• 3 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Wow, that’s so neat!

    On my machine it opens a fullscreen plasma spash and then it shows the new session intermixed/overlayed with my current one instead of in a new window… basically, it’s a mess :D

    If I may abuse your patience:

    • what distro/plasma version are you running? (here it’s opensuse slowroll w/ plasma 6.1.4)
    • what happens if you just run startplasma-wayland from a terminal as your user? (I see the plasma splash screen and then I’m back to my old session)



  • why is your network like this?

    Well, at the moment my network is actually flat :)

    This is an experiment I’m doing because I wanted to have all the management stuff on a different subnet (eg. adguard dns is on the “regular” subnet everyone uses, but its web interface is on the special subnet only select devices can talk to).

    Of course (like with most stuff in my homelab), it’s not like I really have a super-compelling security reason to that, it’s mostly that I wondered “what if?” :D

    Oh. the ping option you are referring to is -I (upper case) and takes either an interface name or an ip. I did try giving a .10/24 IP to the PC and the results were consistent with scenario 1 (pings where source and destination are on the same subnet work, pings acrrss subnets don’t), so I didn’t mention that in the OP


  • I don’t think I quite explained the situation well enough: my server only has 1 ethernet port (same as my PC), otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered with vlans (well, I would still have bothered, since my house still only has one “backbone” cable running through it, but I would have configured it on the switches only).

    Anyway… a few of the things you say/imply go against my understanding of networking, so one of us would better go back RTFM as you suggest :) (just kidding - most probably I just don’t understand what you mean)







  • If going the route of a backup solution, is it feasible to install OpenWRT on all of my devices, with the expectation that I can do some sort of automated backups of all settings and configurations, and restore in case of a router dying?

    My two cents: use a “full” computer as your router (with either something like OPNsense or any “regular” linux distro if you don’t need the GUI) and OpenWRT on your access points.

    Unless you use the GUI and backup/restore the configuration (as you would with proprietary firmwares), OpenWRT is frankly a pain to configure and deploy. At the moment I’m building custom images for all my devices, but (next time™) I’m gonna ditch all that, get an x86 router and just manually manage OpenWRT on my wifi APs (I only have two and they both have the same relatively straightforward config).

    It’s a pain that I know can be solved with buying dedicated access points (…right?)

    Routers and access points are just computers with network interfaces (there may be level-2-only APs, but honestly I’ve never heard of any)… most probably your issue is that the firmware of your “routers as access points” doesn’t want to be configured as a dumb AP.



  • I’d say a good middle ground could be making that stuff only visible from your mom’s user (or even setting up a completely separate server)?

    It depends on what YOU want to do, really… personally, I would be ok hosting religious nonsense if asked, as long as it’s not generally available in kids’ accounts and stuff (also, porn), but I would come clean and outright refuse if it was neonazi,racist and/or conspiracy stuff. It depends on where you decide to draw the line.

    BTW: there’s also the passive/aggressive, cowardly option of sayng “I’ll rip them when I have time” and then sequester all the DVDs and only ever find the time to rip the ones you don’t mind



  • IMHO Ansible isn’t much different than a bash script… it has the advantage of being “declarative” (in quotes because it’s not actually declarative at all: it just has higher-level abstractions that aggregate common sysadmin CLI operations/patterns in “declarative-sounding” tasks), but it also has the disadvantage of becoming extremely convoluted the moment you need any custom logic whatsoever (yes, you can write a python extension, but you can do the same starting with a bash script too).

    Also, you basically can’t use ansible unless your target system has python (technically you can, but in practice all the useful stuff needs python), meaning that if you use a distro that doesn’t come with python per default (eg. alpine) you’ll have to manually install it or write some sort of pythonless prelude to your ansible script that does that for you, and that if your target can’t run python (eg. openwrt on your very much resource-constrained wifi APs) ansible is out of the question (technically you can use it, but it’s much more complex than not using it).

    My two cents about configuration management for the homelab:

    • whatever you use, make sure it’s something you re-read often: it will become complex and you will forget everything about it
    • keep in mind that you’ll have to re-test/update your scripts at least everytime your distro version changes (eg. if you upgrade from ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04) and ideally every time one of your configured services changes (because the format of their config files may in theory change too)
    • if you can cope with a rolling-style distro, take a look at nix instead of “traditional” configuration management: nixos configuration is declarative and (in theory) guarantees that you won’t ever need to recheck or update your config when updating (in reality, you’ll occasionally have to edit your config, but the OS will tell you so it’s not like you can unknowingly break stuff).

    BTW, nixos is also not beginner-friendly in the least and all in all badly documented (documentation is extensive but unfriendly and somewhat disorganized)… good luck with that :)