How to install libreboot on a ThinkPad W500

February 10, 2019 12 minute read

I got a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 from www.2dehands.be for a nice price.

Actually, I got it a couple of months back but I didn’t have time to play with it and it took some time to get some parts from Aliexpress.

The Thinkpad W500 is probably the most powerful system that is compatible with Libreboot, it has a nice high-resolution display with a 1920 x 1200 resolution which is even a higher screen resolution than the Full HD resolution used on most new laptops today.

Security

Keep in mind that the core duo CPU does not get microcode updates from Intel for [spectre and meltdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability). There is no solution (currently) for spectre 3a - Rogue System Register Read - CVE-2018-3640 and Spectre 4 - Speculative Store Bypass CVE-2018-3639 without a microcode update.

Binary blobs are bad. Having a closed source binary-only piece of software on your system is not only unacceptable for Free Software activists it also makes it more difficult to review what it really does and makes it more difficult to review it for security concerns.

Having your system vulnerable is also a bad thing of course. Can’t wait to get a computer system with an open CPU architecture like RISC-V.

Preparation

Setting up OpenStack-Ansible All-In-One on a Centos 7 system

January 21, 2019 6 minute read

Openstack is a nice platform to deploy an Infrastructure as a service and is a collection of projects but it can be a bit difficult to setup. The documentation is really great if you want to setup openstack by hand and there are a few openstack distributions that makes it easier to install it.

Ansible is a very nice tool for system automatisation and is one that’s easier to learn.

Wouldn’t be nice if we could make the openstack installation easier with ansible? That’s exactly what Openstack-Ansible does.

In this blog post we’ll setup “an all-in-one” openstack installation on Centos 7. The installer will install openstack into lxc containers and it’s nice way to learn how openstack works and how to operate it.

Preparation

best wishes 2019

January 2, 2019 less than 1 minute read

How to configure DNS-over-TLS on OPNsense

December 9, 2018 2 minute read

DNS-over-TLS

In my previous blog posts we configured Stubby on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

In this blog article we’ll configure DNS-over-TLS with Unbound on OPNsense. Both Stubby and Unbound are written by NLnet.

DNS Privacy with Stubby (Part 2 FreeBSD)

October 7, 2018 8 minute read

FreeBSD

In my previous blog article we install on GNU/Linux which is my main desktop operation system. My NAS and the services that are required to be always running are on FreeBSD.

In this arcticle we will setup Stubby - the DNS Privacy Daemon - on FreeBSD.