DNS magic

Before my old server died and I had to start over, I would have to access it via http://debby.local (debby was its hostname) when at home on the same network as it, and http://codinghobbit.no-ip.org when elsewhere. This wouldn’t have been much of an issue, except WordPress has the annoying “feature” where all links are absolute, i.e. http://codinghobbit.no-ip.org/link/to/stuff instead of /link/to/stuff. I had to install a plugin to convert all absolute URLs to relative URLs, and it worked okay. Another annoyance was that when giving people links to pages on my site, I would have to change the debby.local to codinghobbit.no-ip.org and vice-versa when clicking links to my site from other places. With the change of server, I figured it was time to fix the issue and do things right. First, I just added an entry to the hosts file on my laptop, which worked fine, but only for that computer. I wanted a more general solution that would work for anything connected to the network. I set up my little server to also act as a DNS server using dnsmasq, which reads the hosts file and uses that as it’s configuration. I then set the servers main and primary DNS to be 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, google’s DNS servers. The next step was to set the router to use my server as it’s DNS server, instead of whatever the ISP provided. Once I had everything set up, it all worked perfectly. Now I can use the same address no matter where I’m connecting from, and WordPress’s absolute URLs work fine.

EDIT: While this worked fine for codinghobbit.no-ip.org, where I didn’t have any subdomains, it doesn’t work now as I want to be able to add subdomains and such to my site. I now have just added address=/ivoah.net/192.168.1.32 to my dnsmasq.conf, which works beautifully

My blog is back

So, you may have noticed (or not, since nobody really reads this) that my blog died a few months ago. This was due to my trusty iMac G3 that had been powering my humble site finally kicking the bucket after around 16 years of service (not all to me). Luckily, I had my Mac Mini that I no longer used, so I loaded Debian 8 up on it and went on my way. Unfortunately, along with the iMac the hard drive that my site was on died also. Thankfully, archive.org had copy of my most important blog post (How to install Debian on a TI-Nspire) on their Wayback Machine. I set up a new blog using AnchorCMS, but didn’t like it very much. It stayed around for a while, because I was too lazy to change back to WordPress. Yesterday, I decided I had had enough of Anchor and switched to WordPress, and made a few other enhancements to the site (mostly benefiting myself for easier dev). In order to keep old links to the Nspire post working, I manually edited the ID number of the post, so it matched what it was on my old blog. If you read all this, thanks for taking your time, and please post a comment telling me that I’m not just shouting into an empty internet. I might post what I did with DNS stuff to make things easier on myself in a few days.

How to install Debian Linux on a TI-Nspire

DISCLAIMER: I AM IN NO WAY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING THAT MAY HAPPEN TO YOUR CALCULATOR OR COMPUTER AS A RESULT OF FOLLOWING THIS GUIDE

Video

These instructions are written for use on a computer running Debian (If you don’t have a computer running Debian you can use Virtual Box). Steps with a “~” in front will take a while. If you use a Raspberry Pi, you can skip installing qemu-user-static and binfmt-support, and skip step 5

You will need:

  • A TI-Nspire CX running a version of TI-OS supported by Ndless
  • A flash drive. The flash drive should ideally be at least 2GB, but 1GB might work.
  • A Mini-B OTG USB cable.
  • A powered USB hub if you want to plug anything else into the calculator.

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