@jnoxon's thoughts

I’ve been using CoreDNS on my home network infrastructure for a few years, and it’s worked really well. One of the things I use it for is translating local DNS queries into DNS-over-TLS queries, which keeps my ISP from inspecting and manipulating DNS lookups. That use case is well documented and works well. Today I found myself wanting to override the DNS provider used by just one browser on my computer. [Read More]

A few months ago, I migrated a bunch of media from a ZFS mirror on my Mac to my home server VM. I used mismatched drives that I happened to have on hand, and while it works fine, I might as well replace the disks with the ones from the ZFS pool that I’m not using any more. While ZFS works reasonably well, it carries a ton of technical and political debt, particularly on Linux. [Read More]

Although this site has never received much comment volume, there have been occasions where comments have been quite valuable. One popular solution for static sites is to use Disqus, which is a fully hosted comment system that many Hugo themes support right out of the box. Disqus is free, but you pay for it with lost privacy, third-party trackers, and bloat. I’ve decided instead to use Commento. There’s a cheap hosted version of Commento, but why not try out the fully self-hosted version? [Read More]

I’ve migrated this blog from WordPress to Hugo. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. WordPress is a bit of a security nightmare, and although I’ve somehow never had my server owned, I did notice a couple of successful exfiltration attacks against WordPress while reviewing logs. Thankfully, the attacks were harmless. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll notice some repeated content. It wasn’t worth the effort to match the content GUIDs. [Read More]

I use a 2012 Mac Mini as a home VMware ESXi server. It’s a surprisingly great little machine, with exceptionally low power consumption and good performance. It runs several Linux and Windows VMs. I’ve been gradually migrating applications to it, and the most recent is my home PLEX server. To do that, I needed to move a Thunderbolt disk enclosure (OWC ThunderBay 4) to the Mini and attach it to a Linux VM. [Read More]