• 7 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • For files I use syncthing (also for music/photos/notes/etc… syncing files is IMHO the way to go wherever applicable).

    For sending links to my PC (eg. articles linked from podcasts’ notes) I used to rely on firefox sync, but I’m starting to distance myself from Mozilla so I am gonna experiment with wallabang.

    For sending small notes to myself (stuff that I want to sort or act upon when I get to my PC), I’m using signal’s “note to self” but I’m investigating alternatives because signal doesn’t mark such messages as unread and so sometimes I forget I’ve sent some.





  • I’ve blocked the bot because I find it’s more annoying that useful (I’m not complaining - just giving feedback).

    That said, IMHO from that list you should remove the entries that:

    • are ambiguous (eg: HA has 2 entirely different meanings in your list)
    • have become words on their own (eg. DNS, HTTP, etc…): nobody cares what these expand to (think, NASA) and also knowing what these expand to doesn’t help at all (if you tell me that HTTP means “hyper-text markup protocol” will I not have to go read wikipedia anyways to understand what it is?)
    • are often not used according to your definition (eg. IP is more often used to refer to an IP address rather than to the protocol) - of course you may want to amend the definitions instead

    Also, you should keep the acronym expansion (“RAID” => “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”) from any comment you may want to add (“for mass storage”) and - since you are at it - provide relevant links to wikipedia articles and/or other resources.

    PS: since a lot of entries in the list are not even acronyms… maybe you should consider renaming the bot to something related to “abbreviations” or “glossary”?





  • you will have to spend a lot of time learning the Nix language

    I’d say you shouldn’t use any system (be it nixos, ansible or even bash scripts) if you are not willing to learn it.

    That said, I too find pre-made modules less useful that I initially thought when I got into nixos: unless you want to do very basic stuff, a lot of times it’s easier to just generate whatever scripts/configuration files you need directly (using one of the trivial builders in lib or writing a custom derivation) rather than learning how the corresponding nixos module works.

    One could say nixos modules make easy things slightly easier, and hard things much harder (this is adapted - possibly imprecisely - from a quote on ORMs, I think by Joel Spolsky).


  • In your shoes (and, in fact, in mine) I’d try to move away from interactive tools and into file-driven ones.

    Personally I use nixos, run WUD (what’s up docker) to be notified of available updates, and manually test/update the containers once in a while (every couple weeks or so?)

    There are a bazillion other solutions (from stuff like ansible/chef/puppet, to docker-compose, to kubernetes, to… a hand-written bash script) - the idea is to setup stuff via files that you can version, reference and write comments in rather than using some gui for interactive steps that you’ll forget to document in some wiki.

    Monitoring is a whole different beast than configuring: you’ll be probably better off using something that does just that instead of some all-in-one solution. Try looking into something like beszel before going for the full prometheus/graphana stack.







  • Getting the router to actually assign an IP address to the server

    You would typically want to use static ip addresses for servers (because if you use DHCP the IP is gonna change sooner or later, and it’s gonna be a pain in the butt).

    IIRC dnsmasq is configured to assign IPs from .100 upwards (unless you changed that), so you can use any of the IPs up to .99 without issue (you can also assign a DNS name to the IP, of course).

    all requests’ IP addresses are set to the router’s IP address (192.168.3.1), so I am unable to use proper rate limiting and especially fail2ban.

    Sounds like you are using masquerade and need DNAT instead. No idea how to configure that in openwrt - sorry.


  • A NAS is just a computer and TrueNAS is just Linux (ok, TrueNAS CORE is Bsd).

    You can run zfs on any machine: they recommend loads of RAM for optimal performance, which you don’t need at home (or at work, unless your job is running a data center).

    You can choose from a number of FOSS NAS-specific operating systems, plus all linux distros (since you post here, I’d assume you either can or aim to administer a home sever?)… why would you go with a proprietary OS?

    There are several FOSS operating systems for network equipment too (keyword “NOS”), but as far as I’m aware none that work on small soho/edge switches. OpenWrt runs both my router (mikrotik) and WAPs (tplink), but the two 8-port switches I have at home (also tplink) run their proprietary firmware.