SR-IOV on a Lenovo M720q (Proxmox & Mellanox)

Preamble So, why build a firewall with Proxmox as a hypervisor and not install bare-metal directly? Well, i ran OPNSense bare-metal for years on a Sophos XG105. It was stable and running fine. The Sophos also had an usb serial port, which was very useful for console access. Unfortunaly, the system began to show its age and performance was not sufficient anymore. When there was a lot of network traffic on other VLANs, I had intermittent packet loss and lag spikes in video and voice calls....

October 19, 2024 · Jan Brand

NetworkManager: Start script only on certain connections

I backup my laptop using Syncoid from the Sanoid package to my homeserver. Because I don’t want to do this manually (e.g. forget it), I was looking for a way to automate the whole thing. A systemd-timer seems like a simple solution at first, but the system is not online all the time and also switches between networks. Also my backup destination is not accessible from the outside without VPN. So I need a solution which only runs if the laptop connects to the home network....

April 17, 2021 · Jan Brand

Fritzbox Recovery

For testing purpose i have an old Fritz!Box 7360 flashed with OpenWRT. For $reasons I needed to reflash the original firmware. Unfortunaly the Recovery tool didn’t work with my model, because it used to be provider branded by EWE. There is a rebranded Version of the tool by EWE, but this didn’t work either. So i researched a little and it turns out you can flash the firmware manually via the ADAM bootloader, just like OpenWRT....

January 17, 2021 · Jan Brand

Coreboot on T430

About a year ago I replaced the horrible TN display of my boyfriend’s T430 with a Full-HD IPS and in the same move I replaced the LAN Ethernet USB Board due to a bent USB port. Because the laptop had to be completely disassembled anyway, I decided to give Coreboot a try. This blogpost serves as a memory support, if I should decide to flash another laptop. I’ve used a CH341A programmer....

October 22, 2020 · Jan Brand