today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 25, 2026

• Tyler Thorsted ☛ BE DEAD

  If you remember the older post about Cafe Beef, you’ll appreciate the file format we explore in this post which uses using the Hex values “BE DEAD”. I guess they jinxed themselves because the software didn’t survive a refresh in 2009 and died. At one point the software was considered remarkable software being awarded 4.5 Mice by Macworld Magazine in August 2002.

• Dan Q ☛ Moving the Internet

  Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven’t yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!

• Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Joining DN42: A MikroTik Border, Three WireGuard Peerings, and a FreeBSD Jail in the Hobbyist Internet

  After a few months of running AS201379 on the public internet, the obvious next experiment was DN42 - the parallel, hobbyist-run BGP network that mirrors the structure of the real internet but lives entirely on private address space, glued together by WireGuard tunnels. It runs the same protocols, presents the same operational challenges, and uses many of the same configuration patterns. The difference is that you can break things at three in the morning without anyone losing access to anything important.

  The moment it felt real wasn’t a routing-table dump or a show ip bgp summary - it was an https:// URL that worked from somewhere it had no business working from. From a shell on the other side of the DN42 mesh: [...]

• TecMint ☛ hyperfine: Find Linux Command Execution Time Accurately

  You’ve been timing commands with time for years, and it’s been lying to you, not because time is broken, but because a single run captures one data point that can spike or dip based on cache state, CPU load, or kernel scheduling.

• University of Toronto ☛ Configuring the ISC DHCP server to pick the right network boot option

  There are at least three ways that x86 machines can try to boot from the network; BIOS PXE boot, UEFI PXE boot, and UEFI HTTP boot. All of them start by the machine asking a DHCP server for what it should boot, and all of them require different answers from the DHCP server. If you want to support more than one network booting option, your DHCP server needs to give each sort of client the right answer for it, which generally means you have to tell the DHCP server how to tell the types of clients apart.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install osTicket on AlmaLinux 10

    Support requests pile up fast.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Uptime Kuma on Debian 13

    Monitoring your websites and services is crucial for maintaining reliability and user trust. Downtime costs businesses revenue and damages reputation.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PhpStorm on openSUSE

  • ID Root ☛ Znew Command in GNU/Linux with Examples

    If you have ever inherited an old GNU/Linux server, you know the feeling.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Bitwarden on Fedora 43

    Password reuse is still the number one reason accounts get compromised.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install SuiteCRM on Fedora 43

• Linuxize ☛ How to Install Node.js and npm on Ubuntu 26.04

  Three ways to install Node.js and npm on Ubuntu 26.04: NodeSource repository, nvm, and default Ubuntu packages.