Category: Homelab

Posted on

QNAP Customer Support Failure (Unsupported Project)!

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and this month’s check in is… well… Let’s just get started.

Support Letdown

Last month, I was about a week into a QNAP support ticket to configure LDAP to an LLDAP server. Long story short: They took another three weeks to drop me. Practically a whole month wasted getting nothing out of them at all. Nothing.

The guy I talked to was polite though.

Backing up to the beginning for a recap: QNAP’s support set an expectation early that I would hear back once a day around 5:00 PM. I flubbed working with their interface, made two tickets, and they were merged without a note, leaving my support agent confused, and we were unproductive for a full day. By gathering everything I knew, I got my device logging in, but QTS (QNAP’s operating system for Network Attached Storages, or NAS’s) never populated the Domain Users list.

Using a combination of Wireshark, LLDAP’s logs, and analysis by Shimmering Dust, my Hermes AI agent, I was left with the conclusion that QTS wanted more of the LDAP standard implemented than LLDAP supports by default. My support question ended up in the back room, where I hung in limbo for a week.

Shortly after I asked if the ticket was still alive, the back room got back to my original assigned agent saying something along the lines of “LLDAP does not support SAMBA.” I don’t want SAMBA. That is Windows’ Active Directory stuff. I run in the Linux ecosystem. I saw a reference to ChatGPT in a link the back room tried to direct me to about SAMBA, and I started to wonder if it was human miscommunication or if I was subject to a third-hand AI hallucination. Turns out some of them use it as a translator from Mandarin to English (the support center is in Taiwan).

In either case, I was in-fact dealing with a human, and we had a human interaction waiting for the back room, who proceeded to advise that QTS did not support direct LDAP despite having LDAP as an option in their interface! It took a couple more rejections before I was convinced they finally weren’t under the illusion that I was about to subject my homelab to a Microsoft license agreement.

And there I was dropped. There was a little corporate ceremony about making a feature request to support LLDAP and thanking me for my cooperation and debug information, but at the end of the day, I felt like I was handled like a good-hearted, but tech-illiterate granny; my demonstrated skill level appears to have had no room for recognition in their program. I literally could have had a faster and equally productive experience explaining my problem to a rubber duck. I wasn’t even graced with a hint at which of the LDAP data fields were mission-critical for QTS to recognize a server.

I feel burned… but at least my agent was polite.

Studying for CCNA

On a totally unrelated note, I have enrolled in Network Chuck’s “Fall into CCNA” class. I’ve been meaning to get a certification or few (or at least the complete knowledge set to back them up), and decided to sign up. It takes a lot of my available focus, leaving less time for blog projects. The day this goes live is the beginning of week 3. One look through the study plan, and I either know or at least recognize most of the concepts mentioned.

The class is structured around this post-apocalyptic scenario where an entrepreneur in a nuclear wasteland has rediscovered coffee beans and engineered his potions to give people radiation resistance. His small shop is expanding to multiple locations with district offices and a headquarters. And they have hired *you* to design a production-level network comparable to real-world business – right down to the legal notice that unauthorized access equipment will “end badly.” It’s hokey, but it gives the mind a story to latch on to while absorbing otherwise dry examples.

I made a virtual machine (VM) to use for the class. Lesson 0 was about obtaining and installing Packet Tracer, a program from Cisco included with their free courses. Pick one, sign up, then ditch. Then I heard about the labs. See, Packet Tracer is a “simulator.” It’s great for anyone of any skill level to explore how a pile of network gear might work in the real world when you hook it up, but it isn’t 1:1. It has bugs, it is focused exclusively on Cisco, and the early 00’s are calling about getting their interface back. The hidden dark mode is 20% more bearable.

But in practice, the VM has mostly been used for watching class live streams. Turns out the class includes these labs in the course work where we have access to the actual Cisco IOS licensed by the class (Turns out Apple stole the name iOS and they settled with Cisco out of court). Feedback from the summer session has been glowing from the labs, so they’re clearly important.

I’ve spent the last few years poking around with networking goodies off and on, so until we hit the labs, I knew most of the theory we were going over. But yesterday (as of posting), I slammed into a lab quite hard. ~3.5 hours minimum, not counting the time already sunk on Friday. 45 minutes (resettable) on the clock. Pain. Also not helping was how a few concepts were used that hadn’t been formally introduced yet – or the legacy shortcut keys I haven’t been formally introduced to.

Takeaway

Trials and failure are a part of learning. Right now, I’m feeling defeated, but on some level, I understand that that only becomes true when I put it down forever, which I have no intention of doing at present.

