting with different operating systems. I’ve used it to run various Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I tend to set it up by hand, use it for a while, then reinstall with something new. In the most recent iteration of this I’ve used Alpine Linux to see if it would be suitable distribution for more than a container runtime.

I like hosting my own services when possible. But I don’t like maintaining complex systems, so instead of setting up my own GitLab, Gitea, or Gogs service I decided to follow the same path I took with this blog and host some of my git repos as static html pages using stagit . One of the neat features of git is that you can actually clone from one of these static repos so they aren’t just html pages but are full copies of the git repo, complete with history.

What is it? Weather TL;DR is a simple weather forecast webapp using data from the weather.gov system. This was an experiment to see if I could write a simple webapp to tell me the current weather forecast in a compact and simple page. How do you use it? Usage it pretty simple. It will ask you if it is ok to use your location data. If you don’t agree then it presents a simple form where you can manually enter a latitude and longitude in decimal form.

I wanted to add some kind of doorbell indication to my office, and was almost ready to start buying parts for wired doorbell sensor like this one on hackaday.com , but I wasn’t sure how well it would work with the Beagle Bone Black that’s running my digitemp sensor network in the garage. I’d have to run about 20’ of wire over to the sensor from the Beagle and that was bound to effect the reliability.

Letterbox is a simple Go program that accepts SMTP connections and delivers mail to a per-user maildir directory. I use it to gather reports from various services on my LAN without needing to setup postfix or some other more complex MTA. Usage of letterbox: -config string Path to configutation file (default "letterbox.toml") -host string Host IP or name to bind to -maildirs string Path to the top level of the user Maildirs (default "/var/spool/maildirs") -port int Port to bind to (default 25) The configuration file is written using TOML .

I went for a hike the other day and managed to capture some decent photos of a dragonfly.

I was expecting to spend the whole afternoon getting a tftp server setup so I could PXE boot some qemu virtual machines for testing. I wanted to make sure it didn’t interfere with anything else on the LAN so it would have to be limited to the user mode network I use with my vms. Typically when I try to do something like this I end up trying a bunch of different things that don’t quite work right.