In this post I explain the ins and outs of network booting Raspberry Pis. Some Raspberry Pi models can do this without local persistent storage, and most other modelsc can boot with a minimum of data from an SD card. The operating system used is Arch Linux ARM. After booting the system and as long as it has a network connection to a server hosting the Pi's file system, it can be used as any other Pi that was booted from an SD card.
Installing Arch Linux is not really that lengthy as the wiki makes it seem to be. What makes the official installation guide daunting is that it tries to keep track of every little aspect that could be relevant in obscure or rare situations. It provides a good reference manual for those who already have some experience with Arch Linux, but this puts those who lack experience in an uncomfortable position. To learn more about the installation process to understand the official guide better it is required to finish an installation at least once. That is where this quick start guide comes into play. Instead of looking at all possible scenarios the scope is much more narrow, limited to a virtual machine. It makes the whole installation process more clear by limiting all the executed commands to a single overview.
Recently I had to work around some network filtering systems. One of the tools I use is OpenVPN. What makes OpenVPN great is its flexibility. Either host the server yourself or use one from a third-party VPN provider, of which most support OpenVPN. An issue with having many (third-party) OpenVPN configuration files is that they are not personalized. Sometimes you really need to add some additional options to increase security, but editing many files to allow easy switching of VPN end-points is never fun. There is a solution for this: 'stacked' VPN configurations. One OpenVPN instance can load its configuration from multiple configuration files.
In this post a brief overview is given for requesting and automated renewal of (free!) Let's Encrypt SSL/TLS certificates in Arch Linux. Such certificates can be useful for web, mail and a plethora of different web services that can be secured with SSL/TLS.
This is a short post about controlling Android TV using a Logitech Harmony infrared remote control using Flirc.