blog

  • what it takes to set up a mail server

    Turns out software is the easy part, IP reputation is the boss.
    Context: I’ve set up a mail server on VPS and it’s pretty tiring to deal with the mail server blocking my mail.
    (more…)

  • TIL systemd userdb got birthDate field (that shouldn’t be) merged

    The merged PR in question: userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records

    PR description:
    Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws
    in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

    Related PR or as in, you know what is coming:
    (more…)

  • Creating self-signed CA and certificates

    Create CA secret key

    openssl genrsa -aes256 -out ca.key 2048

    Create CA cert

    openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -days 365000 -key ca.key -out ca.crt

    Create secret key and certificate request

    openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -days 365000 -nodes -keyout server.key -out server.csr

    To have alternative hostname

    openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -days 365000 -nodes -keyout server.key -out server.csr -addext "subjectAltName=DNS:example.com,DNS:www.example.com"

    Complete certificate request

    openssl x509 -req -in server.csr -days 365000 -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -copy_extensions copy -out server.crt

    Create more requests with existing server key (adding new alt name for example)

    openssl req -key server.key -out server.csr -addext "subjectAltName=DNS:example.com,DNS:www.example.com,DNS:manage.example.com"

  • Setting up WireGuard without it being default route (for wg-quick)

    Was configuring a WireGuard interface to be solely for split-tunneling qBittorrent and it took me a day to figure out how to actually set it up 💔
    (more…)

  • maybe I need to poke SCSI commands directly so I have low level read access to the DVD reader

  • disable dvd disc polling on linux

    while I was evaluating dvdisaster (along with destroying the disc yes), I wanted to stop the system try to read the label/raise an event when a disc is inserted

    most of the information on disabling polling are old which all points to udisks --inhibit-polling

    but udisks (not udisk2) is long gone, the actual way to do this is:

    echo 0 > /sys/class/block/sr0/events_poll_msecs

    and reset with this:

    echo -1 > /sys/class/block/sr0/events_poll_msecs

    ref: https://superuser.com/a/1783343