Posts about programming, DevOps, Linux server management, and more.
Problem and Motivation For a Linux-based demo setup, I need certain side effects and corresponding cleanup steps every time the system boots or relevant system configuration changes. I’m using NixOS, and systemd is the easiest and most powerful way to manage setup tasks at system startup or on substantial system Read more…
Although Nix flakes are still marked as unstable, they became the de facto standard for managing reproducible NixOS system configurations. Regarding NixOS system configurations, the major benefit of flakes is that they bundle nixpkgs (and possibly further dependencies) along with the configuration files. The nixpkgs version and the configuration files Read more…
Usually, I do not just forward people to other blogs. But the other day, I published an interesting article on my company’s* tech blog about testing virtualization stacks using mini operating systems. Here’s the excerpt: Testing and debugging erroneous behavior by a guest under a virtualization stack is hard and Read more…
TL;DR: The convenient CLI-based FTP mirroring tool you wished for (hopefully, lol). In my previous blog post, I presented lftp as my CLI tool of choice in 2024 to connect to FTP servers to perform a parallel recursive download with FTPS (FTP over TLS). However, lftp is a powerful low-level Read more…
TL;DR In this blog post, I show you the best option I found that you can use in 2024 to perform a parallel recursive download (backup) of an FTP directory via FTPS (explicit FTP via TLS) from the command line. lftp is the best command line tool (for Linux, macOS Read more…
In an earlier post, I talked about how you can build an out-of-tree Linux kernel module in a Nix derivation, i.e., package it in Nix. However, for quick prototyping, sometimes you want to just enter $ make in your shell, for example to check if everything compiles. Out-of-tree module projects Read more…