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Programming

Setting up Fedora with a Windows VM

This is a short guide on how to setup Fedora with a Windows VM via libvirt, optionally sharing a RAID-1 Btrfs volume from the host to the Windows guest via SAMBA. I'm assuming you are coming from Windows.

Reasons why you might want to do this:

  • Windows is quite annoying.
  • With Looking Glass, you can passthrough your GPU to the Windows guest and enjoy native graphics performance.
  • The Btrfs filesystem allows snapshotting, checksumming and multi-disk RAID with an unequal number/size of drives.
  • You can snapshot the entire Windows VM and revert to it anytime.

GPU Power Crashes

For a few months, while running my Windows 11 VM with a GPU passthrough-ed, I was getting random reboots/screen hangs. There was a clear pattern - the reboots/hangs occured whenever I launched a resource-intensive application on the VM, such as a game.

In an effort to trace down the problem, I looked through dmesg (truncated for brevity) for various boots:

Music Management with Navidrome, DSub and Beets

Previously on Windows, I was using MediaMonkey to manage my music. It offered wireless syncing (over LAN) for the associated Android client, and worked well.

When I switched to Linux, I had to look for a replacement. I wanted a solution that was free and open-source, could be self-hosted on a server, and supported features such as bookmarks, playlists and transcoding (for clients not supporting certain formats).

Self Hosted VPN with Tailscale

Having your own VPN can be useful for bypassing geo-restrictions and censorship, as your IP address is that of the exit node. Your traffic is also encrypted and this protects you against sniffing attacks when using public WiFi.

However most VPN services are paid. So if you have a physical server/VPS running somewhere, why not use that?

Tailscale is an awesome open-source VPN service which lets you create a secure peer-to-peer network between your devices. It's built on the open-source Wireguard protocol which is faster than the IPsec and OpenVPN protocols.