https://www.ranvier.net/ Recent content on Ranvier Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Fri, 13 Feb 2026 01:56:34 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/delulu-the-jb470/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 01:56:34 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/delulu-the-jb470/ Dreams of Van Life Ever since I moved to Seattle, I have been passively in search of a van that I would be able to use for van life (which I would pursue at some indeterminate date…). I had my eyes on Ford Transits, Sprinters (ouch! expensive!), Delicas (for a more compact option). Before the Element got absolutely toasted by a semi truck on I-5 (RIP Elley), I even humored the idea of converting her into a compact+functional car camper setup. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/siriously-late-hiking/ Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/siriously-late-hiking/ It was a beautiful chewsday when, hard at work delivering shareholder value, I received a text. Originally, I had planned to go do some stairmaster with Danny later that day. However, this text from Richmond informed me that he had desires to hike. But not just any hike - we were to ascend the legendary Mount Si. Well… why do stairmaster when you can do the real thing?! We headed out after work and collected our hiking gear, along with some delicious Bahn Mi sandwiches from Saigon Deli in U-District. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/climbing-all-the-volcanos/ Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/climbing-all-the-volcanos/ When I moved out here, my friend Justin Chen convinced me to take a mountaineering course with him. Little did I know the trajectory it would take the next 6 months of my life on… It all started with Baker: This was the final step in the basic mountaineering course (BMC) we took with the Skagit Alpine Club. This club reminded me fondly of OAR, with its volunteers teaching the course and the small community feeling. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/frosty-friends-falling-at-foster-falls/ Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/frosty-friends-falling-at-foster-falls/ https://ufadventure.com/dt3919 Frequently, fervently, we had fostered fantasies of flocking to Foster Falls, but foiled by fickle forecasts we flocked to more frequented frontiers closer to Florida. Finally, fortune favored us, facilitating fulfillment at Foster Falls! Ok, I’ll stop with the alliteration :^) This was a great trip. I climbed routes harder than those I’d been willing to try in months prior, the company was superb, the food was fantastic (last one! https://www.ranvier.net/blog/why-ranvier/ Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/why-ranvier/ My sophomore year of high school, I was taking AP Psychology on Florida Virtual School (FLVS). We had a class in-person at my school where we could work on this class during school hours. Yeah… Good luck keeping us from doing more interesting things. This was the perfect time for me to learn about TCP/IP networking, Linux, and self-hosting awesomeness. Inspired by the class I was taking, I’d already named my Minecraft server myelin, my homelab server stem, and my Digital Ocean Droplet axon. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/my-backup-system/ Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/my-backup-system/ The times I’ve needed backups the most were when I didn’t have them. I finally got fed up with data loss and went all in on a self-hosted, automated, redundant, and secure backup solution for all my personal devices. Data Sources In my personal arsenal, I’ve got: 1 desktop computer 1 laptop 2 servers 1 phone Each of these has their own set of data that I’d like to be able to recover in the case of any data loss. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/diagnosing-battery-drain-from-syncthing/ Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/diagnosing-battery-drain-from-syncthing/ A Lack of Battery Juice The last thing you want when you don’t have easily accessible AC power is for your easily accessible portable DC power to crap out on you. But on a number of hikes, that’s just what happened to me! I know the whole spiel about cold weather affecting battery life. To avoid this, I keep my phone and portable charger close to by body in my backpack and sometimes on my person. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/2023-homestead-to-co/ Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/2023-homestead-to-co/ What a journey this was… Heavily inspired by the likes of Jeff DePree and his epic adventures, I knew that I wanted to go on a big road trip this summer. Luck have it, my friend and fellow adventurer Henry was working as a whitewater rafting guide in Colorado this summer! These ideas were swirling around in my head in April/May and I still had school to get through. Once that was done, I also realized that having money is nice for, well, living and such. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/linux-encryption-solutions/ Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/linux-encryption-solutions/ Why encrypt? The better question, in my opinion, is why not encrypt? With hardware acceleration for AES being an almost universal feature in modern CPUs, the performance impact of encryption is basically nill and the security benefits are massive. Encryption ensures that, even in the case where an attacker has access to your data, they are not able to do anything useful with it unless they have your encryption keys. Depending on how they get access to this data and in what form the data is in, the usefulness of encryption varies. