Colin Murphy's site IT Guides and other stuff
Posts with the tag linux:

Access your local network from anywhere with WireGuard VPN

For a very long time, I have been using SSH tunneling to access my selfhosted services. This works great, but exposes your server to a multitude of threats. I had to implement additional defenses, such as the Fail2Ban daemon to automatically ban IPs after multiple failed login attempts. I decided that a better option would be to simply implement a VPN. I ended up choosing WireGuard as it’s built into the kernel, and offers great throughput if I needed to transfer files over the VPN.

Booting Linux off an NVMe SSD on an older computer

Most pre-2015 computers, like my HP Z230 workstation, are only able to boot off of SATA disks. While SATA SSDs are perfectly adequate for most workloads, I wanted to install my operating system on a much faster PCIe-based NVMe SSD.

Despite being able to boot from SATA disks, you can effectively trick an older computer into loading an Linux off a NVMe SSD by installing the GRUB bootloader and boot partition on a SATA SSD or hard drive.

Creating a simple adblocking DNS server using dnsmasq

This guide will show you how to create a minimalistic adblocking DNS server. This is a great alternative to Pi-Hole, which requires being run on a Raspberry Pi or in a Docker container.