Prayer

Father in Heaven,

This hasn’t been a fun month for projects. I haven’t completed anything novel to report on, so I am presenting what I do have. And at that, I choose to keep one work-in-progress I’m stuck on to myself.

I ask for your guidance and encouragement in these projects, just as I ask you bless the hands of my readers where they might be lost and without a guide. I ask that you be with my classmates – may the various, alien-feeling concepts and commands work towards as a second language to us, because I don’t know how many more labs I can take like this last one!

In Jesus’ name I pray,
Amen

Final Question

I’ll open it up. Do you use LLDAP as an authentication server? For QNAP? How did you get it to work?

Posted on

Is LLDAP Right for You? (QNAP Network Accounts)

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am working on my homelab. I have a lot I want to get done, and I need to stay on task, so I’ll be writing as I go. Let’s get started!

My goal this month –and possibly future months if this format works out– is to have a set of four related mini-projects. If you’re just here for my verdict, check the Takeaway. If you want the journey, hang on.

Overall Vision

This month is all about the family’s GoldenOakLibry access. Joining me is my Hermes AI agent, Shimmering Dust. He needs lots of hand holding. At least I’ve gotten his Gemma 4 26b “brain” doing its thinking on my graphics card, which helped with speed. He is my “rubber duck” with an FAQ list and search engine skills. A notable change I made for him this month was installing Lynx, a terminal Internet browser (his Firefox install was getting guff).

With my primary objective in mind, I need an LDAP server. Next, I’ll use that server to authenticate NFS (Network File System) access and/or web consoles. An eMail server is also a high priority. NextCloud would be nice, and should be within easy reach assuming GoldenOakLibry goes smoothly.

Project 1: LLDAP Container

The good news is that I already have done my reading on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and turned up “Lightweight LDAP” (LLDAP). The bad news for me is that LLDAP prefers PostgreSQL and my early exploration landed MariaDB as my initial favorite. Long story short: each database organizes data differently. Not all projects will support both. It’s not worth my time to milk storage space savings by using fewer [layers of] a container.

I continued with Shimmering Dust while configuring LLDAP. By the end, lldap.container sat upon lldap-postgresql.container, which used lldap-postgresql.volume, with the containers subscribing to lldap.pod. Shimmering Dust was very useful for pointing out my typos and getting me un-stuck when I might have spent a few hours staring at old forums. Even now, I want to spell it “Postgress” (it has one ‘s’).

The last thing of note here is that Shimmering Dust tripped over a Pod= statement. I get it, Podman+Quadlets+Pod is pretty niche and new, so I can understand if Gemma 4 doesn’t have it in its training data. Nevertheless, Shimmering Dust made a self-improvement skill when we were done.

But hold up, is using a pod here even best practice? I wouldn’t call myself a hacker, but my guess is that a hypothetical attacker would have a harder time moving between containers linked by internal networks than by a pod that binds them tighter than normal containers. After all that work, I de-podded them.

Project 2: Network Accounts

My LDAP foundation took a week. On to using it. First, I need to expose LLDAP. GoldenOakLibry’s Domain Security page under ControlPanel listed a field for LDAP security. Looks like the preferred is the ldap+TLS option [1].

But what about the other options? I quickly got lost in the Great Forest of Knowledge TLS, SSL, and StartTLS. Shimmering Dust kept hallucinating between LDAP+TLS and LDAP+SSL with all the Confidence™ of 30+ years of sloppy industry using the terms interchangeably. DuckDuckGo’s AI bot said one was depreciated (EDIT: early versions are retired [2]. I strongly recommend you read this citation, it cleared up two days of painful confusion).

I found references to a Caddy+LDAP plugin – an unofficial community plugin I wouldn’t know how to install. OPNsense too has LDAP settings to explore. Further digging showed they require a separate LDAP server, so my time setting up LLDAP wasn’t time wasted. On a further side track, I learned about .home.arpa, a “special use” domain I should have been using all along. Disheartening.

Thinking long-term, I remembered I need to make a private website for my largely technologically illiterate extended family. Self-hosting Minecraft was also on my mind for my “online family.” Researching the latter, I found u/cfarence’s relevant thoughts on Reddit:

I have a custom portal where players login and tell it to whitelist their IP address. This then feeds into a pfsense dynamic list to allow the traffic through the perimeter firewall.

