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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Its not for everyone but I use Cisco Aironet APs with a virtual wireless LAN controller. Ubiquiti is popular among the community. They’re cost effective and work well in a home/small business environment. Aruba InstantOn are decent as well from my experience, but they’re cloud managed and this is self-hosted after all :)

    I’ve extensively used Cisco, Meraki, Fortinet, Cambium, Aruba, Ubiquiti and Juniper in a professional setting. Avoid Fortinet and Cambium APs if you can, my experience is that they can be pretty unstable.

    Generally speaking if you’re going to have multiple APs, you’ll want something that’s centrally managed so the APs are able to be aware of each other and manage clients effectively.


  • This is the method I use in your scenario, OP. You can use Folder2iso to get the files in that you need. If the OS has official VMware tools, you can also mount the VMware Tools ISO straight from workstation into the VM and this will give you the clipboard service so you can copy and paste files between the host and VM, if this scenario is permitted within your isolation needs.

    Otherwise, go the ISO route. You just can’t bring stuff out of the VM back to the host is all.



  • Its very much still needed and heavily utilised in the enterprise world. Volume size is usually the lowest priority when it comes to arrays, redundancy and IOPS (the amount of concurrent transactions to the storage) is typically the priority. The exception here would be backup and archive storage, where IOPS is less important and volume size is more important.

    As far as replacing sectors goes, I’ve never heard of this and I might just be ignorant on the subject but as far as I know you can’t “replace” a bad sector. Only mark it as bad and not use it, and whatever was there before is gone. This has existed since HDD days. This is also why we use RAID - parity across disks to protect data.

    Generally production storage will be in RAID-10, and backup/archive storage in RAID-6 or in some cases RAID-60 but I’m personally not a fan.

    You also would consider how many disks are in the volume because there is a sweet spot. Too many disks = higher likelihood of total array failure due to simultaneous disk failures and more data loss in the event it does, but too few disks and you won’t have good redundancy, capacity or performance either (depending on RAID level).

    The biggest change I see in RAID these days is moving away from hardware RAID cards and into software-based solutions like Microsoft Storage Spaces, md, ZFS and similar. These all have their own way of doing things and some can even synchronise the data with other hosts.

    Hope this helps!





  • TIL about Fedora, last I knew it was a rolling bleeding edge OS. Clearly lots of movement in the Red Hat camp.

    As for gaming, drivers were not the problem for me. Getting games to run with ease was. On OpenSUSE, I just install Steam, enable Proton and basically go at that point. Red Hat was non-trivial to do this. Could be a skill issue, but I had a better time getting going with OpenSUSE TW.


  • Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

    TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn’t bother me.


  • Second to this - for what its worth (and I may be tarred and feathered for saying this here), I prefer commercial software for my backups.

    I’ve used many, including:

    • Acronis
    • Arcserve UDP
    • Datto
    • Storagecraft ShadowProtect
    • Unitrends Enterprise Backup (pre-Kaseya, RIP)
    • Veeam B&R
    • Veritas Backup Exec

    What was important to me was:

    • Global (not inline) deduplication to disk storage
    • Agent-less backup for VMware/Hyper-V
    • Tape support with direct granular restore
    • Ability to have multiple destinations on a backup job (e.g. disk to disk to tape)
    • Encryption
    • Easy to set up
    • Easy to make changes (GUI)
    • Easy to diagnose
    • Not having to faff about with it and have it be the one thing in my lab that just works

    Believe it or not, I landed on Backup Exec. Veeam was the only other one to even get close. I’ve been using BE for years now and it has never skipped a beat.

    This most likely isn’t the solution for you, but I’m mentioning it just so you can get a feel for the sort of considerations I made when deciding how my setup would work.


  • As others have mentioned its important to highlight the difference between a sync (basically a replica of the source) vs a true backup which is historical data.

    As far as tools goes, if the device is running OMV you might want to start by looking at the options within OMV itself to achieve this. A quick google hinted at a backup plugin that some people seem to be using.

    If you’re going to be replicating to a remote NAS over the Internet, try to use a site-to-site VPN for this and do not expose file sharing services to the internet (for example by port forwarding). Its not safe to do so these days.

