today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 20, 2026

• Francesco Paolo Lovergine: A Terramaster NAS with Debian, take two.

  After experimenting at home, the very first professional-grade NAS from Terramaster arrived at work, too, with 12 HDD bays and possibly a pair of M2s. NVME cards. In this case, I again installed a plain Debian distribution, but HDD monitoring required some configuration adjustments to run smartd properly.

  A decent approach to data safety is to run regularly scheduled short and long SMART tests on all disks to detect potential damage. Running such tests on all disks at once isn't ideal, so I set up a script to create a staggered configuration and test multiple groups of disks at different times.

• Setup Arch GNU/Linux KVM Guest via archinstall 3.0.15-2

• TecMint ☛ How to Install ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors on GNU/Linux ARM64 Devices

• [Old] Peter N M Hansteen ☛ Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off?

  Greytrapping at nxdomain.no, also known as bsdly.net and a few other domain names, has been a long running experiment. I had been running a mail service for my own and my colleagues' benefit for some years already when I converted that setup stepwise from a Debian Linux setup to one involving OpenBSD hosts as the outer line of defense and a mix of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and other hosts in an evironment not unlike what is described in some of the rather basic configurations described early on in the PF tutorial and later The Book of PF.

  Soon after converting the outer defense at that site to an OpenBSD one running a basic PF ruleset, I introduced the then blocklist-importing and greylisting only spamd, and experienced (as described elsewhere) that the fan noise coming from the mail server, obviously burdened by performing content filtering, just stopped immediately, only to occasionally to rise just a quiet murmor for the rest of that server's service life.

• David Bushell ☛ Winter 2026: Self-Hosted… Success!

  The plan is to duplicate my router virtual machine from my Beelink EQ12 to my Mini-ITX server. For that I need more ports. For more ports I bought the NIC above.

• Morten Linderud ☛ Personal infrastructure setup 2026

  While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade!

  Most of the things I’ve self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

  When I decided I should give up streaming services early last year, I realized I should rethink a bit of the approach and try streamline how I wanted to host different things.

• Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ GeoIP-Aware Firewalling with PF on FreeBSD

  Running a mail server on the public [Internet] means dealing with a constant stream of brute-force attempts. Credential stuffers, password sprayers, and opportunistic bots hammer away at IMAP, submission ports, and webmail interfaces around the clock. While fail2ban-style rate limiting helps, the sheer volume of attempts still clutters logs and wastes resources on connection handling.

  The solution I’ve implemented takes a different approach: geographic restriction. My users are all located in Central Europe - Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and neighboring countries. There’s no legitimate reason for someone in a botnet-heavy region to connect to my IMAP server. By restricting client-facing ports to IP ranges allocated to specific countries, I’ve dramatically reduced both attack surface and log noise.

• Stéphane Huc ☛ Stéphane HUC :: IT Log :: OpenBSD: configure smtpd.conf to auth email client (≥ v6.4)

  How to config your machine to send mail by terminal/console, on OpenBSD, on SMTP server with a required authentication?

• University of Toronto ☛ TCP, UDP, and listening only on a specific IP address

  One of the surprises of TCP and UDP is that when your program listens for incoming TCP connections or UDP packets, you can chose to listen only on a specific IP address instead of all of the IP addresses that the current system has. This behavior started as a de-facto standard but is now explicitly required for TCP in RFC 9293 section 3.9.1.1. There are at least two uses of this feature; to restrict access to your listening daemon, and to run multiple daemons on the same port.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Homebrew on Debian 13

    Homebrew has revolutionized package management across multiple operating systems. Originally designed for macOS, this powerful tool now brings the same flexibility and convenience to GNU/Linux distributions, including Debian 13.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install InvoicePlane on Fedora 43

    Managing invoices, tracking clients, and handling billing can overwhelm small businesses and freelancers. InvoicePlane offers a powerful solution: a self-hosted, open-source invoicing application that puts you in complete control of your financial data.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Miniconda on Fedora 43

    Python package management can be complicated. Miniconda solves this problem by providing a lightweight, minimal installer for conda—a powerful package and environment manager. If you’re running Fedora 43 and need a clean way to manage Python packages and create isolated development environments, Miniconda is your solution.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install LibreOffice on Fedora 43

    LibreOffice stands as the world’s leading free and open-source office suite, offering powerful tools for document creation, spreadsheet management, presentations, and more. For Fedora 43 users, installing this robust productivity software provides an excellent alternative to proprietary office suites without compromising on features or compatibility.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Nagios on Debian 13

    Monitoring your IT infrastructure shouldn’t be complicated. Nagios, a powerful open-source monitoring system, provides real-time visibility into servers, networks, and applications, helping you detect problems before they escalate into costly downtime. This comprehensive guide walks you through installing Nagios on Debian 13 (Trixie), the latest stable release of Debian featuring enhanced performance and security improvements.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install LibreWolf Browser on Linux Mint 22

    Privacy matters more than ever in today’s digital landscape. LibreWolf stands out as a powerful, privacy-focused alternative to mainstream browsers, offering users complete control over their online footprint without sacrificing performance or usability.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install RabbitMQ on Debian 13

    Message queuing systems have become indispensable in modern application architecture. RabbitMQ stands out as one of the most reliable and widely adopted message brokers, enabling seamless communication between distributed systems through asynchronous message exchange. Whether you’re building microservices, handling background jobs, or orchestrating complex workflows, RabbitMQ provides the robust infrastructure you need.

• linuxcapable

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install OpenSSH on Arch Linux

    OpenSSH enables encrypted remote access to GNU/Linux systems, replacing unencrypted protocols like Telnet. Whether you manage headless servers, transfer files between machines, or tunnel network connections through secure channels, OpenSSH handles these tasks while encrypting all traffic and supporting key-based authentication.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Add and Manage Sudo Users on Arch Linux

    Running commands as root is risky for daily tasks because a single mistake can break your system. Arch GNU/Linux follows the Unix convention of using the wheel group for sudo access, which differs from Debian-based distributions that use a sudo group.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Homebrew on Ubuntu (26.04, 24.04, 22.04)

    Homebrew is a package manager originally created for macOS that now works natively on Linux. It provides access to thousands of command-line tools, libraries, and development utilities that may not be available in Ubuntu’s default repositories or where you need newer versions than APT provides.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install OpenJDK 17 on Arch Linux

    This guide walks through installing OpenJDK 17 on Arch Linux, from package selection to version switching and removal.

• ZDNet ☛ How to run Windows apps on Linux with Wine - it's easy

  The good news is that the Wine development team is always busy. The latest release of Wine (version 11) includes NTSYNC support, a unified 64-bit binary, enhanced Wayland/X11 integration, improved graphics via Vulkan/D3D12, better gamepad/joystick support, and smoother performance via WoW64.