This brief post is just my notes specifically on how to make a Mac OSX Lion install DVD from within macOS Catalina. This isn’t really meant to help anyone other than my future self. But I hope it helps the odd other person too. Step 0. Optionally order a copy from Apple, do a search online and you can find Lion and …

Tonight I was doing a little development work towards a telemetry system I’m building for a thing. Along the way I managed (like a 10/10 n00b) to delete a bunch of vital configs on my reverse proxy server that handles all my traffic. Thanks to the amazing ZFS snapshot function made easily available by FreeNAS, I was …

pfsense is a wonderful router appliance BSD distro that I’ve enjoyed for some years now. I use the pfsense certificate manager to issue certs for my VPN client devices. For my Internet-facing life, I have legit SSL certs for everything, I’ve a neurosis about it. But it’s bothered me that for my LAN servers, I’ve …

One of my weird hobbies is installing legitimate SSL certificates EVERYWHERE. Here’s steps for replacing the default self-signed garbage SSL certificates you get out of the box with VMware ESXi: Steps Get your SSL cert, obviously. You’ll need a .key file and a .crt. (If you need help at this stage, take a look at my …

Above: To the right is my hovel at the cottage I setup during my holiday-time-well-spent playing with ddrescue I had an awesome LVM for nearly 15 years. It saw me through high school, 8 years of post-secondary nerding and then some years after. The drives involved came and went, as I perpetually upgraded it. I loved …

I picked up a Dell 690 from an e-recycler for $11. I picked it out knowing that I can kit-it-out with 64GB of slow DDR2 FBDIMM RAM for about $80 and I can replace the CPUs to get to 8 threads for another $30ish. I somewhat foolishly assumed VMware ESXi 6.5 would just run on this rig. I was wrong, kind of. Annoyingly, …

New Version A newer version is here. I now call this ml1610-blaster. I have a trusty Samsung ML-1610 printer that I think I bought for like $90 back around 2003. It’s been an outstanding little cheapie that so far has seen me through two undergrad programs and is now seeing my wife through her third such program. …

I’ve been working out a tolerable dynamic DNS solution for myself lately. After much effort, I’ve settled on running my own bind server (I last did this like 12 years ago, hah). I’ve written simple scripts that handle it for me and they work fine. However, I found for many of my domains hosted by GoDaddy, I couldn’t …

It was time to upgrade my secondary video card on my trusty MacPro3,1. I first goofed considerably with a Radeon 5250. I even went so far as to bust out my old firmware editing tools to change the vendor id in a feeble attempt to get OS X to use it without needing to modify kexts. Then I heard that more recent nvidia …

I’m a fairly heavy user of trac. I’ve got various software projects I organize using trac. I decided to upgrade one of my Ubuntu 12.04 servers to Ubuntu 14.04 and of course ran in to the typical apache2 headaches that are born out of this particular transition. After remembering to rename my virtual host files with …