    The questions you need to ask first are:

    1. What exactly needs to be backed up? Some of it? All of it?
    2. How much space does the data I need backed up consume? Do I have enough to fit this plus some headroom for retention?
    3. How many backups do I want to retain? And for how long? (For example you might keep 2 weeks of daily backups, 3 months of weekly backups, 1 year of monthly backups)
    4. How feasible is it to run a test restore? How often am I going to do so? (I can’t emphasise test restores enough - your backups are useless if they aren’t restorable)
    5. Do you need/want to encrypt the data at rest?
    6. Does the internet bandwidth between the two locations allow for you to send all the data for a full backup in a reasonable amount of time or are you best to manually seed the data across somehow?

    Once you know that you will be able to determine:

    1. What tool suits your needs
    2. How you will configure the tool
    3. How to set up the interconnects between sites
    4. How to set up the destination NAS

    I hope I haven’t overwhelmed, discouraged or confused you more and feel free to ask as many questions as you need. Protecting your data isn’t fun but it is important and its a good choice you’re making to look into it


  • Back in the day when the self-hosted $10 license existed I was using JIRA Service Desk to do this. As far as ticketing systems go it was very easy to work with and didn’t slow me down too much.

    I know you don’t want a ticket system but I’m just curious what other people will suggest because I’m in the same boat as you.

    Currently I haphazardly use Joplin to take very loose notes and sync them to Nextcloud.

    If you want a very simple option with minimal setup and overhead you could use Joplin to create separate notes for each “part” of your lab and just add a new line with a date, time and summary of the change.

    I do also use SnipeIT to track all my hardware and parts, which allows you to add notes and service history against the hardware asset.

    Other than that, I’m keen to see what everyone else says


  • Because prospective customers get shy when the browser says that your site is “insecure”

    Because it factually is insecure. It is not encrypted and trivial to inspect.

    Because it makes for better google ranking.

    No, in this day and age it is permission to play. Firefox has a built in feature to only load HTTPS sites, which I have enabled. This has nothing to do with Google. Your issue is with expensive CAs, to which there is a free solution (Let’s Encrypt). Not HTTPS itself.

    So there you go. Mob hype and googlian dictatorship.

    Incorrect. It is a matter of safety and security and a trivial thing to implement. You are free to not use HTTPS if you want, just as people are free to not consume your service if you don’t.

    Calling it a “dictatorship” is hyperbole and demonstrates that you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about and won’t listen to people that do.


  • Some do. It depends on the type of certificate. Thankfully now we have LetsEncrypt so that there is a free alternative to the big CAs.

    To answer your initial question - yes it is necessary. Without HTTPS or encryption in general, anybody who can intercept your connection can see everything you’re doing.

    A real world example of this is let’s say you’re connected to a WiFi network that has no password and are browsing a plain HTTP site. Open wifi networks are unencrypted, as is HTTP.

    I can sit across the road in a vehicle, unseen, on a laptop and sniff the traffic to view what you’re doing. If you log into your bank, I now have your credentials and can do what I like, and you don’t even know.

    This is why we need encryption. It is an (almost) guarantee that your traffic is only viewable to yourself and the other end of whatever you’re connecting to and not anyone in the middle.

    Edit: for Anyone downvoting OP remember this is nostupidquestions. Take the time to educate if you know better but don’t downvote “stupid” questions lol.


  • Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I’m using KDE Plasma which it let’s you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.

    If you’re familiar with Redhat you’ll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.

    I’ve worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.




  • Authelia is popular, as is Keycloak. I believe Red Hat develops Keycloak or at least has a hand in it.

    I’m on this journey as well, figuring out what I’m going to use. Currently most of my services just use LDAP back to AD but I’m looking to do something more modern like SAML, oAuth or OpenID Connect so that I can simplify the number of MFA tokens I have.

    Just as an anecdote you may find useful - Personally I used to run an Active Directory for Windows and FreeIPA for my Linux machines and have managed to simplify this to just AD. Linux machines can be joined, you can still use sudo and all the other good stuff while only having one source of truth for identity.