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Fedora reigns supreme as my Linux distribution of choice when I deploy new workloads to public clouds. It gives me a well-tested, modern Linux system with tons of helpful tools. Fedora’s cloud images provide a great base to begin building a cloud deployment, but sometimes I find myself wanting a highly customized image with some features I care about. For example, I may want some packages pre-installed that aren’t included with the default cloud image, or I may want certain services stopped or started at boot time....

I started work on packaging the Azure CLI and all of its components in Fedora back in July 2021 and the work finally finished just as the Fedora 35 development cycled ended. This required plenty of packaging work and I was thankful for all the advice I received along the way from experienced Fedora packagers. Installing Azure CLI Make sure you’re on Fedora 35 or later first. Then install azure-cli:...

Much of my daily work involves using multiple clouds and I do the same for my personal infrastructure, too. Building mesh networks between each piece of cloud infrastructure, my home, and my mobile phone quickly became overwhelming. That’s where Tailscale came in and completely changed my workflow. What is Tailscale? The company claims it’s “a secure network that just works” and that definition fits well. Tailscale builds on protocols used in Wireguard to dynamically maintain a mesh network between any number of devices....

My ThinkPad T490 was showing its age and wrestling with the internal NVIDIA GPU was a constant pain. Other than some unexpected early battery wear, it has been a good laptop for me. However, the annual Lenovo sale email came through my inbox recently and I decided to look for something new. I picked up an X1 Nano Gen 1 and the experience has been good so far....

Containers are a great way to deliver and run all kinds of applications. Although many people build containers for server applications, you can also use them for client applications on your local workstation. This helps when you want to test new applications without disrupting your existing system or when you use an immutable system such as Fedora Silverblue. Podman takes this further by allowing you to run a client application without root access or daemons....

Controlling the LED backlight brightness on a laptop in Linux used to be a chore, but most window managers automatically configure the brightness buttons on your laptop. However, everything is much more customizable in i3 and it requires a little more configuration. Controlling the light First off, we need something that allows us to control the brightness. There’s a perfectly named project called light that does exactly this task!...

I’ve tamed many of my complex firewall rules with firewalld over the years. It allows you to divide your devices, destinations, and network interfaces into zones. From there, you apply rules to zones. In addition, it handles all of the difficult work on the backend with iptables and nftables. Forwarding ports remains a tricky process in firewalld, but there are a few different ways to work through it....

I set a goal this summer to read a little each day and work through my reading list on Goodreads. I managed to make it through nine books! If you’re looking for some interesting books to read, this post highlights several of the ones I enjoyed. Tom Clancy I saw all the big Tom Clancy movies as a kid, such as The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, and Patriot Games....

Hetzner has always been a reliable and cost-effective hosting company for me for several years. I’ve run icanhazip.com on their dedicated servers and I run several small applications in their cloud. When I run containers, I love using Fedora CoreOS for its easy updates and very small server footprint. Almost everything you need for hosting containers is provided right out of the box, but you can add extra packages via rpm-ostree layers and reboot to use them....

Sometimes automation is your best friend and sometimes it isn’t. Typically, when two devices are connected via ethernet cables, they negotiate the best speed they can manage across a network link. They also try to agree on whether they can run full or half duplex across the network link. Most of the time, this works beautifully. It can break down with strange networking configs, damaged adapters, or finicky cables....