Blog!
Welcome to this great block of text that organicaly fills your
screen, but do not see it as an opaque, solid and hard wall.
This is a way to present ideas, and thus is ephemeral,
transparent and always changing. For a world where thoughts run
free, with less boundaries, a wallless world.
Yet, this is just another blog on the internet, this one is
brought to you by Brian Mayer. I hope you find something
interesting or funny. Posts receive responses by email, you can
find their reply link on a post's dedicated page on the archive.
Check my portfolio for more info about me or to see my
other projects: terminal.pink.
Posts
2024-10-19- internet highlights ix
2024-09-29- announcing lin0, my linux distro
2024-09-22- internet highlights viii
2024-09-01- astro is now ereandel
2024-08-19- some access logs
2024-07-08- internet highlights vii
2024-04-22- astro browser: 50 stars!
2024-02-26- dev log: my distro
2024-01-21- byte ii: jumentosec
2023-12-19- internet highlights vi
2023-11-05- byte i
2023-10-19- pinebook pro review
2023-10-13- internet highlights v
2023-03-31- internet highlights iv
2023-03-30- my blog publishing flux
[pt]
2023-02-21- hosting your git repos
[pt]
See all in our RSS feed: archive.
All work found here is licensed under
CC BY 4.0.
Internet Highlights IX
Published: 2024-10-19
- Listen to computer networking inspired playlist, great for checking the other links.
- A fun colage style site with some games in it.
- Good site to shop for cheap computers.
- A magazine that explores to contents of old CD-ROMs that include, games, art and more.
- Just a fun personal website.
- Learn binary math with this simple game website.
- A git hosting site which doesn't speak by its name.
That's all folks, enjoy!
Announcing Lin0 v0.0.1
Published: 2024-09-29
I'm pleased to publicly share that Lin0 has reached v0.0.1 and
can be downloaded or built for end users.
Lin0 (Linux zero) is a super minimal source-based
linux meta-distribution, primarily aimed at power
users or minimalism enthusiasts. It was born from
exercises in how minimal a linux system can get.
At this time we provide 3 optimized images: Pinebook Pro,
RPi3B+ and HP Elite Desk G1 800, as well as generic amd64
and arm64 images. In any case you can clone the repo and build
for your architecture.
Lin0 leverages a small system built from scratch using
a selected list of software, which includes:
- the linux kernel, without initrd
- musl libc
- mksh (the myr korn shell)
- tcc (tiny C compiler)
- toybox
- simple configs and a shell script init
Logo
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The logo is a willow tree, which reminds me of
the wise tree in the Pocahontas movie, it is also
a small homage for my son William.
Obtaining
Please refer to the project site for
the download links, there are tarballs, a docker image and
instructions to build your root filesystem.
Roadmap
The big plan is having a complete project with many supported
targets, I plan to provide images for more platforms but that's
the hard part, since I do not have the hardware right now.
Other things planned are:
- A package manager
- An X11 replacement
- XDG desktop implementation
- System management software
Contributions can be made by email using the common
git email workflow. More info on the project's page.
The mailing list is also very open to discussions and
side topics, you are very welcome.
Thanks!
So far I only published it here and on TabNews,
and I think it had a good reception. Finally, I'd like to
emphasize my commitment to creating open and quality software
that can make a change to a better software ecosystem, and Lin0
is my current endeavor for it. Let's build together a great
community for Lin0!
Internet Highlights VIII
Published: 2024-09-22
astro is now ereandel
Published: 2024-09-01
My astro project was renamed to ereandel due to packaging
needs, as there is another project named astro.
Earendel is the most distant star not belonging to a
cluster, also, EƤrendil (a close pronunciation) is a
character in the J.R.R. Tolkien's universe. Thus the
perfect name for this project (with a twist).
Thanks to this, Akash Doppalapudi packaged it to the
Debian project! Which is great news. Having a project
published on the Debian repositories is a milestone, I
hope this brings new opportunities for the project.
Kudos to Akash for packaging ereandel and for having
the patience that the Debian packaging guidelines
require.
Our site accesses
Published: 2024-08-19
Just out of curiosity, this is a plot of connections to the
domains hosted here:
Some considerations: the numbers represent succesfull
connections to my server, that is a TLS handshake.
