WirelessMoves – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

Moving to Euro-Office – Part 1 – Nextcloud AIO

About two years ago, I changed from Collabora Online Office in my Nextcloud setup to OnlyOffice, as the advantages for my use case were overwhelming. It wasn’t an easy decision and I was always a bit uneasy about the move from a political and open source point of view. It looks like I’ve not been the only one, and a new industry initiative was founded a few months ago to fork OnlyOffice into Euro-Office for a fully open source and sovereign cloud productivity stack. Have a look here for the reasons behind the fork.

When I first heard the announcement I thought it would take quite a bit of time before Euro-Office would be production ready. Fortunately, it became available much sooner than I thought and there’s a ready to work with Docker image available to be integrated with Nextcloud. Perfect I thought and gave it a try with one of my Nextcloud instances that is based on Nextcloud AIO (All-in-One).

Moving from Virtual to Physical is even Easier – DD does the Magic

A few weeks ago I had a post on a process I’ve put together to move an Ubuntu installation from a virtual machine to a physical notebook. The core of the procedure was to use Clonezilla in the VM to create a backup and then to restore the backup on an empty SSD in a notebook. While this works well, I’ve now discovered another option that is even simpler: Create a raw disk image of the VM’s disk and write that to a USB attached SSD. And that’s it! In practice, that’s done with 4 shell commands:

Shrinking the System Partition and a VM Disk Image

In the previous posts on the topic I’ve been looking at how disk images can be downloaded and uploaded to virtual machines in data centers. Depending on the data center owner, this is more or less straight forward. There is one tricky thing however, independently of the data center provider: What if the VM in the new data center has less disk space than the size of the disk image downloaded from another data center? The solution: If less space is used on the disk image than what is available in the new data center, one can shrink the system partition in the disk image. Once that is done, the size of the virtual disk image itself can be reduced. While expanding partitions and disk images is easy, shrinking them is a bit tricky. After a bit of trial and error I’ve put together the following procedure:

VM Liberation – Downloading the Disk of a Running VM from Hetzner

In a previous post I’ve had a look at how I could download the disk image of a VM running on a Netcup server and run it in a VM on my own bare metal server at home. The procedure is straight forward, because Netcup offers an option for this in the admin interface. A cool experience and I wanted to do the same thing with one of my VMs running in a Hetzner data center. Unfortunately, they have no such option. But then I remembered that a colleague told me a few months ago how that he downloaded the disk image of a running VM, so I gave the procedure a try myself. While the procedure requires a few steps, each one is pretty much straight forward to do:

Netplan and How To Get eth0 Back!

Once upon a time eth0 was eth0 on Linux. But then, some people thought it would be a good idea to rename the network interface on boot to correspond and map the name to the physical interface. In many cases, that is a good idea, but for virtual machines that suddenly and miraculously change the physical interface when the bare metal server config is changed, this approach is a bit of a pain. Recently, however, I noticed that if the network is configured via netplan you can get eth0 back!

Netcup – Part 3: Smooth Packet Jitter

In part 1 of this series I’ve used this blog as a quick test of Netcup’s tiny and cheap VM offer that I have come quite fond of in the meantime. So it was time to move a ‘real’ application to it I was running on a more expensive VM in a different data center: My TURN server for which I have quite stringent packet jitter requirements.

Netcup – Part 2: Up/Downloading Disk Images

In the previous post I described my first experiences with Netcup and that the server management interface held a pleasant surprise I would describe in a follow up post. So here it is: Uploading and downloading disk images!

Netcup – Part 1: Tiny VMs For Cheap

Over the years, I’ve moved more and more services I was hosting on Hetzner to other infrastructure providers due to pricing and interconnection issues. These days, only 2 small VMs remain but are now under scrutiny as well, as Hetzner has significantly increased prices for them. To make matters worse, such VMs are still advertised but often not available when I actually want to book them. So it was time to look for something else for small workloads that don’t require a lot of CPU power, RAM and storage.

Scaleway Bare Metal Server: Removing the RAID

Back in 2024 I moved most of my services from a bare metal server in a data center of one provider to a bare metal server in a data center of another provider. In my case, the data center I migrated to was Scaleway and like pretty much everyone else, their bare metal servers are configured by default with two drives and a RAID for redundancy. As I required more storage then the RAID could provide, I removed the RAID configuration after I installed Ubuntu as the host operating system. You can find the somewhat complicated details here. But it turns out there is actually a much simpler way: A custom partitioning config file!

Opus and the Jitter Buffer – OTT Voice Observations – Part 5

In the previous posts on this topic I have taken a look at ‘over the top’ voice calling, how much jitter IP packets have when they arrive at the destination and which codec is used. Most over the top voice call options seem to use WebRTC as a general framework for the voice call, and WebRTC in turn uses the free Opus codec to transmit the speech path. Opus in turn uses the NetEQ jitter buffer framework to adapt to changing network conditions. So what does that mean?