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All posts by SnowFields

9 months later….

I don’t think I’ve got enough time in my day to blog about why I’ve been silenced by the Police.

October 2023 I was arrested on suspicion of stalking some female who I had never seen in my life apart from when she followed me home and knocked my door. Police invited me in for a voluntary interview which I gladly accepted as I had done nothing wrong. 8pm arrived and I was at my local police station to find out I was under arrest and on way to custody. Police then raided my house at 11:30pm whilst waking my kids to take all my devices (laptops and spare phones) but forgot my server and raspberry pi’s.

During my 20hours behind bars, I was not offered a call to my partner so she was worried sick about me. she had to chase them to find out where I was and questioned where my motorcycle was. They told her it was at my work under CCTV, so my partner made the trip to see if it was safe to find out my bike wasn’t there.

I was interviewed at 2:30pm and had an on duty solicitor with me. She was confused why I was arrested as it seems the female was the one stalking me! Evidence was shown, 1 video of her following me whilst in control of a motor vehicle. I had CCTV footage of her approaching my house and driving past my house on my device they had siezed whilst I was arrested. 5pm the custody Sargent granted me bail with conditions and I was released pending investigation.

I then installed another CCTV and I caught over 30 videos of her approaching my home on a daily basis and even sending her kids/mother down my road. I visited police and opened a case against her, provided evidence. I didn’t hear anything back regarding it and they just kept changing/extending my bail. It caused me and my family so much distress, and was being provoked whilst out.

it was only recently (ish) March when the officer in charge of the case emailed me to say he needs to talk to me regarding the open case. My heart sunk as i was due to answer bail in 18days time, I called him and told me it was NFA! I got off the call and started crying with relief that me and my family can continue with our life!! 7days later I was able to pick up my 2 laptops and 2 phones!!!!

I’m now free to continue with my geek lifestyle and fucking around with servers and general shite. oh if you hadn’t noticed, this website now hosted on alpinelinux. 

I will try to blog more often now ✌️

stressful few months

So following on from my previous post regarding my Dedicated and shower of shit provider, i decided to go back to WholesaleInternet and purchased a Dual Xeon 5150 with 120GB SSD + 1TB SATA with 16GB DDR Ram for a whopping $15 a month. I’ve used WSI on and off for many years and the service hasn’t really let me down, yes they’ve had the odd outage here and there. I can’t complain with just $15 a month or can i? So after 2 months my server was running perfectly fine till on the 5th July i got a notification stating kvm was offline. I waited it out for around 1 hour to see if it was another WSI moment, but it obviously was something a little more serious. Storm over the DC took out power and fucked the backup generator, you can read about it here. It was around 48 hours it took for my server to return, some people wasn’t lucky enough and hardware failed. You get what you pay for i guess? The service has been rock solid since though. *smiles*

AlpineLinux – i have been introduced to this tiny OS by Blosh on IRC. I must admit, it’s very lightweight and very easy to install shit. I think it was using 256mb storage with the OS, nginx and php8 and around 68mb of ram. I mean wow, if you can find a very small cheap VPS with poor specs. Get AlpineLinux installed and let the funtimes roll 🙂 debating switching this VPS from NetBSD to AlpineLinux but seem’s to much hassle at the moment.

Next blog, will be in 45930 hours or 3 months. Whichever is closest

Dedicated Server RANT!

Well it’s been a very long time since I’ve posted on my blog. Work has been keeping me dead busy and this vps (netbsd) has also been keeping me on my toes.

my rant today is about a dedicated server provider called oneprovider.com who I was told they are really good. I purchased a €22 a month server (which they resell from ovh) and had to wait 3days for delivery when it’s instant if I purchase directly from ovh? makes senses to me. After being away from home I was unable to install much due to no computer, upon on return today I requested IPMI access to install debian (yeah java didn’t like me) which failed so I clicked reinstall via control panel and opted for CentOS and after 90 minutes it hasn’t reinstalled and no my server is offline.

The support is very slow (around 11hrs for a response) which is absolutely shocking. I’m debating if they will issue a refund or open a dispute on PayPal. If you are after a budget server I would avoid Oneprovider.com and choose Wholesaleinternet.net

Goodbye Raspberry Pi’s

well it’s been a very long time since i’ve even blogged, in fact the last time it was with regards to FreeBSD breaking and swapping to arch linux. The raspberry Pi 4 continued to perform really well however i decided to treat myself for Christmas and purchased a lenovo thinkcentre m72e tiny from ebay for £35. It come with 320GB hdd and 4GB of ram and an i3 processor

Upon arrival, i was faced with an issue straight away and it required a male to male VGA cable to use for a monitor (HDMI don’t exist) so jumped on ebuyer paid £12 for one which arrived and was male to female. I didn’t have the time to send back, so i lost £12 and decided to look local to me. Screwfix to the rescue and was £8 however due to Christmas it was delayed and was ready on the 29th December i was very excited.

Plugged it all in, installed Debian (Network Install) and after reboot i was greeted with Error 1962: No Operating System Found and after sometime or more like 6 hours trying i gave up and accepted defeat. I continued to read up on the error more and people mentioned about turning secure boot off in bios (wasn’t an option) and others mentioned the UEFI boot manager missing ” Windows Boot Manager ” after more in depth investigation and a 12 hour night shift the following day i downloaded and installed windows 7. Surprise Surprise it booted to desktop and work as it should, so thought lets try Debian again knowing if it fails we can revert to windows 7 again and do more investigation.

It worked, Debian installed and now running KVM which is running 2 x vps for now. This website is on one vps running Debian 10.x and my local network DNS server is running on a very small (128Mb ram) netbsd vps

Next reboot is planned when i order more ram and potentially power UPS, anyways 2:17am and i’m off to work 🙁

Broken FreeBSD

Well that didn’t go to plan and a simple what I thought upgrade ended up breaking my entire OS. I had some spare time so thought I’d run pkg upgrade on my freebsd raspberry pi 3b+ hosting snowfields.me and all packages upgraded without any drama. Sweet? no far from.

It started with nginx not starting, then upon inspection it complained about openssl mismatch. It was saying I was running an older version yet pkg upgrade supplied a newer version?? 🤔 by this time I was puzzled and running out of ideas. Snowfields.me was offline and I needed to act pretty fast, so rather than risk breaking FreeBSD for the second time I installed Archlinux on the same SD card.  Install went really well, after installation of Nginx/php/mysql/wordpress i noticed the performance  was worse than FreeBSD.  I attempted to swap to the Raspberry Pi 4 however failed to boot so thought i’d reinstall ArchLinux using the RPi 4.

Here we are running Arch on the Raspberry Pi 4 and performance is brilliant, I need to look into what causes the FreeBSD problem on my spare Raspberry Pi