Internet Highlights VII
Published: 2024-07-08
astro: 50 stars!
Published: 2024-04-22
Just wanted to share that a project of mine,
astro, has reached 50
stars! That's my project with most stars at this moment, I'd
like to thank all contributors, stargazers and people that
helped the project reach this cool milestone.
I'd like to reiterate that the astro project is under
development, and well maintained by me and open source
contributors. Looking ahead I plan to add more features
such as:
- Better bookmark management
- Implement the rest of the gemini protocol
- Support downloading capsules
- Add client certificates management
And of course, listen to users' feedback and implement
desired features. So if you want a feature feel free to
open an issue and comment.
Thank you!
dev log: building my own distro
Published: 2024-02-26
Another adventure have started: I'm builing my own distro! I'm
not sure about the motivations as it started naturally from my
fidlings with OSs. Some of the things I remember are:
- My disk was full, so I began to think how to use less space
- I want to try musl
- I discovered that the linux kernel can run shell scripts as init
- I like minimal stuff
Turns out there is a cool project called
buildroot that makes building a minimal linux system
very easy. So I used it to create the linux kernel and userspace
programs for a RPi 3B+ I had lying arround.
The result was a system that does the minimum: boots the linux kernel
without initrd directly from the RPi bootloader, it then runs a
simple shell script as init and drops to a shell.
This system is taking only 22MiB of RAM, which 14 are
cache, and 500MiB of disk, which 470MiB are for git
binaries. I am very happy. Obviously there are
drawbacks: no module hotplugging, this gave me a
headache as my keyboard needed a kernel module, it
took me a day to figure this out. I tought this was
the kernel's job.
So far I'm having a great time learning, turns out
there is a lot of details we usually don't need to
know. For example, firmware, which for the RPi is a
must: in order to load the brcmfmac module
its firmware must be present in the correct place. If
not whenever you modprobe it you'll get a
subtle timeout error.
Luckly buildroot also facilitates this, just select
the corresponding option in firmware section. The
next steps are now building
sbase,
ubase and
sdhcp. I also
included a tiny c compiler
so I can compile the rest of the system.
So far this is the init script:
#!/bin/dash
echo "Init started"
export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
mount -n -o remount,rw /
mount -t devfs /dev /dev
mount -t proc /proc /proc
mount -t sysfs /sysfs /sys
mount -t tmpfs /tmpfs /run
modprobe hid-apple
modprobe brcmfmac
agetty -n --login-program /bin/dash tty1
shutdown -h
There is too much to do, still. I'll keep you posted.
jumentosec
Published: 2024-01-21
A friend of mine is launching, according to his words:
The #1 Underground & Vendor Neutral Security Conference in Brazil
,
which will host a conference this year!
These are the links:
Looking forward to it.
Internet Highlights VI
Published: 2023-12-19
- a nice article on tldp about Linux memory management
- this small and unique piece of art website
- a badly drawn goat
- this directory of design websites to please our desire for beauty
- a recipes site but you tell how long you want to make it
- just a funny game
- hands
- internet radio with style
Introducing Bytes
Published: 2023-11-05
Bytes is a new series os posts that are starting today.
sometimes I notice or think funny things, so I decided
to publish them. Here it is for today:
I was watching Monk and there is one scene that
a boy coughts near Monk. The funny part is that
this boy only shows up in that scene, so I
wanted to watch the episode's credits just to
see that.
This is the scene the coughing boy shines on
his participation:
and the credits screen:
another great episode.
So I bought the pinebook pro
Published: 2023-10-19
It is usable 97% of the time, this 3% is related to a
weird bug with the keyboard, the touchpad and screen
sharing, video calls; but I'll explain. My current
setup is Arch linux with DWM.
