oct8l's pages

Enabling Talos OS SecureBoot on HP EliteDesk 800 G5

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 19:28:19 -0600

I’ve recently purchased a few HP EliteDesk 800 G5 desktops for my new homelab v2. This is to supplement my existing UnRAID setup with things running in containers, and some cronjobs on my main desktop that I sometimes have powered off. I’ll hopefully write some more about the whole new setup later, but for now, I just want to focus on getting my compute set up (securely) with Talos OS on my new nodes.

Scripting LanCache DNS updates with Pi-hole

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 00:31:56 -0500

As I was setting up uklan’s LanCache, I found myself wanting to figure out how I could keep handing out my Pi-hole to clients on multiple VLANs, yet still use my LanCache setup

Relaxed Theme for Windows Terminal

Tue, 25 May 2021 22:04:26 -0500

Much like how I’ve set up Relaxed Theme for Royal TS and for Cmder, I’ve started using Windows Terminal in Windows instead of Cmder, so I wanted to figure out how to make my own theme for WSL so it looks how I like it. After downloading Windows Terminal, you can edit your settings JSON file by going to settings (hotkey of CTRL + ,) and clicking the “Open JSON file” in the bottom left.

Quick pi-dns.me setup

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 16:12:25 -0500

Enter this one-liner into a BASH prompt, and it will generate a random string of 16 characters, create the name with pi-dns.me, update your current IP and make a cron entry to update it every 15 minutes.

qrlink function

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 14:42:47 -0500

If you’re like me and want to access a URL on your phone because you’re signed into different accounts on your phone vs your main computer, you might find this useful.

WireGuard performance with a Pi 3 A+

Tue, 21 May 2019 10:16:00 -0500

After running the WireGuard benchmarks on a Pi Zero, I thought I’d get out my Raspberry Pi 3A+ and try it out just for fun.

WireGuard performance with a Pi Zero

Mon, 20 May 2019 14:52:16 -0500

I had a spare Pi Zero (version 1.3 used for these tests) laying around, and I thought I’d try and check out what some basic performance marks were when running the Pi Zero as a WireGuard server. I haven’t been able to find a whole lot of other benchmarks for running WireGuard on a Pi Zero, so I thought I’d try some out.

Add ssht to Linux

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 13:28:25 -0500

A quick one-liner to add a binary file that will launch tmux automatically upon an SSH connection.

Category Cloud

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 09:48:40 -0500

Category cloud docker-toolbox git-for-windows home-networking homelab hugo-site magicmail microsoft openwrt security software splunk vmware wireguard - full list of categories -

Hosting a cURLable script with GitHub Gists

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 09:29:26 -0500

After making some entirely too long BASH scripts, I like to host them somewhere online to make it easier to get the script to whatever device I’m using. This is especially true when I want to run a long script on a brand new machine, a machine that I might not have enabled secure SSH access on yet, but one where I still have access to a tty. This is where the handy GitHub Gists comes in to play.

PS1 prompt generator

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 21:01:39 -0600

A real cool site for generating a PS1 (prompt string) in Linux is ezprompt.net. It’s an awesome resource for generating your ideal prompt, and then dropping it quickly into your .bashrc file and running a source ~/.bashrc to get your new prompt. Try it out!

Contact

Thu, 21 Feb 2019 10:47:44 -0600

Information on how to contact me

Quick BASH function for adding WireGuard peers

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 21:50:34 -0600

If you’re like me and diving into WireGuard as it picks up more attention, you might be adding lots of WireGuard peers to a server as you’re figuring it out and playing around with it. On my server box, I added a function to my .bashrc to make it a bit easier to add peers. If you’d like, copy the following (three, and simple at that) lines into your .bashrc:

Relaxed Theme for Cmder

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 19:40:02 -0600

Just as I translated the Relaxed Theme to Royal TS, I’ve also made a color scheme in Cmder. I absolutely love Cmder, it’s become my replacement on my work laptop for the default CMD, PowerShell, Git for Windows, WSL Docker Toolbox, and basically any CLI available on Windows. Anyway, head on over to your Cmder XML file (check the top of your Cmder settings screen), CTRL + F search for “Palette”, and append the following text to the end of the XML file:

Relaxed Theme for Royal TS

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 15:28:14 -0600

In my conquest to make everything have the fantastic Relaxed Theme, I have translated the colors into Royal TS 4 and 5 (They are the same colors and layouts for both versions). Below are screenshots and pastes of the hex codes: Colors Hex code Default foreground #D9D9D9 Cursor Text #D9D9D9 Black #353A44 Green #909D63 Blue #6A8799 Cyan #C9DFFF Default background #353A44 Cursor color #D9D9D9 Red #BC5653 Yellow #EBDA7A Magenta #B06698 White #F7F7F7

Dexit (Docker EXIT) alias for Docker Toolbox!

