Author: Timo Geusch

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I may have mentioned this before - I do run my own virtual servers for important services (basically email and my web presence). I do this mostly for historic reasons and also because I’m not a huge fan of using centralised services for all of the above. The downside is that you pretty much have to learn at least about basic security. Over the 20+ years I’ve been doing this, the Internet hasn’t exactly become a less hostile place.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

First, I apologise for not noticing that the comments had been broken for a while. This was entirely my fault and not fault of ISSO, which I’m still super happy with as a self-hosted comments system. So in this post I’m going to describe what went wrong, and also how I made the system a little more resilient at the same time. First, what did go wrong? My web server is using FreeBSD as its OS, with a bunch of software installed via FreeBSD’s ports system.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’ve blogged about putting together a WireGuard server using OpenBSD a couple of years back. The main purpose of the server was to ensure a slightly more secure connection when I was on hotel WiFi. Of course thanks to the pandemic, I have barely travelled in the past couple of years so the server was mostly dormant. In fact, I kept VM turned off for most of the time. The VPN server was set up on OpenBSD 6.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’ve been using a 2009 cheesegrater Mac Pro for quite a while now. I bought it used quite a while ago - around 2013 if I remember correctly - and it’s been serving as my main photo/video/general programming workhorse, although the latter tasks have been taken over mostly by a Linux machine housed in the infamous NZXT H1 case. It’s been upgraded a lot during its life - now has the latest 6 core Xeon these machines support including the upgrade to 2010 firmware, USB 3.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

As I mentioned in my post from a few months ago, I had received the temporary fix in the form of the nylon screws and nuts from NZXT. At that point in time, NZXT’s customer support was not able to tell me when to expect the “real” fix, namely the updated PCIe riser. I ended up contacting them again towards the end of July to see what the status was and apparently, my request had somehow fallen through the cracks.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

In Emacs, I usually end up enabling the same set of minor modes when I use one of my “writing modes”, namely modes like markdown-mode and org-mode. Enabling a single minor mode automatically is generally pretty easy via the appropriate mode hook, but enabling more than one minor mode requires one more level of indirection. Of course it does, because everything in computer science requires one more level of indirection :).

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’m by no means an Emacs org-mode power user - in fact, anything but - but I do use org-mode a lot for note taking and also when I need an outliner to try and arrange ideas in a suitable manner. It excels at both, and usually does what I need including exporting to HTML. Exporting to HTML covers about 90% of my use cases. As much as I’d like to, LaTeX does not feature in my needs, but I needed to export an org-mode file for use with Microsoft Word.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’m in the middle of a server redo - right now, I’m setting up a replacement server for my trusty Dell T30, plus it was time to give this web server a new home. When I started the migration from my old WordPress site to the new static site, the static site was running on a small 1 core / 1GB RAM cloud server at Vultr. That had enough oomph for testing and for the last couple of months.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Not much to update since the last post on this topic, I’m still waiting for the updated PCIe riser. Although I do have to admit that based on the latest video from Gamers Nexus on this saga, I’m not holding my breath. With the current shipping issues I’ll give it another month or so and see if I get any PCIe riser before making a decision if I write off this case and rebuild the machine in a different SFF case.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

First, I’m very much a “very occasional” gamer so I’m usually not the target audience for most gaming related accessories and parts. I did however want to rebuild my rather large grey box Linux/Windows workstation into something more compact with a watercooler for the CPU. The NZXT H1 seemed at that point to be a really good match for my requirements and had received good reviews. One was duly ordered, together with a Mini-ITX motherboard and somehow, a better graphics card also snuck on the shopping list.