Here are some points:
body
-
the pinebook pro laptop is lightweight, sleek, compact and pretty; it has
a premium feel given by the magnesium shell and a gorgeous display. microSD
slot is also very good to find.
battery
-
it has a decent battery, frequently i can use it all day long without
a recharge. i'd only remove the barrel port, as the USBC port can be
used for charging, so no real need for it.
touchpad
-
the touchpad feels a little weird sometimes, it is a little fuzzy and
i have difficulties using the right click, i don't get it every time.
the website says it's a large one, but i don't think so. i'd have it a
little larger and make the click feel the same place everywhere, it clicks
only on the bottom.
keyboard
-
very good one, not the best, the only thing that bothers me is that sometimes
i get a doubled key, may be a firmware thing.
camera
-
people could see me clearly, sometimes it gets really dark i don't know why,
may be some misconfiguration on me. the real issue is processing power, when
i turn it on the laptop becomes unusable, totally lagged.
CPU/GPU
-
i think this is the only thing that bothers me everyday, it is slow and there
is no hardware acceleration for the graphics driver at this time of writting.
i use very light software and it sometimes lags. but software support for most
applications is fine, only missing OSS.
misc.
-
this is very personal: the only design detail that is not what i like is
the display being a little bigger than the bottom part, so when it is closed
the lid is not aligned, but that's really a manner of taste. the pine website
doesn't deliver to brazil and that's a huge bummer, specially because they do
not answer any email or support ticket, horrible customer service.
in sum it is a great linux laptop specially if you consider that it is only 219.99$, i hope Pine64
continue to improve it, they are doing a great job for the linux/BSD ARM community.
please if you know how to solve any issue i found please reply this post. thanks!
Internet Highlights V
Published: 2023-10-13
this time i'll add descriptions, per my last feedback.
Internet Highlights IV
Published: 2023-03-31
here we go again...
My blog posting work flux
Published: 2023-03-30
In this post I will talk a little about my workflow for publishing
content. I find it quite simple and therefore decided to share it with
you.
The first part is to know the infrastructure that I built for my
server. My blog and homepage resides on my Raspberry Pi Zero W which
is connected to my router with a small USB cable to receive power. And
the router is connected to a UPS. This part was done this way because I
wanted to venture into the world of hosting. And I liked the results,
but it is much easier to pay for a VM in any cloud.
Router configuration
This part is not difficult, the goal is to route traffic to my server, for that
I entered the Arris configuration and created a virtual host, I put a static IP
for the RPi and added a port forwarder from port 443 to 4433. This way I can
upload a service without needing root privileges.
Some optional things that I decided to have, and with great difficulty,
were:
-
Business internet plan: to have ports 25, 80 and 443
unlocked. The block is illegal in Brazil, but anyway.
Without this unlock, the only way is to use VPN.
-
Static IP: together with the business plan it was the
most difficult, at least 3 months talking to the
operators, horrible service, unprepared staff.
Undoubtedly, this was the saddest part of the setup. However, these
optionals facilitate me in the code, since I don't need to configure
DDNS. And this prevents interruption of access as my DNS always points
to the correct IP.
The server
Now we come to the actual programming. The server is written in C and listens
to an unpriviledged port, so I run it as a normal user, which gives me more
security and simplifies the process a lot, since my user has all the permissions
for the publishing flow. The server's code can be found on GitHub:
servrian.
In the server, I decided to use static pages, so servrian only works
for that case. For the articles, I just write them in HTML.
Adding content
Now that all the configuration and development work is done, creating and
deploying content is simple:
- Write the content
- Update index page
- Update feed and sitemap
- Run scp
Conclusion
It wasn't an easy process overall, and my impression is that we are
technologically behind, as the worst part was the internet plan. If
there weren't so many complications with blocked ports and network
configuration by the operators, the project would have ended in a weekend
(at least the functional part). Of course, styling and content development
can take an indefinite amount of time. As I wanted to integrate with email
the project became a little more complex.
The code part is not complicated and can be even easier when using
ready-made projects or pre-configured Docker images. Here I wanted to
do everything from scratch for two reasons: 1. to learn how the many
parts work internally, and 2. to create a lighter version than current
projects.
It's this second point that I'm most proud of, everything is very light
and efficient: the blog's homepage has 2700 bytes and loads in 80ms,
it's valid and simple HTML, my portfolio, the page above the blog, has
575 bytes; this allows the project to be served from my Raspberry Pi
Zero W, which only needs 5V to operate. In addition, it still loads
other projects like my Git and email server.