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:47:05 -0600

If you use Docker Toolbox for Windows, there’s an easier way to get everything shut down than going into the VirtualBox GUI and shutting down the Docker VM (if that’s how you’ve been doing it). There is a command called docker-machine that’s available when in the Docker BASH prompt that can control a lot of the host VM’s functions. In fact, Docker’s start.sh that runs when opening the BASH prompt uses it to configure everything inside of VirtualBox on startup.

Add GitHub SSH keys to authorized_user file

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:21:49 -0600

If you have an SSH key you regularly use elsewhere added to your GitHub account, this one-liner to get those public keys and add them to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file of your current machine.

Disable IPv6 in Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 12:46:51 -0600

If you’d like to disable IPv6 for whatever reason on Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04, give this one-liner a go.

Update a standalone ESXi server

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 13:37:32 -0600

Even though it’s not the proper way to do it in production, sometimes it’s just nice to be able to update ESXi from SSH, especially an individual instance at home or in a lab.

My Diceware method

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 20:02:04 -0600

In my journey down the rabbit hole of security, at some point I came across Diceware, probably in some discussion about xkcd #936. If this is the first time you’re hearing of Diceware, I will summarize it as a way of using the natural random entropy generated by rolling five dice to generate a secure passphrase for keeping your most valuable digital items secure. I just thought it was the coolest thing, and it made so much sense to create a long passphrase that is easy to remember, but hard to crack.

Script to delete Dovecot files in MagicMail

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 11:06:55 -0500

Every once in a while, Dovecot goofs itself up when customers are using multiple devices at the same time to check their mail, and we need to delete some files to get it to allow customers to view their emails again. This is partially a manual process until we’re able to get it more automated, but the script below has made it a bit easier to deal with needing to delete them.

Import Exchange photos script

Thu, 02 Aug 2018 13:23:50 -0500

This script is useful for setting multiple Exchange photos at once. In our still on-prem deployment, this is probably the quickest way for us to set pictures in batches when we have new hires. This script is an amalgamation of a few different scripts I use in production, but mostly based off of a script from user Richard Diphoorn at powershell.org forums. My specific iteration of the task that works for our environment is copying the photo to the local user’s pictures directory, and then running this script to pull those files in.

Reset authorized_keys permissions

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:50:17 -0500

Sometimes, you might find you are having odd issues using public keys on a Linux server. It will fix any permissions issues that you might have caused by editing the files incorrectly.

Dell R210 ii not booting

Thu, 05 Jul 2018 11:53:27 -0500

I thought I’d take the extra NIC out of a server and mount it back up. Note to self, the Dell R210 ii server won’t boot unless the riser card is plugged into it… I’m sure there’s a BIOS setting somewhere but I figured it’d be easier to plug it in and leave it.

Privacy

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 07:15:27 -0500

I am currently using Google Analytics on oct8l.gitlab.io. This is to track numbers of visitors and to see which content is the most popular. You can definitely use an extension such as uMatrix to block the JavaScript from loading and I wouldn’t mind in the slightest! I have all options turned off as far as I can for tracking, but please visit the Google Privacy Policy for more information. This site is hosted with GitLab Pages, and is thus governed under the GitLab.

Disclaimer

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 07:15:21 -0500

You are 100% responsible for your own IT Infrastructure, applications, services and documentation. oct8l.gitlab.io owners, authors and contributors assume no liability or responsibility for your work. Please independently confirm anything you read on this blog before executing any changes or implementing new products or services in your own environment. Furthermore, authors and contributors are free to express their opinions, positive or negative–they are, like all opinions, not reflective of any larger group, and do not represent the opinions of anyone else.

Generate SSH key

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:36:30 -0500

A quick one-liner to generate a secure SSH key in Bash.

Using SSH keys with git for Windows

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 14:13:13 -0500

I think everyone would agree that SSH keys are a much better way to authenticate than usernames and passwords. I really just love them. Anyway, I have a freshly reformatted Windows 10 computer that I was wanting to access my GitLab account from, and wanted to set it up with keys for pushing to projects. After installing Git for Windows, I wasn’t quite sure how it really worked until a little bit of Googling and of course help from StackExchange and playing around with some settings.

