Aaruni's Blog v 3.0

Tail-what? Tailscale is a project by Tailscale Inc which creates a mesh network of your devices. It allows all the devices on your tailscale network, the “tailnet”, to talk to each other direclty, in a peer to peer manner. It does not matter if your devices are separated by the internet, or a NAT, or even a CGNAT: tailscale can break through and create a functional tunnel between each of your devices.

As part of my work, I’m heavily using ostree. Ostree is a git like content addressed store for filesystem trees. Its a really cool technology for distributing software, and is used by many major players in the industry : GnomeOS, rpm-ostree, flatpaks, and so on. While ostree has capability of deploying entire OS trees (hence the name), it can also be used in “user mode” (as opposed to “host mode”), where it manages only a target user repository, instead of the entire host.

Pi-hole Pi-hole is a network wide adblocker service for Linux systems. It works as a DNS blackhole, that is, it blocks resolving DNS queries for certain addresses. So, it is able to block ads by refusing to resolve the address from which an ad must be loaded! Contrary to what the name might suggest, Pi-hole can run on almost any Linux box on almost any platform, not just a Raspberry-Pi computer.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them Last summer, I decided to thrust upon my parents’ house the greatness of being a smart home. I gifted them a tasmota enabled bulb I bought from Athom, and an old laptop to act as a home server. The idea was simple : start with just a single smart device at home, and see if I can expand into the complete experience without my folks complaining too much.

Passwhat? Passwords are a thing of the past. Passphrases are are the new thing. But what are passphrases? A passphrase is a long password, typically 15 or more letters, which are just many words which make sense to you, in an arrangement which is memorable to you. There is no need to concoct short strings of gibberish, which are easy to forget, and may not even be that difficult for a computer to crack!