Latest articles
Virtualization · Field notes
A tool that builds golden images and clones them into working VMs was written against
vCenter, then forked for bare ESXi. Moving it to Proxmox looked like the expensive one —
new vendor, new API, new vocabulary — and turned out to be two files, because Proxmox has
a real cloud-init datasource and that deleted the most intricate code in the project. What
actually cost time was underneath the API: a default CPU model that panics
glibc on Enterprise Linux — at one baseline for EL9 and a different one for
EL10, so the fix I set once was wrong within the afternoon — offline image edits that land
with no SELinux label, and a clone that is instant until one innocuous dropdown makes it
expensive.
Read the article
Apple Silicon · Linux environments
macOS is a Unix, but it stopped being close enough the moment your production target
became a Linux container. AppBox turns Apple's container tool into named,
persistent Linux machines that boot systemd, share your home directory at the same path,
and arrive with the thirty-odd command-line tools a base image forgot — all from an icon
by the clock. If lxc launch is muscle memory, this is that reflex, on the
laptop.
Read the article
Homelab infrastructure · DDI
Every network answers three questions constantly: what is this machine called, what
address does it get, and who is supposed to be using it. The enterprise world sells
appliances for that; everyone else has a hosts file, a router tab, and a spreadsheet that
was accurate in March. This is how two small self-hosted tools — Nexus IPAM and
DNSMAQ-MGR — grow into most of what an Infoblox-class DDI suite does, and how a VM
deployer on top turns the address plan into one-click provisioning.
Read the article
Reverse engineering · Field notes
A 25-gigabit QNAP switch with an excellent chassis and a miserable management story: a
sluggish web GUI, no SSH, no Telnet, and not a page of documentation. But a web UI is just a
program talking to the switch over the network — so I read its minified JavaScript, and one
regex mapped the whole hidden REST API: 126 endpoints, before making a single call.
This is how that turned into qsw.py, a tool that manages the switch from a text file
instead of a spinner.
Read the article
Linux · Audio · Field notes
The ASUS ProArt PX13 (HN7306, "Strix Halo") plays audio over HDMI out of the box, but its
internal speakers are dead silent — PipeWire shows only a "Dummy Output". Real, persistent sound
turned out to require peeling back three independent bugs stacked on top of each other: a
calibration firmware blob that ships only in ASUS's Windows driver, a missing (and separately
broken) ALSA UCM profile, and an AMD ACP/SoundWire controller that doesn't survive boot or
suspend/resume. A root-cause tour of each layer, and the fix for it.
Read the article