Using VirtualBox for the Splunker Udemy course

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 21:55:44 -0500

At work, we’ve been looking to take better advantage of our local Splunk infrastructure. It’s a bit lacking in its current state, so I have been looking into kicking it up a notch for that sweet, sweet in-depth look into what’s going on in our environment. Now as you can imagine, Splunk is a very large and daunting beast at first glance. There are seemingly infinite ways to use it depending on what exactly you want to get out of it, and you can really get a lot out of it if you want to.

PowerCLI install script

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 11:34:38 -0500

Credit for this information should go to Kyle Ruddy’s post on the VMware Blogs platform. I have just packaged it up into a PowerShell script for ease of deployment. Currently, this has been tested as of 6/11/2018, and is confirmed working on 64 bit Windows 10 builds 1709 and 1803 (which have PowerShell version 5). PowerCLI is running at 10.1.0 at the current date. Below is a paste of the script hosted on this site.

Adding binaries to the Git for Windows PATH

Thu, 31 May 2018 14:50:08 -0500

As WSL becomes more mature, I will surely start using it more than I use the Bash that comes installed with Git for Windows. But for now, my main Bash interface is through the Git Bash terminal. On my Windows computers for work (I don’t have much of a choice), I have a few scripts I like to port from my personal setup that I use frequently. One of the more relative ones that I figured I’d use as an example is my script to generate checksums for the scripts I upload.

Figuring out VLANs on the Zyxel GS1900-24

Sun, 20 May 2018 13:39:05 -0500

Every great network needs a great core switch, and I’ve found the Zyxel GS1900-24 to be perfect for my home’s needs. When I moved from DD-WRT on a WNDR3000 to a PC Engines APU2C4 running pfSense, I had to move the switching capabilities to an external device. This sent me out on a search for a new managed switch with gigabit networking capabilities and preferably 24 or more RJ45 ports.

Minifying a Hugo site with Gitlab CI

Thu, 17 May 2018 12:32:57 -0500

One of the things I love most about Hugo is the tiny size of the pages. Mine in particular uses very little JavaScript, so it loads very quickly and with minimal requests to the gitlab.io servers. Yet, ever since setting up the site, I’ve wanted to be able to make it even smaller. One of the quirks about Hugo is even if there isn’t anything to render in the partials or layouts for a page, it will still leave a blank line when the HTML is rendered.

Routing the guest wifi through OpenVPN in pfSense

Mon, 14 May 2018 12:29:36 -0500

When I originally bought my Unifi AP AC Lite, I hadn’t put much thought into guest access. I was mainly getting it to improve my own network connectivity, and to get an AP that was independent of my router for greater flexibility. At first, I was using DD-WRT as my core router and firewall, but I have since moved to pfSense on an PC Engines APU2C4 which provides even more features than DD-WRT.

Setting up Commento with Hugo

Wed, 09 May 2018 18:38:46 -0500

Update 15 Apr 2019 While Commento served its purpose fantastically, I have moved on to Isso. Update 11 Nov 2018 I have Commento working again on the site. Update 11 Jan 2019 Commento has stopped working on my VPS and I have disabled it while I try to troubleshoot and rebuild it. As I thought about it more, I realized that I didn’t like the idea of using Disqus for a commenting here on my Hugo site.

Blocking ads in OpenWrt

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:27:28 -0500

Here I have collected few scripts to block/manage ads at the source on my travel OpenWrt router, the GL-iNet AR300M. I use this on the travel router to save bandwidth, mostly while the VPN is active so I can save CPU cycles for the OpenVPN process. All credit goes to tablespoon on GitHub/Tblspn on Reddit. I have just repackaged that script (with a couple of slight modifications to the servers it pulls from and the update schedule) with some other helpful scripts that have come in handy that I thought I’d share on GitLab, and write a bit about them.

Allowing SSL in wget on OpenWrt/LEDE

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 20:47:22 -0500

Why? For the post regarding blocking ads in OpenWrt, I had to figure out how to add some extra blocklists, including those from EasyList and AdAway. In vanilla OpenWrt, we’ll have to use wget to retrieve files, and I like to make sure that I can use secure protocols when grabbing text files across the internet. The scripts ssl-in-wget.sh To enable using SSL/TLS in wget, make a script called ssl-in-wget.

OneDrive Quota Mysteriously Changing

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 20:33:40 -0500

Recently, we had a situation at work where seemingly random employees were experiencing their OneDrive capacity going down to 2GB (as opposed to the 1TB everyone should have), and they were receiving errors on their desktop clients when trying to sync files from their computers, as they were all well past the 2GB limit. We had to open a PowerShell instance, run Connect-SPOService and reset the user’s account to have the 1TB of storage that they should.

