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. It works by employing Wireguard behind the scenes to create a tunnel from each device, to every other device in your tailnet. For 9 devices, that means 90 tunnels have to be created and maintained, and without tailscale, this operation would be MANUAL! The full breakdown of exactly how Tailscale works can be found here.

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. (Fun fact, ostree has the ability to juggle between different versions of the OS, or even different OSs!)

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. More information about Pi-hole can be found at their official website.

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. As a bonus, we realised the solar inverter installed at home also provides telemetry, which I promptly integrated into the smart home setup.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, in its third iteration!

This time, everything is nice and static. We use Hugo in the background.

With time, I will port over old posts with the right timestamps, and media. I also intend to eventually incorporate some social features like Likes and Comments. As for subscribe, we are RSS ready, and will probably not do email subscriptions anymore.

Why hugo, you ask? Have a look at the time it takes for hugo to generate nearly a hundred HTML pages: