Last night, in my over-tired stupor I felt frustrated with my lack of time. But that’s just because I was tired. Overall I’m a very optimistic person about my future endeavors, whatever they may turn out to be.
During busy and tired times when I don’t have time for my interests I do question: “Who in this world can actually pursue their life’s passions, and what is it that enables them to do that?”
I started a family in my teens, didn’t have financial angels around me at the time to help pay for education, cars, first apartment, etc, and as a consequence got deeply into debt. I also have a high degree of attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, anxiety, frequent depression episodes and can be quite impulsive, which adds to my distractions. I also have some sort of short term visual memory cognitive disorder which I’ve never quite been able to pinpoint, but it makes working with visual matrices challenging for me. Despite all those things I’ve felt optimistic that I’d somehow be able to grind through and realize my ambitions of becoming a developer, inventor, adventurer, etc.
Now that I’m almost forty, I realize that I was a little bit delusional. I think that my main mistake was thinking that because I’m intelligent, creative and have the ability to work harder than most other people, that I’d somehow pull through “LATER”. Yes, I am all those things, but there is no more “later”. My every day from now on has to become my new “later”.
One of the things I haven’t come across (admittedly I haven’t looked) is a guide on how to balance a 50 hour work week with learning software development. On top of that; family, friends, relationships, other time consuming interests (my biggest one is BJJ).
For me today consisted of getting up at 5am, working manual labour until 17:00, getting supplies and disassembling the scaffolding around my house in anticipation of the storm tomorrow, and doing a side job. I just got home and it’s 00:30am. Need to get up in 4.5 hours. Crap.
And I was so excited about trying tinyproxy. Oh well. I guess there’s always tomorrow.
Can’t keep my eyes open… Gotta give in to Sandman…
Jesus, time flies. It’s almost Christmas. I’ve decided to attend FOSDEM20 in February even though I have no business being there. But I figure it will motivate me to keep working on my ideas. Kind of like signing up for a marathon when you can’t even run 500m without getting winded and joint pains. Yeah…
Today I worked in Þjóðarbókhlaðan in downtown Reykjavík. It’s a really nice, quiet and free place to get work done. It’s crowded in December and May due to the University of Iceland exam season, but one finds a spot eventually.
University of Iceland public library, Þjóðarbókhlaðan
While working I listened to Lana Del Rey’s album, Ultraviolence and Wu Tang’s 36 chambers
Linux basics
As it turns out I already set up ssh keys before. In order to follow the tutorial I found, on creating ssh keys, I decided just to back up my old ssh key and delete it. For that it’s useful to know some basic commands…
cp -a /source/. /dest/
“The -a option is an improved recursive option, that preserve all file attributes, and also preserve symlinks. The . at end of the source path is a specific cp syntax that allow to copy all files and folders, included hidden ones.”
“To remove non-empty directories and all the files within them, use the rm command with the-r (recursive) option. If a directory or a file within the directory is write-protected, you will be prompted to confirm the deletion.”
Also, I found a decent page on nmap commands. Good for people with a gold fish memory like myself that can’t keep track of their server’s internal network’s ip address.
The parameter -sL (List scan) is the less offensive one, it enumerates the IP addresses in the network and tries to resolve through reverse-DNS lookup (resolve from ip to host) to know the hosts are there. This command is useful to print a list of hosts, In the terminal type:
I’ve grappled with rsa keys for a while. It’s really hard for me to use tools if I fundamentally don’t understand the underlying technology. But after reading the above tutorial and another website I feel a little better about my understanding of rsa keys.
I managed to activate SSH key login on my server and decided to use the optional passphrase for extra security, as someone advised me to do. We’ll see if in the future that becomes a problem for automated things like Ansible
My next focus will probably be a command-line setup of KVM, and after that maybe docker. I would also like to figure out a good way to access my router setup page remotely. So many things to learn, so much procrastination
I’m not sure what the format will be of this blog or how useful it will be to others, but it’s important to keep a record of what one does.
I find the user interface of wordpress to be a bit discombobulated. It took me forever to find how to post a new post in this blog. I’m pretty sure I can just use this link in the future:
In general, wordpress is probably great for people keeping blogs, but one of the things that I intend on doing is setting up something a little less bloated on my server. For now, that’ll do pig, that’ll do…
So, the other day, after a hard day at the construction job I work, I didn’t feel like going to BJJ practice, went home and setup a server instead. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for about 12 years. Better late than never, I guess. The plan is to setup servers in the not-too-distant future, on professional hardware in a rack at home, and have a little UPS to keep it up during electrical maintenance. But for now I’m just using my son’s old gaming PC and plopped it in the kitchen. I bought a new 1TB ssd for it, installed Ubuntu server 18 and initiated ssh. Boom, headless server. It didn’t take much time, really. Definately didn’t need to procrastinate 12 years for that… *sigh*
During the installation Ubuntu wanted, by default, to only use 4GB for the entire installation. Apparently its a Ubuntu bug that they haven’t seen a reason to fix for over a year (wtf Canonical?!). I didn’t even notice it myself. Thankfully I shared a picture of the installation with my friend, JD, who asked me why I wasn’t using the entire disk space. Repeating the installation took no time. I could have fucked around with the partitions using command line, post-installation, as people have pointed out on askubuntu but I want to stay focused on wanted to stay on task.
look at me, I’m installing a 4GB server on a 1TB SSD… WOOOW!
JD also helpfully pointed out that the boot partition was unnecessarily gigantic for what I’m intending to do, so from 1GB to 100MB it went. I tried to delete it completely, but Ubuntu really wanted it there and I didn’t feel like arguing with my son’s old PC. That would have worried my son.
After that I activated two factor authentication (following these instructions) for my ssh login because I heard it’s not that hard for people to brute force regular password logins. I was feeling totally cool and pro so I decided to brag to my professional developer / programmer friend again, to which he replied “why don’t you just use ssh keys?”…
So now I’ll be deactivating 2fa and activating ssh keys for my remote ssh logins, because, honestly the 2fa is a bit of a pain in the ass. Like, what if I can’t find my phone or be bothered to get out of bed, walk across the room and retrieve my phone out of my pants pocket? First world problems…
Another thing I did was forward the ssh port on my home router so when it receives an ssh request from the internet, it directs to my kitchen-gaming-PC-server. I should probably change the port from the default 22 to something more obscure, for security purposes. Like all security precautions, it’s better to procrastinate and do it later.
Oh yeah, one more thing… I updated and upgraded my entire system.
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
For other N00bs out there, this is important before you start working on your linux system for the first time. I once unknowingly installed an ancient version of pagekite, because I hadn’t updated my system. It took me forever to realize why it was acting so buggy. Save yourselves time and update/upgrade your system, kids.
So, yea… I’ll keep you all updated on my server progress with a post later today
keep documenting 