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/uids-gids-and-docker/ Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/uids-gids-and-docker/ If you’ve ever used Docker before (or any Linux-based containerization for that matter), you may be familiar with the mess it can leave on your filesystem. You start up your web server or database container and soon enough you have weird users like systemd-timesync owning your files. That can’t be right though: you were just running a web server! I’m going to delve into this topic for people who may be unfamiliar with Linux identity services and how containers interact with this model on the host machine, leading to unexpected (and potentially dangerous! https://www.ranvier.net/blog/alpine-docker-container-host/ Thu, 10 Feb 2022 01:33:00 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/alpine-docker-container-host/ I have toyed with Docker for about 4 years now and what I can say is that it has made the process of deploying and maintaining software on my servers easier, more secure, and much more portable. I stuck to Ubuntu for years but started to grow tired with the constant push for snapd, lxc, netplan, etc. on my servers when all I wanted to do was run a few services on Docker. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/rpi-cat-tv/ Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:45:00 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/rpi-cat-tv/ Introduction I want my cat to not be bored while I’m away from my apartment for most of the day. She loves watching videos on my TV but I’m afraid one day she’ll go a step too far and damage it. I decided that I would go to Goodwill and find a cheap monitor/TV for her to use. But damned if I’ll put the video on every time she wants to play with it! https://www.ranvier.net/blog/replacing-if-else-with-dictionaries/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 23:21:00 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/replacing-if-else-with-dictionaries/ A common problem in programming is taking user input and executing a certain piece of code based on that input. An example might look like this: cmd = input() if cmd == "command1": print("You've run command1!") elif cmd == "command2": print("You've run command2!") else: print("Unknown command specified!") Which works fine for small portions of code, but can get pretty cumbersome when the code in the if-else blocks becomes a certain size. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/circumventing-smtp-blocks/ Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/circumventing-smtp-blocks/ I want to setup a mail server. Easy! (some restrictions apply). However, my silly ISP is blocking connections on port 25 (the port for SMTP), incoming and outgoing. Harsh… Given that I don’t want to contact them and go through the trouble of trying to convince them to open it for special ol’ me, I decided that I would simply use my Digital Ocean droplet to route all traffic on port 25 for my mail server. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/12-factor-app/ Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/12-factor-app/ This post was cross-posted from https://cliqteam.com/blog/ci-bootstrap/ I love the problem solving that comes along with programming applications. But I also love the problem solving required to deploy and scale those applications. For the past 10 years of my life, I have invested immense amounts of time into not only learning how to program but how to administer Linux machines and deploy applications onto those machines. My perfectionism has not allowed me to stick with conventional methods and I have only begun to scratch the surface of cloud applications and technologies such as CI/CD, containers, container orchestration, and about a 100 other topics I have to learn about. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/ctf-flask-caching/ Thu, 03 Dec 2020 08:14:05 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/ctf-flask-caching/ This was for a CTF challenge that was completed for the UF student info-security team Basically, because I’m too lazy to go into great detail on this one, the challenge consisted of the following source: #!/usr/bin/env python3 from flask import Flask from flask import request, redirect from flask_caching import Cache from redis import Redis import jinja2 import os app = Flask(__name__) app.config["CACHE_REDIS_HOST"] = "localhost" # app.config["DEBUG"] = False app.config["DEBUG"] = True cache = Cache(app, config={"CACHE_TYPE": "redis"}) redis = Redis("localhost") jinja_env = jinja2. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/wireguard-quickstart/ Thu, 28 May 2020 23:47:53 -0400 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/wireguard-quickstart/ I know! You are a very busy person and taking the time to read my wonderful and extensive tutorials isn’t on your list of priorities :’( Fortunately, I understand and forgive you for this and this section will help you jump right into using Wireguard. Installing Wireguard For Ubuntu >= 19.10, Wireguard comes built right in! Just install the utility scripts: apt install wireguard For older versions of Ubuntu: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wireguard/wireguard sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wireguard If you’d like to see more installation options, check out the offical website. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/ranvier-docker-images/ Sun, 24 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/ranvier-docker-images/ I’m moving up the foodchain! After lots of time invested in making my own Docker images and making some for work as well, I have decided to take them more seriously and give them a proper home here. I have already uploaded a couple of images (one for the BIND9 DNS server and another for various versions of SpigotMC). I’m planning to upload more, including: OpenLDAP Kerberos Portable development environment Bastion server Until then! https://www.ranvier.net/blog/wireguard-appindicator/ Mon, 30 Dec 2019 20:03:30 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/wireguard-appindicator/ At the time of writing, December of 2019, there exists no simple to use graphical interface for managing Wireguard connections as far as I’m concerned. To resolve this issue, I wanted to make an AppIndicator with the following capabilities: View status of Wireguard interface Enable and disable Wireguard interface View and copy the IP address of the interface I also wanted to be able to use this on both Gnome Shell systems and systems with only support for AppIndicators, so the script is able to be used as either a standalone script running in the background or as a Gnome Shell extension. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/note-taking-solutions/ Sun, 29 Dec 2019 21:08:30 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/note-taking-solutions/ Over a course of around 4 years, I have jumped from platform to platform, deperately in search of an elegant and effective digital note taking solution for my personal and professional needs. I needed to find something that would allow me to make messy notes and to-do lists for school while at the same time having a structured, organized system for various professional and personal development projects. Below is a synopsis of my journey in searching for this holy grail as well as my current solution that I have found to work the best. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/home-surveilance-system/ Wed, 25 Dec 2019 22:41:49 -0500 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/home-surveilance-system/ Introduction Depending on where you live in the US, your area can either be considered very nice or appealing to drug addicts. In my case, the latter is more true than the former unfortunately. However, there is one thing that can help to prevent this predicament from impacting our lives too much: technology! Network cameras have become incredibly cheap and I have found that this offbrand IP camera has done a great job thus far. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/useful-software/ Tue, 17 Dec 2019 03:00:27 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/useful-software/ A common theme in this catalogue of software is that most entries here are good looking, lightweight, and easy to install (with Docker). Please send me any suggestions for additions should you have any! Ubuntu Customizations For my personal desktop, I run the latest distribution of Ubuntu, which at the time of writing is 19.10. On here, I have some minor customizations that vastly improve my QoL: Plank - An amazing dock solution that is dead simple and aesthetically pleasing https://www.ranvier.net/blog/wireguard-burner/ Sat, 30 Nov 2019 04:38:51 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/wireguard-burner/ Introduction Have you ever gone to the convenience store and bought a disposable phone as a kid? Maybe not, but I was always fascinated by those kinds of things and I did that! I thought that the idea of having a burner phone was interesting because it was another way to detach your name from whatever communication medium you were using. Nowadays anytime you communicate your name is always tied with that message. https://www.ranvier.net/blog/my-first-post/ Fri, 29 Nov 2019 07:47:55 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/blog/my-first-post/ Every blog should have a first post, so here’s mine! This blog was created in December of 2019 by Jack Polk. In this site, I hope to write about my ongoing, past, and future projects, give tutorials on programming and Linux related systems, and share any useful information I can find. #!/bin/bash echo "Hello world!" exit 0 https://www.ranvier.net/creations/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/creations/ Music Russia (Inspired by Dark Eyes) One (My first song made on SunVox) Cybersecurity Lectures Introduction to Linux Introduction to Networking Introduction to Docker Security https://www.ranvier.net/scratchpad/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.ranvier.net/scratchpad/ These items had nowhere else to live, so here is where they lie SSH Keys Primary Key ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIP4uM0IvauwagmKSpEmHGsOCxKzCwuGqDcEfffIMf+Ou Secondary Key ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIPQpqubp0bSpioFXVlSF6F7F4BVNxyVwL30lMqWCsyf2 Reading List Life at the Bottom Maps of Meaning (IN PROGRESS) Symbols of Transformation The Gulag Archipelago The Time Machine 12 Rules for Life 12 More Rules for Life Thus Spoke Zarathustra Rework The Midnight Library Siddartha (DONE) Тhe Brothers Karamazov Critique of Pure Reason The Little Prince Anarchy, State, and Utopia Wage, Labor, and Capital She’s Not There by Jenny Boylan Caste by Isabel Wilkerson The Origins in History of Consciousness The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas I AM STRANGE LOOP (DONE) Atlas Shrugged Where The Crawdads Sing The Four Agreements Services Public file repository - public.