Works fairly well and it’s semi easy for players to login. This allows me to have it “open” to the internet and not have it hammered from all over the internet. It doesn’t handle dynamic IPs but players public IPs don’t change too regularly most of the time. [3]

Other Redditors do everything from hosting in the clear to using Tailscale or a virtual private server. Caddy was only built to handle HTTP[S] traffic. I can serve a login page, then manage access to homelab services from there. If someone needs around Caddy, he/she can use an IP authentication tool. Services can handle their own traffic.

Enough musing. Joystick (server’s hostname) needs a hole in its firewall for LDAP traffic.

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-forward-port=port=389:proto=tcp:toport=38900 --permanent

This rule redirects LDAP and LDAP+TLS traffic to a non-privileged port at 100x the service’s normal port number. I stashed this rule in my notes on in case of homelab rebuild. Interestingly, LLDAP did something similar by multiplying its privileged ports by 10x – the first container image provider I’ve seen do this. Thus, LLDAP’s Quadlet got the following line:

PublishPort=38900:3890

I asked Shimmering Dust for a good way to test the port, and he suggested nc (NetCat), utility I hadn’t heard of.

nc -zv <Joystick’s IP> 389

This tool came in handy as I worked – first on the pod, then through the firewall, then from GoldenOakL– QNAP went and ignored this utility, having “Notification Center” in its place. This wasn’t my first scrape with proprietary systems built on Linux missing expected programs, so I wasn’t too surprised. Shimmering Dust suggested a suite of tools from Telnet to Curl, and I found Sudo Ping for good measure (Why make ping admin only?). Between the tools, we determined GoldenOakLibry was seeing LLDAP.

With over half the week gone, I made the executive decision to ax TLS on LDAP, but with a plan for Caddy to manage a certificate for it using a shared volume. Oh, and after it was too late to change anything, it appears GoldenOakLibry has an LDAP server built in. Oh, well.

Next wall. Login. The top FAQ item is dedicated to it [4]. Turns out I’d installed incorrectly. I didn’t document the full process of “sideways progress,” but it involved adding a bunch of echo statements to bootstrap.sh to chase down a weird error:

"parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 1, column 16"

I traced this down to the auth() function, where I found an error from a failed database login being processed as JSON:

`Authentication error for user "customadmin"`

16 characters in, that’s the first space, if you include the ` mark.

And here I stalled for the longest time. This month hit the family with two major emergencies back-to-back, and neither feel fully real yet (early morning of 8-21). I will be lucky to finish my base goals. Nevertheless, after a good session with Shimmering Dust where I had him go source diving with a copy of logs for both LLDAP and its Postgress containers, he noticed LLDAP sending MySQL commands to Postgres (I don’t have the skills with databases to verify), which in-turn produced the failed login and crash above.

Shimmering Dust recommended I try using an all-caps version of the variable LLDAP_Database_url to be consistent with relevant standards. As it turns out, the LLDAP container as it is expects the mixed-case version, and I happened to have made it all-caps already. This change allowed me to initialize my LLDAP database and log in.

Project 3: Connecting GoldenOakLibry

With a week left on the clock, I began work on logging GoldenOakLibry into LLDAP. My progress was entirely sideways, bouncing between running process of elimination, circling over similar ideas with Shimmering Dust, and reaching out to the empty LLDAP Discord community.

One big burrier I busted was authentication. I installed Wireguard-CLI to examine the unencrypted traffic between GoldenOakLibry and LLDAP, but its utility, Tshark, resists running as root (I’m monitoring LDAP traffic on a privileged port, after all). I soon found TCPDump, a small packet sniffer program, and ran the log through Tshark.

$ sudo tcpdump -i any 'port 389' -w ~/packet_log.pcap #Ctrl+C to end log
$ tshark -r ~/packet_log.pcap | grep LDAP

I found LLDAP rejecting GoldenOakLibry’s LDAP bindRequests despite following the examples.

Rejected: "id=user_name,dc=yourdomain,dc=lan" simple
Expected: "uid=user_name,ou=people,dc=yourdomain,dc=lan" simple

The next wall was authentication, and took the longest. Shimmering Dust kept volunteering scripts to test hashing algorithms, but I vetoed the attempts. I changed my admin password to “changeme”, and suddenly GoldenOakLibry made it in. My standard procedure for passwords is 128 mixed-case alphanumeric with special characters. Testing showed the max character length is 64.

But the last hurdle stopped me cold the moment I understood it. Even though Tshark was reporting successful bindRequests and LLDAP was sending over all its user data, domain users were still not populating in. I grabbed a large, suspect log from LLDAP’s container where tens of fields were being ignored and fed it to Shimmering Dust – who advised that QTS (GoldenOakLibry’s operating system, made by QNAP) may be expecting a full POSIX environment (Portable Operating System Interface), which LLDAP was never going to provide in the first place.