These are the difficulties you may encounter if you decide to venture
down this path, at least here in Brazil. I hope I've helped in some
way. I say it's worth it if you value extreme simplicity, like to do
things your way, and want to get away from the dependence of the
infamous big techs, libraries or frameworks, and above all,
learn a lot.
Future plans
I still want to change some things in the project, out of pure curiosity and
zeal:
- Use a solar panel and battery to save energy.
Hosting your git repositories
Published: 2023-02-21
Setting up a git server is easy, and involves only common shell
commands, this post will show you how I started my very first
self-hosted git server. find one extra computer and set up a
SSH connection to it, then you are ready to start. here I used
my raspiberry pi, which is always up [1].
To setup the git server you should do the following on the
server machine:
- Create git user
- Add sshd keys
- Create projects dir
- Create empty git repo
- Using the git shell
Create git user
This step is just sudo useradd -m git, no secret here.
now log in this user.
Add SSHD keys
This part is the creation of the authorized_keys, so you can
SSH in with this user. Basically you just add the allowed
public keys here. In my case I just copied from my main user,
but the ideal case is creating another key and adding that to
the git server.
mkdir .ssh
cat new-key.pub > .ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
Now you should be able for SSH into your git machine using the
key you added.
Create projects dir
This step is optional but I like creating a dedicated folder
for my projects, so I ran: mkdir git, and entered it.
Another cool thing to do is to change the default git branch:
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
Create empty git repo
This is the command that creates a repo on the server, so you
can push to this repo. To create it first create a folder, and
then issue the init command:
mkdir project
cd project
git init --bare
At this stage you have a fully functional git repository, to
use it you proceed as you do for new repos.
Using you new repo
Now in your other machine you can init a repo and push:
cd project
git init
git add .
git commit -m 'Initial commit'
git remote add origin git@:git/project
git push origin main
You can stop here if you want, but in this state there are some
anoying things on the server that can drive you nuts, for
example:
-
You have full access through SSH and SSH forwarding,
that can be a security concern in some environments
-
To create new repos you'll need to log in the server
and run the git init command
The next section will deal with these issues using the
git shell and some configurations.
Using the git shell
First thing to improve is to remove port forwarding, so add
this to the start of each entry in the
~/.ssh/authorized_keys file:
no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty
Now SSH users cannot get a login shell, only the
non-interactive shell we are going to configure will be
available.
The we must set the git shell to be used on login.
so log in your server machine, now check if the git-shell is
listed on the /etc/shells file with:
cat /etc/shells, if you do not see
git-shell there, you can add it:
sudo echo "$(which git-shell)" >> /etc/shells
But I advise you to use an editor. Now make it the login shell
for the git user:
sudo chsh git -s $(which git-shell)
Now you will not be able to get a shell on a log in. So this
user is useless for anything else than git stuff. You can only
run git commands like pull, push and clone, plus the commands
we created on git-shell-commands.
Setup up greeting and commands
The git-shell can be customized by creating the folder
git-shell-commands on the git home, the first and
funnier thing to do it to just show a message when a login
is atempted.
You can present a greeting to users connecting via SSH by
creating a file named no-interactive-login in the
folder we just created. It's funny, e.g.:
#!/bin/sh
echo "welcome to your git server!"
So when git tries to log in your server this message is shown.
Adding programs to this folder will let users run them. There
are some convenient commands to add, for example, creating a
new repository, deleting one and listing all repos. To make
them available don't forget to let them be executable:
chmod +x git-shell-commands/program
A good starting point is [2].
Conclusion
I think this is a good configuration, it is safe and let's you
fully interact with git, even creating and deleting repos.
At the same time this configuration is flexible as you can keep
adding new commands. But there is room for improvements, for
example, your repositories have zero visibility, there is no
colaboration.
Adding public access can be done using git-daemon, or setting
up the git HTTP. But those are subjects for other articles.
References
-
My rpi, in the future it will have a PoE HAT.
-
git-shell-commands repo
Notes
Misc
This site is a member of the 250Kb
and 512Kb clubs.
Some links we like:
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ee 0_/e e\o_/__\-e,o^e
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| /_-ee,_.
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_/ / \ \ \_
.,wW'^^^//;^-^;^;w_
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