Armbian - using kernel-config

About a year ago the Armbian build framework made its transition to the next generation. Tons of code have been rewritten, new features added, existing one were rewritten in Python from scratch. The main driving force behind it was Ricardo Pardini.

With this transition some build options regular users were quite familiar, KERNEL_CONFIGURE or CREATE_PATCHES for example, were deprecated and this lead to confusion and incomprehension, last but not least due to the more or less constant lack of detailed framework documentation. So users had to conjecture how things work from reading the code, forums and answers to issue reports.
This situation even forced the Armbian developers to bring back the old switches to some extend.

In today’s topic I want to break down kernel-config as the now modern way to configure your Linux kernel configuration before building.

Deploy Jitsi on demand in Hetzner Cloud

Recently the so called BigBrotherAwards have been awarded. In the pool of winners this year were also the well known Zoom video conference tool. This made me thinking, because the Armbian project uses Zoom for their weekly developer meetups.

So I decided to invest a bit of time to explore if it would be possible to deploy a self-hosted Jitsi video-conference server on a Hetzner cloud server on demand, without much configuration needed. And this is what I came up with.

Snipboard.io selfhosted alternative

I really do enjoy the service of snipboard.io. It is straight forward, very easy and convenient to use and independent from operating system. Unfortunately it is closed source and I really wanted to have something similar as a self-hosted service.

The closest I could come up with to get something like or even more convenient was a combination of xbackbone on server-side and Shutter as client tool.

Running Nextcloud behind NGINX reverse proxy

tl;dr: Was bored and setup a Nextcloud instance behind a NGINX proxy and since I had some trouble to get it running properly I simply share my configs here. Maybe this helps somebody else.

My two main goals were forwarding client real IP addresses to Nextcloud and getting rid of NC’s warnings about running behind reverse proxy.

Nextcloud itself runs on a LAMP stack inside Ubuntu 22.04 LXC container. The reverse proxy is provided by NGINX running on the host machine which is also powered by Ubuntu 22.04.

Making my favorite loaf of bread

Totally different story today. For those who follow me around on Twitter already know that I enjoy making my own bread. And at this point I would like to share my favorite recipe. It has a nice thicc crust around and is very soft inside.
Credit goes to a YouTube video from which I adopted the basis and made my own adjustments to it.

I will provide the ingredients and measurements for both US and Europe (Austria/Germany).

So no further wasting of time, let’s get started!

Cloud NAS with local cache

While I was bored and had a spare NanoPi Neo3 laying around I though to myself why not make good use of it? With its small size, gigabit ethernet and a USB3 port it is the perfect board for creating servers or in this case a crude network storage. Some of you already read about it on Twitter.

Intentionally I did not plan to write an article about this project since I believe it is poorly hacked together and it also suffers from performance issues which I could solve partially at least. However to anticipate the excitement for all the Neo3 owners: I did not finish this project on this board and had to switch to a more expensive model to accomplish full speed. If you are fine with slower speeds it is still perfectly fine though.

Since my cloud backend would be Google I realized that this way I can access all the data on my phone as well simply by using the Drive app. This is comfortable but also concerning since I do not want to blindly send all my data plain to the cloud and simply trust a hugh company in the US. So I split it up into two shares: an unencrypted one for mobile access and an encrypted one for local access only.

I will cover both.