Viewing profile — astralbijection

> An archive of files and directories is in itself not a program. Okay, but you can make the same argument to say that ELF files aren't programs in and of themselves either. In fac…

This one is an interpreter for CPIO files.

... I think you're reading a bit much into it. It's less that I couldn't afford to pay that, and more that I didn't want to pay that, and iterating on the solution I used to dodge …

I did learn about systemctl switch-root after finishing my kexec solution, but I think if you're at the point of reimaging a server over the network, you probably don't care enough…

Does it make it more cursed that the distro was built off of NixOS Anywhere, and then it theseus shipped NixOS Anywhere out of it?

To be honest, even this has plenty of room to go down. I get the feeling I could have squeezed a couple more MB off if I had actually cut things off of the default Nixpkgs busybox,…

Part 2 presents a fully automated proof of concept that does all of this: https://astrid.tech/2026/03/24/2/how-to-pass-secrets-between...

From what it sounds like, because you have a console and therefore aren't dependent on SSHD not getting overwritten, you can just dd the live running system here?

That script sounds extremely unhinged, and I mean it as a compliment :) Without spoiling too much, the command at the very end of the series does something adjacent to this.

It does get linked at the very bottom, though admittedly it could be made clearer. https://astrid.tech/2026/03/24/1/swap-out-the-root-before-bo...

All of those things get covered in parts 2, 3, and 4 :)

I was curious about that myself, so I've updated the article with the results of some quick research. TL;DR: in 2010 it seemed like they'd keep it, but now, China can get rid of it…

Adding onto that, from my understanding of the political situation, China has been repeatedly affirming that the country of Taiwan is not a country, but is actually a rogue provinc…

Yeah, that was oversight. I typed up this thing in the span of a few hours and I was so caught up with the fall of the Soviet Union that I had forgotten about Hong Kong.