Gitlab CI Hugo Deploy Failing

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 14:12:10 -0500

For a while, I had been having issues where GitLab-CI pipelines for this Hugo site would fail on the deploy function. This would let the site build correctly, but the files wouldn’t be pushed to the location where they were served to visitors. There are a few open issues where this same behavior is exhibited, but I did get a tip from @fyr77 on how they were able to resolve the issue for their own project.

Docker Image for building Hugo site with GitLab CI

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 20:38:22 -0500

When I was getting my Hugo site set up, I was looking for a way to implement search. Luckily, it seems that I ran across a solution by eddiewebb and I was able to get it set up. Originally, I had issues where it would work locally, but when I would push it up to GitLab pages, CI would take over and publish a version of the site, but the search function didn’t work when it was live.

Disqus Commenting

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 18:28:27 -0500

Update 15 Apr 2019 I have replaced Commento's functionality with Isso. Update 11 Jan 2019 I have re-deployed Commento, and it is working again with my GitLab Pages site. Update 11 Nov 2018 Commento has stopped working on my VPS and I have disabled it while I try to troubleshoot and rebuild it. Update 15 May 2018 Disqus has been replaced by Commento.

Home

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the visit! This site will serve as a repository for any knowledge I gather in my professional career or in my private endeavors that I think is worth sharing. At times, it may just be a log of projects that I’ve worked on at home for fun. I have moved into a more development-focused role at my current employer, but I still have a passion for small-scale, non-mission critical systems administration (mostly at home these days).

Running Scripts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

All scripts that I upload and reference on my Hugo site will have an associated checksum file along with it. I have a BASH alias that will calculate and output checksums into a text file that matches the script but with an appended _checksum.txt. For example, the example script of script-example.sh, there exists a checksum file alongside it named script-example.sh_checksum.txt. The four checksums calculated in this file are: MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA512 Hopefully this should give enough for compatibility of automated systems (MD5 and SHA1) and for security (SHA256, SHA512).

Scripts Directory

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Warning: Before downloading anything from this page, confirm that you are visiting the site via the https protocol. Note: Be sure to read the disclaimer before running any of the commands or scripts below. You can check out some information about getting and running scripts and checksums from my site site here. File name Size (bytes) PowerCLI-Install.ps1 1484 PowerCLI-Install.ps1_checksum.txt 352 checksums.sh 154 checksums.

Site search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This file exists solely to respond to /search URL with the related search layout template. No content shown here is rendered, all content is based in the template layouts/page/search.html Setting a very low sitemap priority will tell search engines this is not important content. This implementation uses Fusejs, jquery and mark.js Initial setup Search depends on additional output content type of JSON in config.toml ` [outputs] home = ["HTML", "JSON"] \`

oct8l's pages

Enabling Talos OS SecureBoot on HP EliteDesk 800 G5

Scripting LanCache DNS updates with Pi-hole

Relaxed Theme for Windows Terminal

Quick pi-dns.me setup

qrlink function

WireGuard performance with a Pi 3 A+

WireGuard performance with a Pi Zero

Add ssht to Linux

Category Cloud

Tag Cloud

Hosting a cURLable script with GitHub Gists

PS1 prompt generator

Contact

Quick BASH function for adding WireGuard peers

Relaxed Theme for Cmder

Relaxed Theme for Royal TS

Dexit (Docker EXIT) alias for Docker Toolbox!

Add GitHub SSH keys to authorized_user file

Disable IPv6 in Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04

Update a standalone ESXi server

My Diceware method

Script to delete Dovecot files in MagicMail

Import Exchange photos script

Reset authorized_keys permissions

Dell R210 ii not booting

Privacy

Disclaimer

Generate SSH key

Using SSH keys with git for Windows

Using VirtualBox for the Splunker Udemy course

PowerCLI install script

Adding binaries to the Git for Windows PATH

Figuring out VLANs on the Zyxel GS1900-24

Minifying a Hugo site with Gitlab CI

Routing the guest wifi through OpenVPN in pfSense

Setting up Commento with Hugo

Blocking ads in OpenWrt

Allowing SSL in wget on OpenWrt/LEDE

OneDrive Quota Mysteriously Changing

Gitlab CI Hugo Deploy Failing

Docker Image for building Hugo site with GitLab CI

Disqus Commenting

Home

Running Scripts

Scripts Directory

Site search