SYSLOG_25-W01
1. pfSense and the Mystery of Blocked Factorio
I spent way too many hours wrestling with port forwarding on pfSense to get a Factorio server working. On paper, everything was correct: DNS resolved properly, the local LAN was fine, and I had NAT rules that looked perfectly normal. Yet I couldn’t connect from outside. I tried packet captures, combed through firewall logs, and even suspected that my ISP might be blocking the specific ports in question. No definitive answer emerged. The final nail in the coffin for my efforts was getting no success after following these instructions.
After a lot of hair-pulling and friends wondering "Is the server up yet?!", I decided to set up the service on an Oracle VM instead, where I have a couple of virtual machines running BBC Radio Relay. That took just over an hour. One weird twist: Tailscale on my own desktop was interfering with normal traffic. Once I disabled Tailscale, everything worked right away on Oracle’s side. This experience reinforced that sometimes pivoting to a different host—especially in the cloud—can save you from hours of local router tangles.
I'll write more about the Factorio setup another time.
2. Void Linux + ZBM + Wayland + Auto-Login + Nvidia = Pain
Later in the week, I returned to a completely different project: installing Void Linux on ZFS Boot Menu and building a minimal KDE desktop environment. I'll write about ZBM another time - I'm working on an install script that follow the official instructions as close as possible while also adding some flair.
My first attempt with Void on ZBM was back in September:
xbps-install kde5 kde5-base-apps xorg
ln -s /etc/sv/dbus /var/service/
ln -s /etc/sv/sddm /var/service/
And that was it. It worked! But... I really don't like SDDM and since the root disk is protected by full-disk encrpytion there's no reason not to have auto-login straight to the desktop. I also wanted Wayland and have an Nvidia GPU which made things harder.
From the base install:
I installed the most basic packages: xbps-install kde-plasma konsole dolphin sddm and enabled SDDM: ln -s /etc/sv/sddm /var/service
But I kept getting errors when I tried to run SDDM manually. I sought some assistance over IRC on the libera#voidlinux channel (my first real attempt at using IRC at all) and persisted after getting some new ideas. Installed xorg-server but then got a blank screen. Tried to run dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland but got a "Could not create wayland socket" error (caused by logging in as root and then su zenodo - not a normal workflow but it had been while I was trying to troubleshoot other things).
I enabled dbus (now getting a black screen) and then installed xorg. I realized that a few additional xorg components (xorg-minimal, xf86-input-libinput) were necessary. Once I installed them and enabled SDDM, I could at least get into KDE—albeit a bit glitchy in a VM environment.
What a mess.
I fed all of my notes into ChatGPT's O1 model to see what it would do and here is my summary of O1's weirdly formatted notes and instructions:
xbps-install -Syu xbps-install -S dbus ln -s /etc/sv/dbus /var/service xbps-install -S void-repo-nonfree xbps-install -S xorg-server xf86-input-libinput # Potentially Needed: xorg OR xorg-minimal xbps-install -S kde-plasma # (inc. plasma-desktop, sddm, xdg-portal, dbus, elogind) xbps-install -S konsole dolphin kate echo "-a zenodo" >> /etc/sv/agetty-tty1/conf # After logging in: dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland
I'll try these instructions soon. I can always just install everything and then try removing things one-by-one.