Armbian - using CREATE_PATCHES

The Armbian build script has a built-in method to automatically create patch files from changes you do within the sources.
The official documentation writes about this:

prompt right before the compilation starts to make changes to the source code, separate for U-Boot and kernel, and will create patch files out of this. If you want these patches are included in the normal run, you need to copy them to their appropriate directories.

While this basically puts stuff in a nutshell for beginners this could be a bit confusing. In this post I will show you step by step how this works in a practical example.

• What is needed to start this process?
• Where are the sources to edit?
• Where are the created patches?
• How to apply them next time you build?

Zuckerbude 3.0

The whole website has been reworked. Why? Because I can. After a very long time it is now time to say goodbye to Wordpress and say hello to Hugo.

What is Hugo?

Hugo is “The world’s fastest framework for building websites”. You can learn more here.

Simplified it takes your input files, which are formatted using the Markdown syntax, and a template and creates a ready to upload website from that.

There is no web interface or fancy WYSIWYG-editor thing. You can use any text editor, preferably one with syntax highlight or even a small IDE like VScode.

After editing the changes can be previewed locally by using

hugo server --disableFastRender --ignoreCache

which will provide a http server that serves the website on localhost. Once satisfied the output of the public folder is pushed to the webserver and the changes are live immediately.

VeraCrypt and Panfrost compile vs 1GB memory

Recently I needed to build mesa on my OrangePi One Plus to get the most out of the current Panfrost support. However the building always failed because the board locked itself up. Some research showed that it most likely ran out of memory.

A bit later I tried building VeraCrypt on a NanoPi Neo3 and after a while run into the same issue.

Armbian does ship zram with each board to get help get around the memory lacking a bit. However in these cases it simply was not enough.

Setup Quake III Arena server on ARM64

Recently a fellow Twitter user asked for help setting up a dedicated Quake III Arena server on his OrangePi One Plus.

In first place two things came to my mind:

• is there a source code available as there is proabably no chance that there are arm binaries out there?
• if so will it compile on arm64 since it lacks of compat to armhf? Running stuff native is more awesome anyways.

Finally...

…moved to a fresh VPS using Debian 10 as OS. Also IPv6 is now configured and available.

The mailserver stuff has been discarded. Too much effort to maintain for way too less throughput.

Message webmaster with his public key

What??

Sending a message to a webmaster with his public key… The idea behind this I actually got from an April fools released by c&t magazine. To cut a long story short they claimed that weak GDPR phrasing could be a reason that common letter post might need to be properly encrypted. They even provided a tool that extracts a websites public key use it to encrypt a provided message.

You can find the article (in German) here and the tool here.

Anyway. I was thinking how I could use this to send webmasters encrypted messages when they do not offer public keys emailing. And for some reason I do not was to ask them for keys. Maybe because I am incredibly clever and shy at the same time … never mind.

Some basics

To get a basic understanding how symmetric and asymmetric encryption - to say the relationship between public and private keys - works just watch this video. I started adding captions in English. Hopefully they will be released into the wild soon.

THX @dunkelmunkel Feel free to watch more of his videos 😉