Mauro Morales

software developer

Tag: Development Setup

  • Remote Setup with EdgeVPN

    Last week I started using my old 13″ laptop and left the bulky 15″ workstation permanently at my desk. This setup gives me portability without loosing power when I’m connected to my home network. Today, I decided to configure EdgeVPN on both devices to also have this setup while on the road.

    EdgeVPN makes use of tokens, to connect nodes to a network. Since I have a Nextcloud server, which keeps files in sync on both of my laptops. I decided to put the EdgeVPN configuration file there and created a small script that reads from it to generate the token, and decide which IP to give to each device, based on their hostname:

    #!/bin/sh
    TOKEN=$(cat /path/to/Nextcloud/edgevpn-config.yaml | base64 -w0)
    IP=""
    if [ "$(hostname)" = "zeno" ]; then
    	IP="10.1.0.10"
    elif [ "$(hostname)" = "seneca" ]; then
    	IP="10.1.0.11"
    fi
    
    if [ "$IP" = "" ]; then
    	echo "IP not configured for $(hostname)"
    	exit 1
    else
    	echo Using IP: $IP
    fi
    edgevpn --token="$TOKEN" --address="$IP/24"
    

    Plus I created systemd services so I can make use of systemctl instead of having to remember the name of that shell script

    [Unit]
    Description=EdgeVPN
    Wants=network.target
    
    [Service]
    ExecStart=/path/to/start-edgevpn.sh
    
    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target

    On any of the nodes, I can start EdgeVPN’s web UI and list all connected nodes

  • Revived my Dell XPS 9350

    My work laptop has been giving me some trouble since I first installed openSUSE Tumbleweed. At first, it was just small annoyances, like not properly syncing the time. But installing the OS again is a bit of a hassle, as much as I enjoy doing it, so I found a workaround to reset it whenever it broke. However, last week it started freezing multiple times during the day, the workaround was to hard shut down the machine, which was very annoying, but I was hoping would get fixed in a next upgrade. Tumbleweed has weekly upgrades, so waiting wasn’t that big of a deal. But with the latest update, my Docker setup stopped working with Earthly, which is my bread and butter for Kairos, so I decided to try a different distro.

    Switching distros can be a big deal, and I didn’t want to learn a new package manager and special configurations, so I went with something I’ve already used before, Ubuntu 23.04. But even then, I first waned to give it a try, just in case there was any red flag. So, I dusted off my personal Dell XPS 9350, an 8-year-old laptop, to test it out. So far, everything seems to be working well, much slower than the workstation but still good enough and way more portable, so I’m probably going to start leaving my workstation at the desk.