WHAT COULD A TIKTOK BAN LOOK LIKE TECHNICALLY?
The leadership of the US seems to be chasing down banning TikTok from the United States, and today had a hearing with the CEO of TikTok. It got me thinking that should this ban go forward, what would it look like and how easy would it be to bypass? Disclaimer: This post is meant as a thought exercise and in now way should be read as any sort of deep technical analysis of plans congress may have.
Read morePREPARING FOR YOU HOMELAB'S DEMISE
Trigger Warning: This post talks generally about human mortality and loss of your home. One ting I’ve recently started considering is how my Homelab can survive if I’m not around. At first, everything in the lab was pretty low value so losing things wasn’t a huge deal. Recently though, I’ve started archiving family photos and other important things that need to survive after me. I’ll outline the considerations and situations I took into account, then I’ll share some of the tools I used to plan.
Read moreUSING HTTPS IN YOUR HOMELAB, AND WHY IT'S IMPORTANT
When you have a homelab, you’re going to start having a number of internal websites and services you use. You’ll learn to live with HTTPS warnings when navigating to these sites, but these warnings can still be a problem. What if we wanted to have valid HTTPS everywhere? HTTPS Primer HTTPS encrypts your traffic so things that intercept it (routers, attackers, etc) can’t decode it, and it does this even with an invalid or self-signed certificate.
Read morePLEASE DON'T SELL SPACE IN YOUR HOMELAB
Hanging out in subreddits like /r/homelab, /r/servers, and /r/datahoarder, I see this question asked too many times: I have extra space in my home server, how can I sell this for other people to use? My answer (and a lot of other people’s answer): don’t. We’re Really Not Trying To Ruin Your Dreams If you come across this post, or if this was sent to you, know that we aren’t doing this for the sole purpose of ruining your day.
Read moreMY THOUGHTS ON LASTPASS AND THEIR RECENT BREACHES
If you’ve poked your head outside in the last few weeks, you’ve noticed that LastPass had a security breach where customer vaults were exposed and downloaded. I’ve been hanging around in /r/lastpass and seeing the mixed reactions has been interesting. Why I’m Leaving I’m leaving LastPass, and had been looking at solutions for the last few months. While the security problems are the last nail in the coffin, I’ll share why I’m leaving besides the breach.
Read moreTHE COST OF HOMELAB BACKUPS
If you ave a homelab, you’ve probably collected a few TB of data that needs backed up. Recently in /r/datahoarder and /r/homelab I’ve seen a lot of posts that ask about backups. I’ve talked about my strategy in the past , but I figured I dive a bit more into offsite backups. If you’re not familiar with why you should be keeping backups or some general rules of thumb, I have some information over here.
Read moreSETTING UP A BACKUP 4G INTERNET CONNECTION WITH OPNSENSE
One thing that quickly becomes annoying is disruptions to my main home internet. This is annoying for the obvious reasons: I can’t use remote services, home automation that needs the cloud breaks, etc, but is also frustrating because it’s something I largely can’t control. I’m at the mercy of my ISP to detect outages and resolve them, and sitting around and waiting is one of the worst feelings. After an outage that lasted over a day, I took matters into my own hands and created a backup 4G connection for my home internet.
Read moreTHIS SITE'S STACK
This site isn’t anything too special, but I figured I’d share how I host things for others who may be interested in owning their words. Motivation For Self Hosting I’ve run this website (in some form or another) for the last 6+ years. The idea was to share some stuff I do that I think is cool with others and maybe remind myself of projects past. I’ve always just shared written content (for now), and there’s a million different ways to get your words out there.
Read moreNAMING THINGS IN A HOMELAB
There’s an old joke in Programming that 90% of your time is spent naming things, and I think this extends into Homelabs and any other computer environment. Names are there give your systems identifiable places, can describe where they are and what they do, and are the easiest way to identify something, so giving some thought into a naming system is worth it. Styles of Naming Naming schemes, like the environments and systems they reflect, can vary widely.
Read moreMONITORING TRAFFIC WITH OPNSENSE AND ELASTIFLOW
One critical thing for any environment, in my opinion, is monitoring. Being able to detect problems and get an understanding of them is crucial to solving them. One thing that is important to monitor is your network. This is not just an important to get a sense of its health an performance, though. Detecting when client machines talk to potentially malicious hosts is a pretty quick way to pick up on security concerns.
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