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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I tried for 25 hours to crash the box that kept freezing. It wouldn’t.
A few weeks ago I retired Thorin, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M90q Gen 3, from my Proxmox cluster. It had hard-frozen four times between 27 September and 6 October. Each time the power LED stayed on, the fan kept spinning, and nothing reached the logs. Balin, its twin, took its place. I wrote that up in Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died.
That post ended with the cause still unknown. memtest86+ had passed, so RAM was unlikely. What was left was the board, the iGPU, the power supply, or the workload. So I put Thorin on my desk with no guests and tried to make it freeze on purpose.
Read more about I tried for 25 hours to crash the box that kept freezing. It wouldn’t.
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Cold Storage: From Manual to Automatic Backups
My files live on two Synology NAS units. The DS920+ is the one everything points at. The DS1621+ holds a second copy, kept in step by Synology Drive ShareSync. A change on one shows up on the other within a few minutes.
That’s good protection against a dead drive or a dead NAS. It’s no protection against me. ShareSync is a two-way sync, so a deleted folder, a bad script or ransomware reaches the second NAS just as fast as a good change does.
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What my homelab costs to run: 337 W and S$76 a month
I priced my homelab in a spreadsheet, then checked each row against what was actually running.
The homelab’s devices draw about 337 W across 21 rows. After UPS losses that’s about 377 W at the wall, or 276 kWh a month. My rate is 25.39 c/kWh before GST, 27.68 c with 9% GST, so the homelab costs S$76.25 a month, about S$915 a year.
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Homelab hardening, step by step: the commands
The exact audit I ran on my own homelab, in order, with every command you need to run it on yours.
In the first post I covered what to look for and in what order. This one is the toolkit. Every command below is one I ran, adjusted only to strip out my own addresses.
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Homelab hardening: what, where and how to start
You don’t need a security background to make your homelab a much harder target. You need an order of operations.
I spent an afternoon getting Claude to scan my homelab properly for the first time. I expected the scary findings to be at the edge: an open port, a forgotten forward. The edge was fine. The problems were all inside, in the boring places I’d never look at since things worked.
Read more about Homelab hardening: what, where and how to start