As of posting, I have a support ticket out to QNAP. So far, my experience so far on this issue has been disappointing, with support only ever getting back to me once a weekday a few minutes after 5:00 PM. On first reply, I spent around three hours drafting an eMail, then gutting the fluff when it was too long for their support form. Then it had to be submitted as a second issue when their system glitched, and that cost me a full interaction when the technician helping me got confused at my merged ticket – during which I solved my authentication hangup and hit the presumed POSIX problem. I was asked to provide a log, but by then I had already decided to switch gears to QTS’ internal LDAP server as a workaround.

Takeaway

I seem to recall trying for a similar format where I compress several smaller projects into one. They have a tendency to go wrong and get delayed. I’m 99% sure LLDAP isn’t compatible with QTS’ LDAP client. Check my next post or two for a solid yes/no.

Prayer

Father in Heaven,

It’s been a long month for me. I’m feeling immense pressure to finish this project on a time frame I can’t do anything about, and having all my progress pulled about at the last few days isn’t doing any favors for moral.

But Father, I ask that when I or my readers get to feeling like this, you help us recontextualize it as learning – be it as “sideways progress” as I like to call it or whatever makes sense.

I praise you for professional tech support. While I may not have a final answer right now, I have faith that I’m being taken care of by someone whom I can’t see, yet knows what he is doing. I ask that you bless him and his team with wisdom as they study my setup.

Likewise, I pray that my readers find inspiration with their own projects – that they absorb the concepts they are studying.

In Jesus’ name I pray
Amen

Works Cited

[1] QNAP, “Connecting a QNAP NAS to an LDAP Directory,”qnap.com,Aug. 7, 2020 (Ambiguously: July 8, 2020). [Online]. Available: https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tutorial/article/connecting-a-qnap-nas-to-an-ldap-directory. [Accessed Aug. 9, 2026].

[2] M. Normann, “Overview of TLS and LDAPS,” kb.symas.com, Aug. 19th, 2024. [Online]. Available:https://kb.symas.com/configuration/overview-of-tls-and-ldaps. [Accessed Aug. 11, 2026].

[3] SparkyGears, cfarence, et. all, “Safely Self-Hosting a Minecraft server,” reddit.com, Nov. 24, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/182h7x9/safely_selfhosting_a_minecraft_server/. [Accessed Aug. 10, 2026].

[4] selfhoster1312, “[LLDAP] Frequently Asked Questions#I can’t log in!,” github.com,July 6, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/lldap/lldap/blob/main/docs/faq.md#i-cant-log-in. [Accessed Aug. 14, 2026]

Posted on

Homelab Check In 2026

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am reviewing the important parts of my homelab, going over the servers and software, and improving the inner workings. Let’s get started!

Hardware

The Internet comes in and connects to my ISP’s box. It’s set up in some kind of bridge mode. I have an Opnsense hardware firewall named Cerberus serving as the network hardware firewall and router. Wi-Fi is handled by an older router with stock firmware.

I have a server closet with my old RedLaptop, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) called GoldenOakLibry, and a pair of Dell Optiplex towers named ButtonMash and Joystick.

Golden Oak Libry

When we first got a NAS, we went with Synology. Since then, I’ve learned and the Linux kernel has developed, and one day I heard from tech support that they won’t be supporting a mission critical feature given my software stack (more on that later). I’ve been taking it slowly, but I’m transitioning into a newer QNAP device and adjusting to its quirks.

The driving force behind this month’s efforts has been completing this migration. I’d previously moved all the data onto other drives and back while only missing a few small files – mainly thanks to a terminal program called rsync. I grabbed all the metadata along with it – including UID/GID (User ID/Group ID) of all the files. And since I’d set up the previous NAS to not care about users, it was all Synology’s default “everybody” identifiers.

My goal for this time around is to distinguish between users. How-hard-can-that-be? Very.

Researching for Network Login

NFS (Network File System), the protocol I’m using to talk with Golden Oak, by default just trusts the incoming UID of any clients connecting to it. That means that if I upload a file from DerpyChips with a UID of 1000 and I access the NAS from my new laptop with a UID of 1000, everything will just work. But nothing is keeping my father’s computer from reporting the same UID, as 1000 seems to be the default value for all initial users. Now, I have an account on my father’s computer, and since it was created after his, my UID on there isn’t 1000. Too much work, too fragile. Approach rejected.

