Notes

I am one of those people who function better by writing things down. One day, I realized that most of my notes don’t have to be private, so here they are - my second brain. Be warned that, if you stumble upon something here that doesn’t make sense to you, it isn’t meant to!

Research on Opnsense hardware

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.

Would a thought exercise like "10 years from now" work?

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. ...

First steps on a new Proxmox server

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

How to enable, and then migrate to, native ZFS encryption in Proxmox

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: ...

Recommended BIOS setup

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

Dell desktop BIOS upgrade

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: ...

Mount a remote filesystem over SSH

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: ...

Proxmox Backup Server in the cloud

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?

Setting up mailcow

I’ve been interested in setting up a self-hosted email server for quite sometime. I initially tried Mail-in-a-Box, then NixOS Mailserver and I recently moved to mailcow. Some setup notes for my future self: I used a plain Debian instance on Hetzner. Usually, I create a non-root user and disable password-based SSH, but mailcow wants to run everything as root and so I didn’t bother. I disabled Solr and ClamAV so that I can use a lower memory instance. That’s it! It was smooth sailing other than that. ...

Validate snapshots on a Restic Rest Server

I setup a Restic Rest Server and this is how I can validte snapshots for it: export RESTIC_REST_USERNAME=a export RESTIC_REST_PASSWORD=b export RESTIC_PASSWORD=c export RESTIC_REPOSITORY='rest:https://restic.a.ketanvijayvargiya.com/a' restic snapshots