I recall hearing that there’s a Debian install for Qnap devices. I’ve been considering reimaging an old Qnap with Debian and Minio for backups.

Edit: Found it https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/QNAP

How do you decide what’s for Terraform and what’s for Ansible?

Similar to others, I do this but the reverse direction. I have a Pi with HDD at a friend’s house. On a timer, it wakes up at 3am, boots to a VPN and initiates an rsync (pull) with it’s twin Pi at my place. When the sync is done, it powers down or the timer cuts power at 9am.

Other than clock drift due to power outages, I’ve had no issues.

I have a directory that i can put scripts into and the remote Pi will execute anything in this directory after the sync and before the shutdown. Logs from the rsync or scripts are pushed back to a different directory on the local Pi.

A pretty good read. I’ve made many of these mistakes myself and learned from every one of them. We spend so much time hardening our home labs from the bad guys, I wonder if we should instead focus on hardening from ourselves.

Of course, the answer is both.

Just imagine if the roles were reversed and some reporter was hanging out in a top secret war chat on Signal with high ranking US government officials!

I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

I’ve been trying to learn K8s and more recently the Gateway API. The struggles are that most Helm charts don’t know Gateway (most are barely Ingressroute) and I’m trying to find a solution to one service affecting the other gateways.when a service cannot find a pod, the httproute fails and when one route fails, the ingress fails. It’s a weird cascading problem.

Right now, I’m considering adding a secondary service to each gateway that resolves to a static error page. I haven’t looked into it yet; it cane to me in the brief moment of clarity before I fell asleep last night.

Also, I may be doing everything wrong, but I am learning and learning is fun.

I landed on Tandoor. I had a bunch of recipes on one of those web sites and they switched to a subscription model and locked me out of my recipes. I don’t remember why I chose Tandoor over Mealie, but having full ownership over my recipes is freeing.

I do on all my devices that can as a matter of practice, not for any real threat. I’m interested to learn about how to set it up and use it on a daily basis including how to do system recoveries. I guess it’s largely academic.

Once I switched to linux as my daily driver, I didn’t have a need to do piracy anymore since all the software I need is FOSS.

I am interested in compression. I may give it a try when I swap out my desktop system. I did try btrfs in it’s early, post alpha stage, but found that the support was not ready yet. I think I had a VM system that complained. It is older now and more mature and maybe it’s worth another look.

Those are some good points. I guess I was thinking about the hardware. At least where I do RAID, it’s on the controller, so that offloads much of the parity checking and such to the controller and not the CPU. It’s all probably negligible for the apps that I run, but my hardware is quite old, so maybe trying to squeeze all the performance I can is a worthwhile activity.

Generally, if a lower level can do a thing, I prefer to have the lower level do it. It’s not really a reason, just a rule of thumb. I like to think that the lower level is more efficient to do the thing.

I use LVM snapshots to do my backups. I don’t have any other reason for it.

That all being said, I’m using btrfs on one system and if I really like it, I may migrate to it. It does seem a whole lot simpler to have one thing to learn than all the layers.

I’ve got raid 6 at the base level and LVM for partitioning and ext4 filesystem for a k8s setup. Based on this, btrfs doesn’t provide me with any advantages that I don’t already have at a lower level.

Additionaly, for my system, btrfs uses more bits per file or something such that I was running out of disk space vs ext4. Yeah, I can go buy more disks, but I like to think that I’m running at peak efficiency, using all the bits, with no waste.

Given my skill with 3d model creation, i’d be more likely to create something that would hurt me than inflicting harm on someone else. Mostly when I take that razor sharp tool to remove anything from the build plate, but also just my awful measurements and tolerances.

Perhaps I’ve been naieve.

I have local incremental backups and rsync to the remote. Doesn’t syncthing have incremental also? You have a good point about syncing a destroyed disk to your offsite backup. I know S3 has some sort of protection, but haven’t played with it.

I have tailscale mostly set up. What’s the issue with USB drives? I’ve got a raspberry pi on the other end with a RO SD card so it won’t go bad.

This reminds me that I need alerts monitoring set up. ; -)

I’ll have to check this out.

I attended some LUGs before covid and could see something like this being facilitated there. It also reminds me of the Reddit meetups that I never partook in.