July 24, 2023
This website is hosted on AWS S3 and uses AWS CloudFront as CDN.
I use a couple of AWS Lambda@Edge functions to make AWS CloudFront a little brighter.
When I decided to self-host a Fediverse instance, it became immediately evident that I would have to set up WebFinger on my domain to be able to use my root domain as the account domain.
There is documentation on the web on how to set up WebFinger, but it is aimed at different setups, so I had to configure it myself.
Read More 
May 29, 2023
Recently, I was looking for a couple of Single Board Computers (SBCs) for a project I’m working on.
Given the characteristics I was looking for, there were not many options; in the end, I opted for the ROCKPro64 by Pine64.
Once I received the SBC, I immediately tried to put Fedora on it.
The process proved slightly more complex than I was expecting since I assumed that U-Boot (or some other boot loader) was already present on the board.
Turns out, it is not!
So, the first step became installing U-Boot.
An aspect I really like about the ROCKPro64 is that it has 128Mb of Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) Flash memory.
I appreciate this fact because it allows me to install U-Boot there and then a standard OS on another storage device.
Speaking of other storage devices, the ROCKPro64 features both an optional eMMC and the mSD Card slot.
The process turned out more complex than I initially thought since my goal was to use Fedora on the eMMC, but I forgot to get the eMMC USB adapter, so I had to leverage the mSD Card as well.
Read More 
March 6, 2023
I bought a MACCHIATObin Single Shot a few months ago with the idea of creating a NAS out of it.
The results have been very good and, to begin in an easy way, I decided to install Fedora 37 Server Edition.
Now that I’ve decided exactly what I want out of it, I reinstalled Fedora and started from scratch with exactly what I wanted.
I decided to install Fedora 37 IoT, which is an rpm-ostree based release.
To create the installation media, I leveraged arm-image-installer.
Overall everything went well, and the system booted successfully, although I wasn’t sure at first due to an issue with my DHCP server configuration.
Therefore I decided to connect to the board serial port and see if the boot was successful.
Read More 
November 29, 2022
As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use.
Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network.
When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network.
This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel.
The second advantage I have, is that I can choose the location where my traffic leaves my VPN, since I have multiple machines in multiple nations.
Another advantage is that I can be sure that no data is visibile by the network manager, even if this is becoming less and less relevant, since the majority of the traffic is encrypted nowadays.
Read More 
October 10, 2022
Every so often, I have a conversation with someone, and we end up in a sub-conversation around the differences between products and technologies.
This phenomenon frequently happens to me because I consider a product and a technology two completely different things.
At the same time, many people use them interchangeably when discussing IT products and technologies.
I think this distinction’s value is clearly distinguishing the solutions that are resilient to a single entity failure and those that are not.
Suppose the producer of a product goes out of business or, for any reason, will not do additional business with you.
In that case, you lose the ability to buy that product and, sometimes, even use it completely.
This limitation does not apply to a technology since you should be able to access it, regardless of the specific vendor.
Read More 
August 31, 2022
After my last post about MACCHIATObin, a few people reached out to better understand how to install Fedora on it.
The MACCHIATObin board provides many different installation options.
It has an onboard eMMC (in my case, 8GB, but I’m not sure if other sizes are available), an SD card slot, 3 SATA ports, and 1 PCI x4 slot.
This setup means that the various options to install Fedora on a MACCHIATObin are:
Read More 
July 31, 2022
I’ve played with a MACCHIATObin Single Shot board for the last month.
I decided to pick this up instead of a different board because of its sheer connectivity.
This board has 1x1GbE, 1x2.5GbE, and 2x10GbE, which is very rare for those kinds of boards.
I was most interested in the two 10GbE due to some projects I have in mind.
I was interested in installing Fedora, which proved very easy.
The first time I created a bootable micro-SD card with Fedora, it worked perfectly out of the box.
After a few tests, I decided to install Fedora on a SATA drive.
The SATA installation proved a bit more complex because I assumed it could boot from USB, but I did not manage to do so.
I then moved the Fedora ISO to a micro-SD card and installed it from there, which proved to work flawlessly.
Read More 
June 30, 2022
In the last year, I moved more and more data and services to hardware that I can directly control.
A direct consequence of this is that I started to run more hardware at my house.
This change has been very positive, but it is suboptimal when not at home.
All services I run are secure and could be shared directly on the web, but I prefer a more cautious approach.
For this reason, I decided to create a VPN.
Read More 
(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog