GNU/Linux

A look at the traffic originating from my Tor Exit relays

Have you ever wondered which clearnet web domains (as in not onions) are the most popular among users of The Onion Router project (Tor)? Is there any evidence to support the popular mainstream opinion that Tor is predominantly used by people with malicious and criminal intent? To add some spice to this question in 2026, I’ve aggregated non-identifiable data based on DNS queries made by my five Tor exit relays.

Alpine Linux review – The desktop experience

Alpine Linux is designed to be a small, simple, and secure Linux distribution. For many, it’s the default choice for containerization. In fact, you might already be running an Alpine container somewhere as a part of a deployment without even knowing that it’s there.

Year one of hosting Tor exit relays

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. I’ve been mirroring this blog as an onion site since 2016, so I figured it was time to contribute a little time, effort, and money towards the infrastructure of the Tor network. Besides, running Tor relays has always been on my bucket list, and I am getting old. No more time to waste ;)

The year of the Linux desktop has arrived

After spending the majority of my personal computing adventures on my MacBook Pro last year, I received my final deprogramming session with the latest batch of macOS updates. Surveillance tech has now festered deep inside macOS Sequoia itself with the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple’s promises of groundbreaking privacy protections aside, I employ a strict zero-trust policy when it comes to accessing my personal data.

openSUSE Tumbleweed needs to fix Secure Boot

After my recent rant about Enterprise Linux, the company where I work became a SUSE Linux partner. Therefore, I’m giving Enterprise Linux another go. After initially looking at SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), I decided to go with SUSE’s rolling offering, Tumbleweed.

HTTP/3 on Nginx – Be QUIC or be Dead

The Nginx mainline branch (currently version 1.25.3) has implemented support for HTTP/3 and I want it on my server. The first order of business will be to switch from the nginx stable branch (currently version 1.24.0) to the mainline branch. As Arch Linux provides both Nginx branches in their repository, it’s just a matter of performing a quick drop-in replacement.

Fedora 39 breaks Chromium-based browsers after a Mesa update

I temporarily return to Fedora and am welcomed back by more breakage. The first thing I did after updating and restarting my Fedora laptop was to fire up the Cider app to connect to Apple Music. It immediately croaked with its dying words being Skia shader compilation error. That felt eerily familiar, as I remember facing the same problem on Fedora a few months back.

Should you get an Ubuntu Pro free personal subscription?

Earlier this year, Canonical decided to advertise the arrival of Ubuntu Pro by hooking up the following message in the terminal as users were issuing apt update: “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled: (list of vulnerable installed packages)”. Predictable for anyone but Canonical, confusion ensued.

Proxmox VE - TASK ERROR: CT is locked (snapshot-delete)

During an issue with a defective storage solution, I had temporarily (as in not added to fstab) mounted an external USB disk under /mnt/usb-disk on a Proxmox server to keep the backups flowing. A day and a reboot later, those backups started to fill up the local storage instead with unfortunate consequences. As they say, you really can’t fix stupid.

The official Slackware Linux website is hosted on Ubuntu

A few years ago I speculated in the article “Slackware Linux trivia, history, and things you didn’t know” that slackware.com was being hosted on Slackware Linux 12.0. My assumption was based on the host headers returned from the server. Those headers reveal that the webserver is Apache/2.2.22, coincidentally the last Apache patch ever released for Slackware 12.0. However, it turns out that I was very wrong.