systemd soft reboot I wanted write about a brand new feature in systemd 254 that has got me very excited, this feature is soft reboot which is described as: systemd-soft-reboot.service is a system service that is pulled in by soft-reboot.target and is responsible for performing a userspace-only reboot operation. When invoked, it will send the SIGTERM signal to any processes left running (but does not follow up with SIGKILL, and does not wait for the processes to exit).

What VPN’s? One of the big businesses on the internet are VPN (Virtual Private Network) services, but the ones you normally see advertised (Privacy VPN’s) are not what I want to write about today. The VPN services I want to write about are Remote access VPN’s, as per the name the purpose of these VPN services are to securely access remote device and networks. These can be needed in lots of different situations from OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturer) needing to support a machine on the other side of the country or a utility provider with hundreds of individual sites, normally these sites will have a little cellular router or on the odd occasion the site will have a local office network where the IT team will want to manage access.

NOTE:When I wrote this post I worked for an Emerson distributor, while this makes me more familiar with the Emerson offering this is my personal blog and thus these are my own thoughts and not my employers. But I am limited in what I can talk about with regards to Emerson due to restrictions imposed on me. One thing that has gotten me really excited about the Industrial Automation space in the last couple of years is the new generation of PLC’s that are expanding what we can do with PLC’s.

Following up my previous post on nebula and the two big things that were outstanding were getting DNS over nebula and setting the default route through nebula, Well now I have figured out the DNS side and will be sharing that with you today. Update 15/08/2023 Due to changes in systemd-networkd the following need to be added, this is reflected in the below examples KeepConfiguration=yes What does not work Now I could just put a DNS server listening on a device connected to nebula but I really wanted to include the built in DNS functionality you can enable in a lighthouse so that I don’t have to remember nebula IP addresses (with being in control of the addressing on all these networks you think I would have aligned all the IP addresses).

I have been using OpenVPN for my remote access for a while now and while it works well enough the newer options are very attractive and solve a couple of issues with OpenVPN. I have four use cases for my VPN which are: Connecting remote sites back to my central server. Managing remote sites from central site. Access central services while roaming. Protecting my traffic while on untrusted sites roaming. After looking at the different options I decided nebula was the most interesting, something I could host myself (as I was doing with OpenVPN) and should be able to address my four use cases (I think).

This post will go over the process I took to make this website for those curious or wanting to go through the process themselves. Broadly the path was purchase a domain, get email for that domain functioning, create a repository in Source Hut for the site and learn how to use a static site generator to create the website. Self hosting background Before I get in to the process I should highlight my experience and background so people do not think I started from zero, I have spent the past two years learning to self host my own services where possible with docker, which admittedly was running in Docker For Desktop on a Windows 10 machine using WSL2, these services include my own music server, baby tracker, RSS reader and a Pihole to name a few.

This is my first Blog post so as is tradition for anything software I would like to say Hello World!