A more robust approach to solving this problem is Kerberos. I have some recollection from my initial days setting up the Synology NAS. In short: a client talks to a trusted server to get at a service. I spent a while researching implementation –including using Buildah to make a container to run with Podman– but found it expects way more network infrastructure than I already have, so I pivoted toward learning about this technology I keep hearing about in relation to homelabs: LDAP.

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is roughly equivalent to Active Directory in Microsoft Land. And in true Linux fashion, LDAP is a specification, not a single piece of software. Opinions differ as to which is best for a use case like mine, but LLDAP (Lightweight LDAP) seems to be right for me.

Joystick

Podman is the underlying technology I use for my homelab. It is often compared to Docker, but it works without root access in case of container breakout. I have a non-admin account on my server, Joystick, where I use Quadlet files for permanent Podman containers so they’re always running when I expect them to be.

But the heart of my homelab (software wise) is Caddy. Caddy is more or less a do-it-all networking suite. It’s a reverse proxy with built-in HTTPS – both real and by self-signed SSL certificates. And everything Caddy does is controlled by a Caddyfile written in as simple a format as possible. Once everything is in motion, the most annoying part is telling your computers and browsers to trust your self-signed certificate authorities.

Taking inventory, I found I didn’t have much in fully functional order. Vaultwarden (3rd party Bitwarden server written in Rust) and Crafty Controller (Minecraft server management software). Beyond that, I have an incomplete Nextcloud setup waiting on Golden Oak and dreams of many more projects – many of which also are waiting on Golden Oak Libry. The home directory was getting full, so I sorted them between Services that provide target functionality and Network that support the Services.

One of Caddy’s features is a static web server. After reviewing all my containers, I wrote a landing page for it to display. Debugging it ate a bunch of time, but I found I had goofed a mount configuration. From there, I linked my different services as a way to test them.

During this process, I discovered a poor Caddyfile entry for Crafty. Someone on GitLab had suggested essentially bypassing HTTPS security in a way that otherwise looked legit. This would have been fine for my setup, but out of concern for the community, I updated an earlier solution that relied on a deprecated Caddy term a different Caddy /path/to/certificate. In this way, I learned one way to “establish trust.”

Cerberus

Hardware Firewall. It’s basically a fancy router – a REALLY fancy router. If Caddy is the heart, Cerberus is the head. It handles the DNS blocklist using the OPNsense plugin Unbound. But Unbound also handles domain name resolution. I was several major versions out of date. Oops. Fixed.

Ironing out Unbound was another place that ate up diagnostic time like crazy. I eventually happened across a bug report where DNS server crashes if Unbound tries forwarding a wildcard subdomain (as in *.myDomain.lan) if the router thought itself on that same domain (under System>Settings>General>Domain). It wouldn’t stop completely, but it would get really slow. Switching to myDomain.arpa is a small price to pay for not having to manually forward each subdomain I configure for Caddy.

Takeaway

Life’s been hectic as of late, so I haven’t had the time or usable attention span to finish all my goals. Instead, I found several smaller goals and am in the process of whittling away toward the larger ones. My homelab was a bit of a mess after the techno-wizzarding I’ve been pulling off, and on this later pass, I’ve improved my understanding of what it was I was doing and how to engineer it better.

I have plenty of smaller goals I left out because I want this to be a log of what I’ve managed to finish – not a dream log of what I still have to do, but I still have one thing I wish to share.

One of the links on my homelab landing page is back to the router: https://cerberus.myDomain.lan. Firefox won’t load it. I looked up how to establish trust between Caddy and OPNsense, and my search results were flooded with a Caddy plugin for OPNsense. I’m sure it’s a fine project, but I don’t want to invest in that toy right now. Long story short, I pivoted approaches to use an ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) client I found for OPNsense. I left an entry in my Caddyfile to hopefully expose the ACME server and did everything to make my first attempt. It failed, but at least I got to that attempt in the first place. I do however need to call it quits on the research.

Prayer

One YouTuber I occasionally pay attention to is Network Chuck (Shoutout if you’re reading this). I may disagree with his claim that “everything in IT requires coffee,” but I do like how he’s made a space in his videos for Jesus, and I’d like to do the same (the prayer, not the coffee).

Father in Heaven,

I thank you for the progress I’ve had this month, and I praise you for whomever is sticking around. Please bless him or her according to your will. May you inspire my readers in their personal projects, be it with Caddy, OPNsense, or more. Guide them towards whatever documentation or bug report they need, and help them avoid focusing on premature feature creep.

