Tales from a lifelong hackathon.

I was never really happy with the light in my kitchen (which doubles as my workshop) since I moved in. I had installed a Philips Hue White Ambience Runner 3 but the integrated spots had a horrible light output. I never wanted to leave the Philips Hue ecosystem, since I really liked the Apple HomeKit integration, but it started to bother me more and more. One Saturday evening, 1h before shops closed, I was missing a threaded rod for another project and drove to my nearest hardware store with one of my best friends and stumbled over the Paulmann URail System which looked promising. We decided to go with it and a quick trip for ~2,00€ in threaded rods escalated to the following inital BOM: ...

Intro I’m currently building a 3D-printed lifesize MrBaddeley R2D2, a project I inted to share more about in the future. The brains of these printed droids are historically a bunch of Arduinos with serial communications between various modules from various people. When researching which modules should power my droid, I came across the Next Gen Astromech, which aims to minimize the wiring between the modules leveraging a CAN-Bus. I bought a AstroCAN ProDuo board, which functions as the brain of the droid, running ShadowMD on an Arduino Mega 2560 and interfacing with the CAN-world on an ESP32 Dev Board. ...

Why? It’s been over 7 years since I last posted on this blog, which had multiple reasons: I was more in love with microblogging using Twitter (now X). After a change in management and some weird decisions, the platform no longer felt like home and whilst I found my place on mastodon, it never felt like an adequate replacement. After some more months and more questionable decisions, I finally decided to leave X after 13. years. I was deeply involved in my professional career, and I still am, but I feel like this blog could be a better use of my free time. I was using Pelican to host my blog and, over the years, lost access to the files (they’re probably still in a backup somewhere, but I couldn’t motivate myself to start digging) and I had a bad memory about the build pipeline being painfull, which didn’t add to my motivation. Choosing the right tool for the job I’ve had some experiences with jekyll, the websites of DENOG and Stuttgart-IX which I (Co-)maintain are both built using jekyll. Jekyll usually does serve its purpose, but equally, I’ve spent too much time chasing the right version and fixing the build pipeline. Also for both projects I’m working on, it’s awfully slow. ...

An amazing group of people gathered at this years Chaos Communication Congress to set up multiple alien wavelengths for 34C3. If you are interested in the detailed setup be sure to check out the slides.

If you couldn’t make it to this years DENOG9 conference you can find @marcnetismus and my slides on ‘200G over alien wavelength’ here. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

If you couldn’t make it to this years DENOG8 conference you can find my slides on ’nesting dwdm within cwdm’ here. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

I’ve been running a TINC VPN for about 3 years now and lately came to the decision to improve my setup. One thing I came across was that all my scripts were using net-tools in their tinc-up and tinc-down scripts, meaning commands such as ifconfig etc.. As I enjoy working with iproute2 it was time for me to make the switch. #!/bin/sh # tinc-up ip tuntap add dev $INTERFACE mode tun ip addr add 10.0.0.1/24 dev $INTERFACE ip link set $INTERFACE up And of course: ...

To allow linux to issue discards through lvm and luks a few steps need to be performed. I’m running the following setup: sda |__sda1 /boot |__sda2 |___ LUKS |_____ LVM |___ / |___ /home |___ ... Therefore the discards need to be issued through the filesystem, the LVM and the LUKS down to the SSD. Let’s start with the ext4 filesystem: We need to append the discard option to the other filesystem options like so: ...

We recently bought a Cisco SG500 at work as we needed a cheap switch with 4x SFP Interfaces. In the default configuration the SG500 only offers 2 SFP Ports for networking, the other 2 are used for stacking and they don’t show up in show interface status. Howsoever if you try to configure gi28 no error is thrown. Confusing as hell. But as mentioned before I needed 4x SFP for networking so I went on a google hunt and found nothing. The manual at least suggested that it’s possible but I couldn’t find out how. ...

I just got an alix apu.1c4 in the mail. It is a great board for ~200Euro with a great set of features, you can find more on it here. First step is to pick up the BIOS-Update here. Then unpack the file: tar xjvf apu_tinycore.tar.bz2 Now we have to create a FAT filesystems on our flashdrive, in my case: /dev/sdc. mkfs.fat -I /dev/sdc Then mount the filesystem and copy the files to the flashdrive: ...