Andreas Happe: linux
Homeserver: Glances and Home Assistant for Monitoring
Now that I have a minimal home server running, I thought it would be good idea to monitor temperature, disk usage and such. The simplest solution that I found was to use Glances and use Home Assistant to store and display the data.
Homeserver: Creating local Proton Drive/Mail Backups
By now, I am using Proton Drive for cloud data storage and Proton Mail as my primary mail service. While I trust Proton with my data, I do not want to rely on them completely. As I have a small server standing around at home, it’s kinda obvious to use it for automatically performing backups of my cloud data. I try to use systemd services and timers for this, as this makes monitoring and logging quite easy. This blog post mostly serves as a reminder for me, but maybe it helps someone else as well.
Homeserver: Services Pt. 1
I am running a home server for a while now. I have been using it to host some services that I use regularly. In this post, I will share my experience with some of the services I have set up on my home server. This initial post will go over local git hosting using gitea, audiobook streaming using audiobookshelf and a self-hosted RSS reader using tt-rss.
Using tailscale on Fedora Silverblue
I am using Fedora Silverblue as one of my main desktops. Recently, I’ve been moving some services to a server behind tailscale but was still using its local IP address when at home at my Silverblue desktop. While doable, using an IP-address with an invalid HTTPS certificate wasn’t that pretty — so why not just access it through tailscale even within the same network, it’s an overlay network overall (so it should do a direct connection between my desktop and the home-server).
Building a little home-server with Linux, TailScale, ProtonVPN, Docker Compose and VM support
I’ve been using a mini-computer as home-server for the last couple of years. Originally, I used it to share files between my computers, but over time more and more services (like RSS-readers, media-libraries, home automation, etc.) were moved on that surprisingly capable mini-server. I’ve grown up using Linux (well, I was already 16 when Linux became available around here, but you get the gist) so it always felt natural to me to just just use a minimal Linux installation (debian) instead of using some NAS that supports add-on third-party software.
Building a 4G/LTE router+accesspoint using hostapd, network-manager and modemmanager
So I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 4b+ together with a WaveShare LTE Modem as 4G router/access-point for my home network setup. I do like my hardware to be quiet and thus fan-less, alas the Raspberry Pi 4b+ gets a tad on the warm side. So this was a perfect opportunitiy to play around with an older Raspberry Pi 3b+ which should use approx. 20-25% less power (both, during idle and load) and with “new” software.
Create a new Ubuntu 20.10 Desktop without too much Ubuntiness.
After I’ve bought a new and fast 1TB SSD, it’s time to setup my aging Desktop again. Last time I went with Fedora Core, this time I will try to reduce some of the ubuntu-iness of a Ubuntu 20.10 Desktop for that. After preliminary tests Ubuntu seems to be more resource efficient than Fedora Silverblue and I should be able to remove most of Ubuntu’s problematic packages. Given that my Notebook still runs Fedora Core, I’m also keeping in touch with both the Ubuntu/Debian as well as with the Redhat/Fedora world through that.
Amazing (Physical) Access Control with HID RFID cards
So my company moved to a new building which uses HID RFID cards for access control. These cards are typically white with some sort of numeric code printed on one side of them. I have not included an image of my card due to (later) obvious reasons.. Setting up my Proxmark3 RDV4 reader Some time ago I joined the Kickstarter for an updated version of the Proxmark3 RFID reader/writer and immediately broke it during the initial flash update.
Revising my lazy http/https interception setup
I’ve wrote about about creating a simple wireless (WLAN for us right-pondian) http/https interception setup before. Mostly I’m using this as a first step when testing mobile/desktop applications. Linux’ network-manager is perfectly able to create an software access-point with most modern network cards. Alas GNOME’s configuration tool only allows for the creation of ad-hoc networks (and switching to KDE for just this is a bit overkill for me) so you have to setup the access point on the command line with nmtui or nmcli.
Fun Hacking Stuff ahead
Recently I’ve found an old post-it with guidelines I wrote myself a couple of years back, two of those stood out: make mistakes don’t buy stupid stuff Seems like I haven’t been the most consistent person back then. The post-it got discovered during a clean-up session of my flat, the same session brought up the following stupidly-bought-and-never-used gadgets: one BBC micro:bit that should be able to capture Bluetooth Low Energy transmissions one Proxmark 3 RV4 that should be able to do some nifty RFID stuff (and that I was recently able to fix) one Realtek Software-Defined Radio USB Stick (rtl-sdr).