In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

And if you are curious about the Bible, God, or Jesus, I’d be more than happy to talk. These days, I primarily use Discord. There’s a link to my server in my Socials tab at the top of this page. So far, He’s been welcome there, but from now on, I’d say He’s properly invited.

Final Question

Do you have an opinion on which LDAP server reigns supreme for homelabs? I look forward to hearing about it in the comments below or in my Socials!

Posted on

Hardware Firewall Up!

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

I left off last week having made attempts on four separate nights trying to get the hardware firewall online in a production context. When I tested it between my upstairs workstation and its OpenWRT+Raspberry Pi router/Wi-Fi adapter, it worked fine. Put it back in production between our ISP’s gateway and our existing gaming router, and no one gets Internet.

The solution: pull the gateway’s plug for 30 seconds and let it reboot. Internet solved.

Longer explanation: my ISP box is in some sort of bridge mode, where it’s supposed to pass the external IP address to a single device (usually a router, but can be a normal computer). In this mode, it didn’t like this device getting swapped out – possibly as a security measure. It still reserves the address 10.0.0.1 as itself through out the network, a behavior I took to be half-bridge mode, but my surprise this week while fiddling with settings was that it did in-fact pass on the external address.

Takeaway

I expected the struggle to continue a lot longer, but I actually figured it out pretty quickly once I started researching the symptoms online. I explored the settings a bit more. I’d like to move the functions of PiHole over, but the web interface has a drop-down menu for block lists instead of a text box. I’ll look into it another time. Instead, I spent a good chunk of the week weeding grass and getting a sunburn.

Final Question

Have you ever found you were rebooting the wrong thing? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

Posted on

Server Month: Data Preservation Ceremony

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today is part 2 of server month. Let’s get started!

Per my original draft of last week’s blog (before I suffered a power outage), I’m dedicating this February to testing the idea of study posts. Goal-oriented posts make for a satisfying story, but I often exhaust myself trying to reach big milestones and stress out when I manufacture victories. This month, while I would like to safely overhaul my server setup, I’m going to do my best to have no goalposts aside from writing between three hundred and a thousand words. We’ll see how long that lasts.

When I first ButtonMash (my current home server) used, I also bought one of its twins for my father. His new system is stable now, and so he has relinquished control of the old system. At the point of handover, it was dual booted with Linux Mint and Debian – with Debian being the less used. With this in mind, I’m planning on overwriting the Debian drive and keeping Mint around just in case.

As a part of the ritual before wiping a drive, I examined it for data we might want to keep. I spotted some images from a high quality set of Bible pictures my church has the rights to use, but our local copy is stuck on an external hard disk that fell and doesn’t work anymore. In total, I figure I’ve salvaged around 50 to 56 distinct photos of a much larger set. I locked onto the pattern of five digits and a .jpg extension, which came in handy when searching for additional survivors. Most of them were in a directory titled trash. I moved everything I could find (duplicates included) to an external USB stick from both Linux installations and on over to GoldenOakLibry for safekeeping.

However, when I went to install Rocky 9, my Ventoy USB froze while bringing up its menu – both when attempting legacy and UEFI boot.

Posted on

My First Computer “Rack”

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

So far, I’ve been assembling my servers (ButtonMash, RedLaptop, and GoldenOakLibry) on and under a foldable table. Add a workstation, and it’s getting a bit cluttered. We’ve had a set of glass shelves going unused for a while now, and I think they might do nicely to organize the servers’ room.

I started by measuring ButtonMash’s case against the shelves’ metal frame. While it was close, I estimated an inch vertical clearance once the shelves were in place. Otherwise, the tentative plan was to remove a shelf. My father and I moved the shelves in and loaded them and the setup’s UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). Wiring was relatively straightforward with the traditional wire Medusa in the back, but out from underfoot.

Unfortunately, I left ButtonMash in a precarious state such that a reboot before moving it knocked out my known house of cards supporting PiHole and Unbound. What I didn’t realize was that I never got Caddy working on that machine in the first place. In trying to fix Caddy, I wiped the containers I actually the whole house was using for DNS. As a patch, I pointed the router back at our normal DNS servers.

While I’m trying to avoid server work this month, I went ahead and looked up how to change my specific DNS settings temporarily to restart my DNS containers. From there, I did not encounter any notable issues, though I wasn’t up to testing the removal of my patch.

Takeaway

I have a rack. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Final Question

How do you organize your tech stack?

Privacy Policy