An introduction:

The story behind this webpage is that I bought this domain back in July 2022. I bought it for learning new things and if I one day screw everything up, no harm is done. I decided to host the web- and mail-server of this domain, on a free Oracle Cloud-account. I by the way highly recommend getting yourself such an account, but don’t misuse it or I’ve read that Oracle doesn’t hesitate to close accounts down without a warning (more details below). For the past weeks, I’ve been thinking about what to do with it:

It’ll be a blog where I hope to sometimes post stuff about what I’m interested in, which is generally everything involving Linux, self-hosting, virtualization (qemu, KVM and Proxmox), docker, clouds, pfSense (and friends) – i.e. networking firewalls, hacking/pen-testing (cyber-sec, I sometimes participate in CTF competitions), devops, software programming, Open Source tools, machine learning etc – the list is not exhaustive.

About the Oracle Cloud setup I’m running

For a hobby-project I can so far highly recommend the generous resources Oracle are throwing in the game, to take market-shares from Azure and AWS. Although I’ve upgraded from the free tier to a normal paid customer account, I’m currently not paying anything for running these instances:

I might tell/explain some more details about this setup in a later blog post. But briefly, as shown, they’re running Ubuntu on ARM architecture with 8 GB RAM and I’ve setup some simple Ansible Playbooks so I can automate e.g. upgrading the system packages.

Two of my instances are currently not running: As I remember it, I received some kind of “Cloud Advisor”-email in which Oracle proposed that if I wanted to save money I should maybe switch off unused instances and there were other recommendations. As I don’t pay anything and am grateful for the generous offer Oracle is giving out here, I think it would be a waste to leave everything on, when I currently don’t need that and in these energy-crisis times it would be stupid to not turn them off and then I can also go to bed and think to myself that I did something good for the climate.

Reminding myself about what I’ll probably write future blog posts about, why I started etc:

• I currently have 2 Proxmox-servers. One of them is running 24/7 with a virtualized pfSense-machine. I think I’ll describe the setup in the future, incl. how I made VLAN segmentation in my home such that all IOT-devices are on their own “unsafe” VLAN.
• Interesting issues/findings on my Proxmox-server and stuff related to self-hosted Open Source network/firewall software (gotta figure out what’s interesting to share – could also be intrusion detection which I’ve however got to play more with before anything interesting can be conveyed).
• A month or 2 ago I was lucky to to grab my hands on a raspberry pi CM4 and I’m going to use it a cheap and modern KVM-switch. So I might go through the setup of a BLIVKM-device (see: https://github.com/ThomasVon2021/blikvm for the CM4-version), when I’m happy with it.
• Maybe I’ll share a programming project related to CAD-files, which I’m currently working on both on my job – and sometimes in my spare time.
• Something related to Docker, Ansible – maybe even K8S although I don’t professionally work with it so this is also gonna take some (a long) time.

I’m a WordPress-noob, so if you have any suggestions feel free to link/write below. If I continue with this blog and write once in a while, hopefully I’ll eventually master everything. If you know about e.g. other free cloud resources as good as the Oracle Cloud free tier, you’re welcome to write in the comments section (I’m currently not sure if it needs to be moderated but I’ll experiment with it and in case of misuse I’ll enable the “A comment is held for moderation”-setting).