echo ${core_dump} > /www/blog

Typing takes time. Typing without typos is an art. Fixing mistakes in a terminal command is a pain in the neck. Luckily there’s such a thing as aliases. An alias lets you set a keyword and a command it should expand to. For example, I have set a super simple one, which is widely used: alias ..='cd ..'. This allows me to write .. in terminal and it will act like cd .., saving me typing a c, a d and a space. This seems minor, but when you imagine how often I need to go up a directory in terminal, it’s a huge timesaver. ...

I have a ZFS dataset named data, mounted at /data, which I bind-mount into my LXC containers. The dataset is a three drive set with a lot of storage space. Basically, this huge pool of gigabytes is shared by all LXC containers that need to store serious amounts of data. Think Immich, for photo storage, or Jellyfin and all the movies, series and music it has to be able to play. As you may imagine, having several different LXCs write to the same “drive” may cause permission issues. ...

It’s about that time. There’s a new version of Proxmox VE in town and it has had a couple of months to “stabilize”. Now is the time to bump up the version of that homelab. I’ve pulled the trigger and did the upgrade. The following is my experience with doing this update. I’ve run into some issues, which all got solved and I didn’t break my server. Prerequisites You must be on PVE 8.4.1 or newer before upgrading. Check with: ...

I have too much shit. It’s been 40 years of me gathering it and storing it. On my dad dying I inherited even more shit. Shit that’s even harder to part with. I like a bare environment. My living room sports two couches, a coffee table, a tv dresser with a tv and sound bar, a large closet, a dinner table, six chairs, a sideboard, two plants a lamp and a statue. That’s it. There are no more furnishings. No clutter, no fluff. Well, ok - the two sofa’s each have two pillows. I had to fight the wife to get it down to four total. Oh, and the house came with a wood burner, which I’ve placed a stand with a set of tools like thongs, a poker, brush and scoop next to. There’s also a single photo frame on the large closed with six photos too. We also have a decorative samovar on the wood burner. Still, when comparing to living rooms of people I know, mine- well ours is quite sparse. A better example; the bedroom. All it has is a bed, a dresser, two nightstands and a wooden ladder on which the wife hangs clothes in between clean and dirty (don’t ask, I have no clue). In the kitchen there’s a breadbox, salt, pepper, oil and a coffee maker on my counters. Oh, and a fruitbowl. ...

I just moved my server into my server rack. This sounds silly, but it was a desktop-like enclosure, not a rack mounted one. I do have a rack mount in my basement, but it mainly held switches and the likes. Now it also holds my server and it’s amazing. The reason for posting this, apart from celebrating the joy of having done this and getting rid of the server sounds in the office, is that I figured there’s a tip to be had! ...

It’s been a while since I wrote one, but the other day I finally finished my tutorial on setting up Proxmox Backup Server. It’s a detailed account of what I did. I mainly write these to clean up the notes I take while working on things. If I left the notes as-is, in a few months I’d have no idea what I actually did. The notes simply don’t contain everything, so while it’s still fresh in my mind, I turn them into a tutorial. I do so mostly for myself, but hopefully its useful to others as well. ...

This is going to be a long one. I have spent countless hours setting up my Proxmox VE and the VM’s and LXC containers on it. It occurred to me that it might be wise to have a decent backup solution for this, in case something goes catastrophically wrong. Luckily Proxmox provides a ready-made solution for this and it is called Proxmox Backup Server or PBS for short. This post will go through how I set this up on my system. ...

It sucks. No really, it does. It’s a shame, but there’s nearly nothing of value left. Nuke all your cookies and the likes and start in a fresh new browser. Wadda ya see? AI slop. Bullshit videos and nearly all thumbs seem AI generated. Lose your soul and drop into shorts… This place is even worse. YouTube is doing full minute ads now too, I hear. I don’t suffer from that shit as I have decent adblock. Still though, one minute of a single ad between “free” content? That’s bonkers. ...

I used to have cover images for some posts on my blog. I felt they added some needed pizzazz to the site. Turns out I was wrong. It added a splash of color to the index page, sure, but it also brought some issues. First was that some images were too big, spacing out blog posts on the index page, forcing users to scroll way too much to go through the posts list. I tried to remedy this by cropping the images and making them all the same height. This, I found, works for some images, but ruins others. No bueno. ...

I hate the fact that I cannot enjoy the moment anymore. I used to be able to sit down and watch a movie. A whole movie. Start to finish; watch it. No breaks. No peaking at my phone. No little distractions. I’d get up to take a piss, or grab a drink, sure, but I was into the movie. Not just movies though. Music! I used to be able to enjoy music on its own. Just having an album on I took the time to go out and buy and just enjoy it playing. Nothing else, just the music. ...