December 23, 2018

What Makes a Linux Distro

Linux, or GNU+Linux, has been around as an operating system for every type of device, phone, server, desktop, since the early nineties. Because of the free nature of the software, countless different distrobutions for all sorts of applications have sprung up over the years, some highly specialised, others more capable in different roles. Some popular ones today, such as Ubuntu or Red Hat, have a several concurrent releases at a time: a server and a desktop. Conversely, other projects like Debian and Arch produce a more generic release for end users to build up how they see fit, providing merely the framework. A Linux distrobution in general terms is a design philosophy behind a project; in technical terms it is the software suite included with the Linux kernel.

December 19, 2018

Building a Homelab

Intro

For those not already in the know, homelabs are a staple for those in IT: a place to build, test and play with technologies to improve understanding for use in a production or home deployment. There are somethings that people should know before getting into homelabbing, as it can be an expensive and draining hobby if done improperly. These are some of my notes and ideas from building my own enviornment.

December 17, 2018

What I learned running Linux Minecraft Servers

Intro

Running Minecraft servers on linux the manual way isn’t too bad: just execute the jar file with java and leave it running. What if you want to automate it, or need to send in commands? One needs to be able to easily access the run session easily, and the tools I used was screen.

Screen creates a vtty that can be attached and detached as the running tty locally or over and SSH tunnel, making it ideal for automation and remote management. Simply start the screen session, leave it running and forget. Using Debian, a systemd distro, I used screen, a systemctl service, and a bash script to get things running. This was an excellent chance to experiment with these tools for a useful application.

August 22, 2018

Welcome to Jekyll!

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.