Notices by Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to), page 2

Update on minifree.org situation: I'm nearly done configuring my new network, and I'll begin setting up the new shop tomorrow morning most likely.

I'll have the new shop online by the weekend at the latest. I'm doing a totally new shop site, to replace the old one.

The new site will also have easier payment methods e.g. card payment method.

And I'll also make it look sexy, like it was designed in the year 2025, instead of the year 2014. The old site was designed in 2014 and was never changed.

@april i'm probably going to wing it. i've never had problems even half way through a testing cycle. it's only sid that really ever breaks on me.

@arch I might yolo and go with something different entirely. Such as a BSD. I'll literally decide this over the next few days.

I just hate that I'm re-doing all my servers while Debian, my preferred distro of choice, is currently so close to the next stable release.

Debating whether I should just run on Debian Trixie, which is currently in testing, and just wing it until it becomes stable.

As opposed to setting up my new servers on Debian Bookworm, only to update to Trixie in like 4 months from now?

Right now is about time for hard feature freeze. By my reckoning, Trixie will be officially stable around August 2025?

I recently re-did all my routers - a few stragglers left there. A better tunneling setup, for example faster failover (switching between main internet and a backup internet connection - switching takes seconds now, instead of a minute).

I'm bringing a bunch of services in-house too, that are currently outsourced to a VPS, such as libreboot.org - I'll host them tunnelled.

I'm re-doing all infrastructure, not just Minifree. Libreboot project infrastructure is being remade, replacing old servers.

There's going to be a new Minifree shop. New site software. Debating whether to use OpenCart or something else. The old site was a WooCommerce site that I'd been meaning to replace for years; if I kept it online, I'd only be encouraged to keep it running for years longer. So I'm forcing myself this week to re-do a better shop site.

It's not just about setting up a new shop, I'm also setting up the new infrastructure so that I'm way more efficient, by reducing the day to day administrative cost.

Further to my previous post, I have on update: minifree.org will be online again *in a few days*.

I've generally been re-doing all of my infrastructure recently. I've recently finished upgrading all my routers.

My web, mail, DNS and other servers are all being remade over the next few days. New servers. Middle of March is always quiet so I'm taking the opportunity this week to completely redo my infrastructure.

I'm shipping orders today; I resume work on servers tonight. New shop coming soon.

I'm probably just going to nuke the whole site and start over. It's on an old Debian - which I'm in the process of updating too. I'm probably just going to set up a whole new server from scratch.

I just spent my evenings this week setting up a new network (that I've alluded to in recent posts), so it's the perfect opportunity to also set up a new web server!

FYI minifree.org will be offline for the day - I'm spending today upgrading the server. I'll remove this post when it's online again.

If it is online, don't expect it to stay that way until tomorrow. I'm in the process of updating all my software.

I'm also at the lab tonight, working on orders that will ship on Monday, 17 March.

March/April are always quiet so I like to work on infrastructure things during this time. My other ideal time for infrastructure changes is usually July/August or so.

@tlaurion yes, what of it? i have that one on my list, because i'm updating the coreboot revs in lbmk ready for the april release. i'll be merging t480 back into the main coreboot tree within lbmk.

is there something specific about it that you wish for me to look at? i otherwise think it's a good diff. perhaps you could give that to @mkukri so he can include it in his gerrit patch, for upstreaming purposes.

@aaisp And the reason I still wish to use my L2TP service with a&a is very simple:

The wireguard server that I have, is hosted on a VPS with a datacentre IP address, and if I surf the net through that IP, I'd often see captcha warnings.

a&a gives you residential IPv4 and IPv6 subnets, and has really good peering. So long as your tunnel connection is good, you can get a pretty reliable service this way. And the entire internet doesn't think I'm a rowebot when all I want to do is watch a video.

I still have my normal L2TP service with @aaisp - but I route it via WireGuard. So I'm tunneled twice. This lowers my overall MTU, but mitigates these issues:

* My local ISP (main one) is a bit funny about L2TP, often throttles it

* xl2tpd / a&a's L2TP server is a bit slower about failover; when my client IP changes, my L2TP is down for a minute, when switching to backup internet

Routing L2TP through wireguard mitigates both issues. wg-quick reconnects within seconds, during failover.

I've recently been messing around with my own wireguard tunnel router that I made.

Wireguard is *really good* for redundant routing setups. I make my local network connection have no default route, only a static route for my VPS where I run a wireguard server. Wireguard reconnects instantly, when I change the route. A default route appears when wireguard is up.

I have backup internet, but failover took 40-80 secs (L2TP service).

New wireguard tutorial coming soon on https://fedfree.org/

@tlaurion just send me some patches. you make such a song and dance on mastodon, you could send a patch instead in the time it takes you to write such long mastodon posts.

https://codeberg.org/libreboot/lbwww

make a codemountain account and send me a pull request! the site is in git. markdown files. instructions further written here:

https://libreboot.org/git.html

to be clear: nothing you want will be implemented, unless you send me a patch. please do so immediately. cheers.

@tlaurion @mkukri I agree wholeheartedly with your proposal.

And for now, you may refer to Libreboot documentation as desired.

Well, the upstream coreboot documentation currently does not need T480 information, since the actual T480 code isn't merged upstream yet, so I propose that this be done at that time when the latter is done.

Further to my previous post, I also observe that Heads has published the following installation guide:

https://osresearch.net/T480-maximized-flashing/

Once again, I'm very happy. Now two coreboot distros have ThinkPad T480 support!

Libreboot added it in December 2024. Heads added it in March 2025.

Thanks again to Mate Kukri @mkukri for the T480 coreboot port, and deguard, and for a considerable amount of work that he has done, benefiting coreboot in general.

And thank you @tlaurion for giving us the Heads project.

@tlaurion @mkukri And I personally respect the hell out of the fact that he actually sat down to read lbmk, and even mentored other Heads developers about the various idiosyncrasies of my build system.

Libreboot's build system is extremely insanely efficient but very unforgiving in its design. It's the most conservative possible design for what it does, and works differently completely than most build systems; the logic in Heads's T480 integration is based on lbmk's implementation in Libreboot.

FYI to my readers, I've unblocked @tlaurion - we got into a public tit for tat the other week, regarding technical disputes over the T480 coreboot patchset:

https://mas.to/@libreleah/113986932463262974

I got annoyed because he was making demands that @mkukri do work to merge the T480 patches upstream - which he plans to, but Thierry demanded it *now*. Disrespectfully.

Thierry took our advice afterall and merged T480 in its current state for now:

https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/pull/1908/files#diff-aa7fedf57a6390f6795119e7f4d60a4c85ea71fc71ad9af374005ae2c93bccde

So i'm happy that Heads now supports T480!

@Natasha_Jay don't forget recreational ice cream

@ariadne yeah i got confused since it interfaces with systemd. oh well. i edited the post. the rest of it is still valid. netplan sucks.