There’s been a lot of push recently (especially on some youtube channels) for “The Year Of Linux On The Desktop”. Partly because of the crap Microsoft has been pulling. Partly because Windows is turning into a bigger pile of shit than it’s always been. And maybe there’s some contrarianism involved. And it seems Linux is slowly moving up the Steam charts. I find this amusing; I’ve been a Linux user since the boot+root 0.
In December I documented TLS settings for Debian 13. These settings gave us TLS1.3, the ability to use ECDSA, backwards compatibility with some older software, and an A+ rating in SSL Labs. Last week I re-ran the tests and noticed an additional flag had been added; “This server supports PQC (Post-Quantum Cryptography) key exchange.” So I thought I’d summarize all the previous posts into a single one and describe my setup.
I got asked a question… this gives me a chance to write an opinion. I have lots of them! What Linux distribution should I use? Oh boy, this is a biggie and could almost be a religious one! In the past we had the Unix wars and then the Linux distro wars. But with Microsoft making Windows worse and people trying out (and liking!) Linux is becoming a viable desktop operating system.
Over on Reddit someone commented that self-hosting solutions (eg email, calendars, file sync) was too much like hard work. Needing to update TLS certificates, keeping code up to date, acting like IT support (especially if what you’re doing is used by friends and family) was becoming too much like a job. And you know what, they could be right. Other people starting out on their homelab and self-hosted path need to be aware of this.
These days it seems that AI is everywhere. It’s being pushed in your face, every application has an AI component. Even your OS is going to be agentic In many cases I’m not a fan. But I can see some benefits under some circumstances. Because of how many areas AI is getting into, this has become something of a long post (I’ve been putting it off for a while ‘cos I expected this!
Back in 2016 and then in 2020 I described how to get an A+ score with your TLS config. That was 5 years ago. Since then OpenSSL and Apache have both advanced and there’s even more options than before. Nicely OpenSSL can now also use the official TLS names for ciphers, so we don’t need to keep switching between entries reported by Qualys SSL Labs and the OpenSSL internal names.
The recent AWS outage led to a slew of It was DNS jokes. It reminded me of a time maybe 12 or 13 years back. I was part of the architecture/engineering team for the company’s Unix authentication product. Basically every login, su, privilege escalation call went through our code. So when things went wrong we got the blame. One day a call got escalated to me. It went something like:
One of the things you might see a lot on sites like LinkedIn is the recommendation to not ask interview questions for stuff that is easy and trivial to look up. For example, asking about command line options to a program. To an extent I agree with this. I always need to look up the “key field” options to the sort command (especially since they changed from when I learned the command!
This is a long long post because I’m providing a lot of configuration files and explanation. I could have split this into multiple posts, but I felt it made sense to put it all in one entry In my homelab I use virsh to manage QEMU/KVM virtual machines. I might want to spin up a test VM (oh, say Debian 12) to do some playing around and then destroy it again.
In the past I’ve pushed for automation of server builds, of application configuration. Indeed, for my home setup, I’ve been using ansible for over a decade; I still see a config file for CentOS 6 postfix dated 2015. I’ve started a migration from CentOS/Rocky Linux (i.e. RedHat) to Debian for my personal servers. And I’ve realised this automation is causing me more problems than it’s solving: Differences between distributions Debian is configured very differently to RedHat.
