Sysadmin Tales

Anyone who’s viewing this via the actual website rather than the RSS feed will likely have noticed that things look a little different now. There was nothing really wrong with the old m10c theme, but I was bored of it and it was missing some features that I wanted like tags and built in search. I quite like the look of the new theme, Hugo-Papermod. I’ve done my best to avoid any differences in the RSS XML that would result in your RSS readers showing all of my posts as new, but if I screwed it up… Sorry? ...

I’m quite fond of the small little IP KVMs that have become more and more available lately. My favorites are the JetKVM and the GliNet Comet series. I have 2 of the Comets that I use internally, and I mostly access them via their Tailscale ts.net names. I could do I what I usually do and put them behind a reverse proxy, but there’s one of these that I keep in my work bag and take with me onto client sites, so there’s no reverse proxy in that scenario. ...

Overview Effectively, what we’re trying to accomplish here today is the opposite of a Tailscale Subnet Router. As in, allowing clients on our local network to talk to devices via their Tailscale subnet IP addresses. When I started looking into how to do this, I could not find a complete guide on the topic. I’ll do my best to do this start to finish so that anyone else can follow along with me. ...

This weekend I’ve been playing with setting up a self-hosted Fluxer instance. In my traditional fashion, I made things much harder by myself by refusing to use their provided Caddy setup, and instead using Traefik. And for an additional challenge - I wanted this to be completely inaccessible from the public Internet, instead using my Tailscale mesh network. The setup required some heavy modifications to the Docker Compose file provided by Fluxer’s team, and a few tweaks to livekit.yaml. ...

For a while now I’ve been searching for an automated way to have our clients with higher security needs (mostly local government offices.) Finally, I discovered this post on how to do what I was looking for using Intune and ServiceUI.exe. ServiceUI.exe is a part of the old Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which has since been deprecated, but I was able to extract the executable and simply use it as is. I had to make a few small adjustments to the script to make it behave with Datto RMM but now it works quite nicely. ...

Overview There are many ways to back up your Proxmox virtual machines. One of the most popular ways to do so is via Proxmox Backup Server, which gives you many advantages: Deduplication of common data. The ability to cherry pick files out of your backups. Tight integration with the Proxmox ecosystem. However, how is one to achieve proper 3-2-1 backups using this mechanism? One way is to run multiple datastores, some local and some using Amazon S3 compatible endpoints. ...

Short one today. I learned that Meilisearch has added experimental support for dumpless upgrades. So far it works well, though to be fair none of my Meilisearch databases are particularly important. I have one for better searches in Jellyfin and another for my Karakeep search index. Losing either of them would be a minor inconvenience, whereas it’s been a massive inconvenience for me to have to dump and manually import every single time I patch Meilisearch. ...

Or in other words, how to configure 802.1x authentication with an Active Directory backend. I wrote this for work with a few tweaks, but I figured that it would work just as well as a blog post. Given that $job has a lot of people who aren’t the most Linux-savvy I tried to keep it as simple as I could, but there are a lot of pieces to making this work. ...

I switched to GrapheneOS I recently purchased a ’new-to-me’ Pixel 10 Pro to replace my Pixel 8 Pro. There was nothing particularly wrong with the 8, but I’d had it for a few years, and my father is in need of a new phone, so it was a good opportunity for me to upgrade. At the same time, I’ve also been meaning to check out GrapheneOS, a custom ROM based on AOSP that has a focus on privacy and security. ...

Creating your own documentation with Mkdocs and Obsidian Overview One of the most important parts of being in any highly technical profession is documentation. There are many products centered around doing this, even plenty that are free and open source as I prefer. However, many of these products rely on databases and force me to use editors that are not my preference. I like keeping my notes in Markdown format, so that they are both portable and can be manipulated with common tools on the Linux command line like grep, awk, sed. ...