In 1998 Tim Berners-Lee penned the historical essay “Cool URIs don’t change”, a treatise on keeping URIs (and URLs) active so content remains accessible and doesn’t just drop off the face of the CyberEarth because you wanted to re-organise your website. The post resonates so much with me and feels more applicable now then ever before as we enter an age of link rot with companies deleting swathes of valuable information when they don’t care about resources they acquire or just want to save a buck.
It’s been a few years since I posted about my NAS upgrade ideas and one of my major points was how to do regular off-site backups.
TL;DR: I use Rclone with AWS S3 as a backend. Versioning enabled and cron setup in TrueNAS to run a sync with bandwidth limiting, performance+cost tuning, file filtering and logging of the output.
A long time ago I would just manually do an off-site back up of my data to Google Drive, a laborious and time intensive process thanks to ADSL internet and the finicky nature of the Google Drive web interface.
I’ve posted a bunch about LBS (my NAS) before because it’s such a core part of the way I backup and maintain data1; from important documents and photos to old work and hobbies. But space is always a cost, especially with regular offsite backups. As an example of my data hoarding I’ve got about 78GB of photos, some of which date back to 2001. Thankfully the photos from that far back were taken on a digital camera that saved them to floppy disk but the proliferation of amazingly powerful smartphone cameras makes it so easy to take heaps of incredibly high resolution snaps with no remorse or regret.
I’ve been having on-and-off issues with my right hand for over a year now. There is no way we could ever know how this could happen, especially with such a healthy daily schedule like:
Wake up and scroll my phone one-handed. Go to work for eight hours using a mouse intensely for GIS work. Go home and play click-heavy video games for four hours. Go to bed and scroll my phone one-handed.
I quit my job recently to spend a bit of time funemployed before looking for a new role and finally pulled the trigger on buying a new PC. Given a decent portion of it is tax deductible, I tend to hold onto my desktops for a long time, and I want to be able to use it for gaming, rendering, and some ML experiments I decided to spend pretty decently on it.
For a long time I’ve wanted to run some form of “cluster” at home. Given I make less than $500 million in annual revenue Cray won’t return my calls and I’d rather suck eggs than deal with IBM, so I eventually had to set my sights a little lower.
So for about 5 years now I’ve wanted a Raspberry Pi cluster. I had my eye set on a PicoCluster five node kit, but with the Raspberry Pi 3B+ still being limited, I wasn’t super convinced.
For about a year and a half now I’ve been running “my own” mail server on my sole trader business domain using Mail-in-a-Box on a cheap VPS, slowly migrating more accounts and subscriptions to it. I originally started doing this after thinking about my 2021 ICT goals, focusing on ownership of my own email data.
While there have been privacy issues about email providers before, such as Google using your emails to personalise ad content until 2017, another factor is the risk of losing all your email data if the hosting company decides to cancel your account without any reason.
I’ve run a bunch of different VPS servers for my own projects over the years, and one odd hobby was checking the /var/log/auth.log and seeing just how frequently random mass scans of the internet would turn into unauthorised SSH attempts on my server. The following is one minute of my logs:
May 15 06:55:23 srsbzns sshd[6401]: Invalid user ubnt from 116.110.92.78 port 55134 May 15 06:55:23 srsbzns sshd[6401]: Connection closed by invalid user ubnt 116.
I discovered Funkwhale a while back, but didn’t go further than understanding where it fit as a cool “Fediverse” project.
But ever since my 2021 ICT Goals post, I’ve been wanting a media player that lets me play my own music. Stuff that I’ve purchased from Bandcamp/BeatPort/iTunes or from CDs that I’ve purchased and ripped onto my computer. Unfortunately I have three regularly used machines (1 desktop, 2 laptops), plus my phone, meaning a standard music player application isn’t appropriate for managing my library.
I’ve got an old HP N40L Proliant MicroServer that I’ve written about before and mentioned a couple of times in the past ([1], [2]). It’s been sitting variously in a storage locker and under my desk for the better part of six years and four house moves but I decided it’s finally time to either throw it out or repurpose it.
I’ve finally found a use for it that I can hopefully discuss in a future post, but here I’m dedicating some time to an issue I ran into when getting it all set up and going over some of the issues with troubleshooting when all signs point you in the wrong direction.