Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

MACCHIATObin boot on serial port

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.

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Use SSH to proxy web traffic

November 28, 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.

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Product vs. Technology

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.

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Install Fedora on MACCHIATObin

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:

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MACCHIATObin Single Shot first impressions

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.

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Nebula on Fedora

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.

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