Paying Down Technical Debt
The never ending back of the house saga continues.
Things are slower in December with the holidays coming, so I’ve been dealing with what could loosely be described as “technical debt issues” and it’s coming along nicely. I will summarize for the sake of those who also have tech support duties.
Proxmox 8.1.3 is pretty slick, I like it.
Open Semantic Search was getting retired, but now it’s going to linger, thanks to a chance encounter with a Debian 10.5 ISO.
Ubuntu Budgie 23.10 has not offended me yet, but I am gonna hold till 24.04 comes out before any major changes.
Qubes 4.2.0rc5 is now running Authy, Discord, Maltego, Signal, and Telegram on my backup $200 HP Z420 workstation.
Alpine Linux is a diminutive distro that’s perfect for small headless appliance work. I can just use Ubuntu server for firewall VMs but some of you are working with very limited machines, so this may enable you to get going on the gear you already own.
And here’s what’s left to do:
VPN services on Qubes are constantly discussed but there is no definitive howto for it, and we need one that will do Wireguard to both Mullvad and Proton.
Qubes will require the ability to connect a USB tethered phone to a firewall VM, and I fear this is going to mean an additional piece of hardware in the mix, which is NOT needed for VirtualBox.
Qubes defaults to the profoundly crippled LVM, there is a third party ZFS solution, but for the collective good I think the BTRFS option in the Custom install is the right choice.
Qubes backup and restore must work smoothly, I have all the bits I need to try this, just gotta churn through it.
I have not done calls with Signal, nor do I know how to record activity in a window using OBS Studio.
I know next to nothing about Trusted Platform Module but it looks like I’m about to learn.
I didn’t intend that to be a Qubes specific section, but I guess if I go one step further I will be converting my desktop to it. I will need to round up funds for an older Dell Precision Xeon laptop and see if I can create a tolerable mobile Qubes solution. It also looks like I have the rationale to replace one of my Z420s with a Z440 for the sake of TPM 2.0.
Summaries of this work are going to end up here in Tool Time but for the day to day grind I got busy on the Qubes forum. The project is an absolute riot of innovation but the community is taking it in many directions that were never envisioned at the start. It’s not just “a reasonably secure operating system”, it enables a lot of experimentation in the same way Linux and VirtualBox do. And this means the documentation of the specific set of use cases we have here varies from fragmented to non-existent. I suspect I’m going to end up writing a bit in this area, but this is just my first week.