Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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Printing to a Windows Print Server from Linux
My Linux desktop couldn’t find two printers that every Windows machine in the house uses without trouble. The fix took one service, two drivers and an address format nobody explains.
There is an old Windows 11 laptop in my study called cirdan. It does one job: two printers are plugged into it by USB, a Brother DCP-L2535DW laser and an Epson L8050 inkjet, and it shares them with the rest of the house.
Read more about Printing to a Windows Print Server from Linux
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The kill switch held. IPv6 didn’t.
My router reboots itself every Sunday at 05:00. I read the boot log line by line to see whether my torrent client ever reached the internet without the VPN.
My router is an ASUS RT-BE88U running Asuswrt-Merlin. It runs a WireGuard client to hide.me, and Merlin’s VPN Director decides which LAN hosts go through it. Thirteen devices do. One of them is a small Proxmox container running qBittorrent.
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Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died
A ThinkCentre in my homelab kept hard-freezing and left nothing behind. This is how I narrowed it down, and why I swapped it out before I had the answer.
My Proxmox cluster,
thefellowship, runs on three small machines. Thorin, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M90q Gen 3 with an i5-12500T, carried the media side of the house: Jellyfin, qBittorrent, the *arr stack, and Frigate, the camera NVR.Read more about Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died
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The Same Key, Eleven Times
What I found when I finally counted the SSH keys I’d handed out to an AI agent.
I opened
authorized_keyson my Proxmox cluster expecting a short list. What I got was seventeen non-blank lines, the same key pasted eleven times, and one line readingPASTE_YOUR_PUBKEY_HEREthat had been sitting there long enough that I have no idea when it arrived. -
The Auth Layer I Didn’t Build
Everything on my home network that has a web interface sits behind one reverse proxy. You type a friendly hostname, the proxy terminates TLS with a real certificate and hands the request to whichever container is behind it. It is the most useful single thing I run, and in August I realised it was also a very tidy list of everything an intruder on my LAN would want to look at.
The proxy adds no authentication of its own. Whatever login the application has is the only login there is. So on 11 August I sat down to answer a reasonable question: does this lab need an identity provider in front of it?