WirelessMoves – Page 4 – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

HDD Performance – Part 1 – Huge Files on a New 20TB Drive

My data heap keeps growing and I do have a good multi-layer and multi-location backup strategy. Offline and off-site storage is the motto of the day, which requires hard disks with large capacities so data can be physically moved. So far, I used several 8 TB hard disks to which I would sync the data from various sources. I’ve come to a point however, where 8 TB is no longer enough and incidentally, I noticed a significant slow down during my backup procedures. So I bought my first 20 TB drive which, so far, performs very nicely. But I really do wonder why my 8 TB drives seem to have slowed down so much while that new shiny 20 TB drive (still?) performs much better. So it was time to do some benchmark tests with different drives and real world data so I can see how new drives perform with my data and analyze performance of existing drives. But why do I care? Because it makes a huge difference if 10 TB of data is moved to or from a disk drive at an average of 50 MB/s or 200 MB/s. At 50 MB/s, moving such an amount of data requires 55 hours, while at 200 MB/s it only takes 13 hours. And we are not even talking 20 TB yet. You see where this goes…

500 Mbps Bandwidth Throttling – Part 2

In the previous post, I’ve had a look at how a high speed data transmission is throttled to 500 Mbps between two data centers in different countries. In this post, I’ll have a look how the TCP sequence- and transmission window graphs look like for the same throttling scenario when I downloaded data from my server over an FTTH fiber line in Paris.

500 Mbps Bandwidth Throttling – Part 1

A few months ago, I moved my services such as this blog from a bare metal server in a data center in Finland to another bare metal server in France. One drawback of the move was that the bandwidth to the server is limited to 500 Mbps instead of the 1 Gbps the network interface could provide. And indeed, the data center operator does enforce the 500 Mbps limit in the downlink direction. Recently, I wondered how that is actually done in practice and had a closer look with Wireshark. As you can see above, the result is quite interesting!

Bucket Watching – S3 at Hetzner and Scaleway

I’m old school, I like locally attached block devices for data storage. Agreed, we are living in the age of cloud, but so far, the amount of data I store cloud at home and in data centers could always be placed on block devices, i.e. flash drives directly connected to that server. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking a bit about how to store images and videos in the cloud and how to upload and synchronize such data from different devices. That means that a few hundred gigabyte will definitely not do anymore, we are quickly talking about TBs here. Locally attached or network block storage in a data center of such a magnitude is quite expensive, we are talking 50 to 100 euros a month per TB. But perhaps there is another option? Many cloud providers also offer S3 compatible object storage today at one tenth of the cost, i.e. €6 per TB per month. Could that be an alternative?

Quantum Safe – Some Thoughts

There is quite a bit of momentum in the industry right now to prepare for the day when quantum computers have become powerful enough to break today’s authentication- and encryption algorithms. Here’s a video that explains the issue to a general audience. All of this got me thinking about what that means for my data, particularly the data I exchange with my self-hosted cloud services today. So here are some thoughts on the topic, to be revisited from time to time as the topic comes up again.

Note Taking with Joplin

While listening to talks at conferences, I tend to take notes either with pen and paper or on my phone or notebook with the Nextcloud note app. While pen and paper notes can be structured nicely, the notes often don’t make it to my digital archive later on and are thus pretty much lost. Hence, they are only useful during the event and perhaps a few days after. Using the Nextcloud notes app is better in this regard, but I can’t quite get my head around how to produce structured markup text. Then, back in summer, I saw someone using an app during a conference that supports structured text input with markup characters: Joplin. It looked interesting, and I finally managed to give the app a try on my notebook and phone during 38c3 at the end of 2024 for taking notes during talks. So let’s have a look how that went.

Wireguard – Ubuntu 24.04 Client

And I’m back with yet another post on Wireguard. After Ubuntu 22.04 has left some mixed feelings when it came to Wireguard, I was positively surprised to see that Wireguard has been finally integrated into Ubuntu 24.04’s GUI. So let’s see if the shortcomings the command line tools have brought with them in previous Ubuntu versions have also been addressed.

Wireguard – Ubuntu 22.04 Client

After setting up a Wireguard VPN Server, the next step was of course to use it with my notebook. Even though it’s 2025, I’m (still) running Ubuntu 22.04 for cross-familiy OS compatibility. Even though Wireguard has been around for quite some years now, Ubuntu 22.04 does not come with native Wireguard NetworkManager support. However, the Debian repository contains at least a number of Wireguard command line tools to bring up a connection. So let’s have a look at those.

Ubuntu 24.04, Virtualbox and the GPU

Another 2 years have come and gone and Ubuntu 24.04 has now been the new Long Term Support (LTS) version for half a year. To plan my eventual migration on my notebook, I’ve been installing 24.04 in a VM running on two different Ubuntu 22.04 hosts. It’s good to see that it works, but the default installation settings end up in a frozen screen and some manual tweaking is required.

Wireguard – A Server With Docker

My OpenVPN installations are aging a bit and every time I go from one major operating system version on the server to the next, it takes some effort to adapt the installation. As I am coming closer to such a point again, I was wondering if I should rather spend my time on a different approach. In recent years, an interesting alternative has gained popularity: Wireguard. Now that Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop comes with built-in Wireguard client support, I thought I’d have another look and see how much effort would be required setting up a Wireguard VPN server.