[Nov 20 2023] Mesh networks for connecting to your home remotely

This was one of the things that I always used to think would absolutely require
a VPS to do - connecting to your home network away from home.

I discovered mesh networks some time ago. They essentially connect people in a peer-to-peer
manner with no port-forwarding required! ZeroTier was the first one I tried and am using right now.
Before settling with it, I tried Tailscale, NetBird, Netmaker. All of them offer various things
such as some being wireguard-based and some being kernel-wireguard-based - latter being the most
performant one due to no userspace overhead.

ZeroTier is inspired by TincVPN which doesn't use WireGuard but uses its own solution to VPN.
It is theorically slower than its WireGuard-based counterparts due to overhead but it is unnoticable
but ZeroTier establishes a more stable connection than others as well as with low latency.

[!] Do note that if you have a firewall set up on your machine (not router), you should allow
incoming connections from at least one UDP port, default port for ZeroTier being: 9993/udp.
The reason to do is because of the way mesh networks work: UDP hole-punching.
When you drop the incoming traffic from all UDP ports, mesh networks will relay the connection instead,
resulting in very poor latency.

Mesh networks can be used to communicate with people online as well which is very useful for stuff
like LAN sessions with friends, remote working with co-workers, basically connecting to people without
a third party server - which is amazing just because of the fact that you don't rely on a thirdparty.

[Nov 16 2023] The Importance of Stability

Today, I set up sunshine - which is a game stream server - on my linux machine.
It was quite cumbersome...

My current setup for my linux install heavily involves bleeding edge
technologies. As such, since I used Wayland, and Wayland didn't support
screen capture, sunshine couldn't find a way to capture my screen.
The only solution to that was to use KMS which, basically, is a way to
interact with the display in the kernel space.
But in order to apply this solution you'll be required to have root
privileges which is not really ideal for obvious reasons.

So, the message I'm trying to convey with this story is that; with new, shiny
stuff you almost always sacrifice convenience and it is really annoying.
When something like X11, just works all the time, why would a sane user
switch to a newer technology that is expected to be better but can't do
the things the old one could?

The reason why Windows is so popular is that, all the software made for it
just works as always even after decades. It is stable at its core, it almost
never breaks the old stuff made for it. And this is good, for the users.

In my opinion, this is the problem with the Linux ecosystem. It keeps disappointing
its users.

[Nov 15 2023] Cockpit: the simplest way to manage a linux server

Cockpit is a project by Red Hat that provides its customers - and the people
who manually setup cockpit - a very simple way of managing linux servers.

It's accessed via a browser, it is capable of authentication via PAM modules
which is amazing because it allows you to setup stuff like 2FA with it.
It is modular, anyone can write a module and access it through the cockpit panel.

My favorite module would be the cockpit-machines module - which is a KVM frontend -
You can check your system logs, SELinux logs with cockpit; manage your users,
services, podman containers and all sorts of things. It essentially replaces SSH.

Oh by the way cockpit can also allow you to control another machine via SSH
it only requires the cockpit-bridge module on the target host.

[Nov 15 2023] First blog

This is the first ever blog of my life. I can share my opinions on something here in the future! (maybe)

Thanks for stopping by!

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