Notes

I recently got a (free!) IPv6 tunnel from he.net and I set it up on my Opnsense firewall. Here are some links that I found helpful: Official documentation. https://scribe.rip/swlh/ipv6-on-opnsense-router-599a9198aaed https://subnettingpractice.com/ipv6-subnet-calculator.html https://www.niksa.dev/posts/he-ipv6-tunnel/

I was traveling to Goa for 4 days with my sister and I am now at the airport heading to my next destination. I was excited about the trip before I got here and it turned out good enough. A few things on my mind: Like last time, we headed straight to the northern part of Goa. We stayed in Seolim but it wasn’t north enough. Next time, I should try to stay near, say, near Morjim or Ashwem. Morjim and Vagator were beautiful, maybe even Anjuna but I forget. I had high hopes from Arambol but we found a lot of crowd and sun there. The beauty of the beaches was punctuated by trash. The beaches weren’t exactly filthy but a stray plastic waste here and there often marred the experience for me. A few times, I just wanted to dispose off some trash myself but then there were no trash cans etc. anywhere close. It was hot and dusty (thankfully, not too humid), so driving a 2-wheeler was unpleasant. Next time, I should try to hire a cab, maybe with a driver. I ate a lot of authentic Goan food and it was fantastic, probably one of the high points from the trip. The curries were hot, most probably because of green chillies, and I loved it!

Today, I run Opnsense in a VM on my Proxmox node. That creates issues once in awhile when my fiddling with the Proxmox server brings down internet for the whole home. So, I was looking online on what dedicated machine I could purchase to run Opnsense. Here’s what I found: Qotom looks like a good choice, kind of like a cheaper yet similar version of Protectli. I found 2 nice versions. Both were priced pretty similar on AliExpress. Q335G4. i3 but probably 1G ports. I have 1 Gbps fiber connection today, so 1G ports might be fine today, but things may change in future. 15W TDP. Q750G5 This has J4125, which is better than N4000. 2.5G ports. Also, 5 and likely overkill for me, since I’ll anyway use a switch. 10W TDP == lower. Can also get rack-mountable versions of these. I saw a bunch of Reddit posts on how people have repurposed used 1 liter or mini PCs. So, probably no need to buy new hardware. Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q: can be extended with dual NIC. 1G vs 2.5G probably only matters for the WAN side. LAN traffic only goes through switches and wouldn’t hit the Opnsense box.

I saw a video recently that suggested the following: Write up a story about your life 5 years from now with the understanding that you cannot possibly fail It’s pitch was that such a story will help figure out the first steps, however small, you need to take to move towards your goals. ...

Enable management interface on LAN, in case I (still) have a virtualized firewall. ZFS: Enable encryption at rest. Limit memory usage. Enable notifications.

Introduction My use case: Add encryption-at-rest to an existing unencrypted Proxmox host. Encryption only for LXC and VM data. None for the root installation. Automatic decryption on server startup (and not requiring me to enter any encryption key). It took me awhile to figure everything out but eventually, as with most ZFS stuff, things turned out fairly straightforward. Pre-requisites Verify the machine supports hardware acceleration. (It most probably would but doesn’t harm to verify.) This is what GPT-4 recommended for my Intel machine: ...

Verify and, if required, enable hardware support for encryption. Configure machine to start up whenever power is restored (after an outage etc.).

It wasn’t exactly rocket science but I updated BIOS for the first time today. High level steps for my Dell desktop: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us -> Enter “service tag” -> “Drivers & Downloads” -> Choose “Operating system” as “BIOS”. Make sure the BIOS I want to install doesn’t require an older version to be installed first. Put the .exe file on a USB drive that’s formatted as FAT. (ExFAT didn’t work.) Boot the computer, hit F12 when “Dell” is visible and select “BIOS Flash Update”. As of today, latest version installed on my: ...

Install SSHFS. Add something like the following to the /etc/fstab file. (Here, you can put more specific path after the colon in the first term.) [email protected]:foo /mnt/rsync fuse.sshfs noauto,x-systemd.automount,_netdev,IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/id_ed25519,allow_other,reconnect 0 0 Restart the computer. If you aren’t able to use this as a datastore in Proxmox Backup Server, try this (as per this): Create a local datastore. Copy over its contents to the SSHFS-ed directory. Modify /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg to point the datastore to the new directory. Resources: ...

Spinning up PBS in the cloud seems fairly easy: Add deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pbs bookworm pbs-no-subscription to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. apt install proxmox-backup-server. (Not proxmox-backup as this requires ZFS etc.) That’s it?