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📙 Introduction
 
 
 
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 This will be a story about how a git push containing an Ansible firewall role went out to my self-hosted CI runner and subsequently not only took down every service I host, but locked me out of every single one of my servers.
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 This post will be about how you can easily clone MIFARE Classic cards with a Proxmark3 device. I have long been interested in how RFID works and the security behind it and the Proxmark3 is a great tool for this.
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 Pocket ID is a lightweight, self-hosted OIDC provider that’s perfect for homelabs. It’s simple, it’s clean, and it doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. What it doesn’t have, however, is SCIM support and that’s where things get a bit spicy when integrating with vCenter Server.
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 This is kind of a part 5 of my 100TB NAS project/series, well, it is and it isn’t but I’ve included it as part 5 regardless.
🤦 Intro - The rantings of a muffn
 
 
 
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 As usual, I’m doing substantial yapping before the guide, if you don’t like reading and/or know what you’re doing, jump to the guide 
 

 Here we are again. Politicians making laws about technology they fundamentally…
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 vSAN is something I’ve been pretty enamored with for a long time, since it was first becoming a thing. Hyperconverged was the buzzword at the time and as someone just coming up in the industry, I knew it was something I wanted to mess with, and I did.
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 Look, cheap and mini are subjective so this may not be what you might imagine when you read the title, but, subjectively, this build is mini for an 8 bay NAS with this kind of hardware and objectively, it’s cheap. An off the shelf NAS with this many bays can’t even be found close to this price even in the used market (at least…

 
 
 
 

 This is the definitive guide to MANS - I truly outdid myself with the yapping on this one. 
 


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 MANS (Muffin’s Awesome NAS Stack) is a flexible, efficient approach to building a NAS that prioritizes storage efficiency and ease of expansion over redundancy, managed through…

 
 
 
 

 You can skip my yapping and jump to the fix. 
 


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 In my apartment, I have an ESXi host that runs some local services including my router/firewall. vCenter is located offsite, which is fine, usually. All my hosts run vDS, and this just caused me a massive headache when doing some…
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 Anyone who’s tried torrenting over VPN knows it can be a bit of a pain. Sure, basic setups work - connect to VPN, start downloading, done. But if you want proper speeds and proper seeding ratios, there’s a bit more to it than that.
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 As I age throughout this life, my priorities are changing. Some might dismiss this as paranoia, but it’s undeniable that our privacy is at greater risk than ever before.
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 I’ve recently been looking to move all my firewalls from pfSense VMs and Mikrotik hardware to OPNsense. Virtual pfSense has been great for me over many, many years and all the benefits a VM brings to a firewall have helped a lot, such as hypervisor level HA and snapshots. These days, however, I am leaning more towards physical…
🎬 The Plan
 
 
 
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 I’m dubbing this setup and its configuration ✨ MANS ✨, Muffin’s Awesome NAS Stack.
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 This post will be a tutorial on how to get rclone working on Synology’s DSM and enable one/two-way sync between your Synology device and an rclone compatible cloud backend.
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 Feature creep is a hell of a drug. Before my NAS build had even 1 hour of uptime I decided I would entirely change how I was planning to use the NAS and so some things had to be changed.
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 Cheap cloud storage is dead. :saluting_face: 
 Storing vast amounts of data in the cloud at an affordable price is currently not feasible. Although it served its purpose for a while, I’ve decided to just build my own dang cloud again.
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 Recently I have been experiencing some odd behaviour in my new whitebox ESXI server build. I had a GTX 1080 in the server passed through to an Ubuntu VM for GPU accelerated decoding/encoding with modified drivers to work around Nvidia’s ‘fuck you’ limitations.

 
 
 
 

 This is an image heavy post. 
 


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 My 3D printing journey started like many others, with an Ender 3 (Pro in my case) and covid lockdowns. I had wanted to get into it much earlier but a tiny apartment stopped me from doing so.
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 Recently, when I have tried to SSH to vCenter I have been getting the following:
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 When I got my Steamdeck in mid-2022, I couldn’t find a way to stream my Xbox to my Steamdeck locally which sucks because I use my Xbox far less than I should.
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 I no longer use Goatcounter. I instead use Umami. This tutorial will still work if you wish you use Goattcounter though. 
 

 I just posted about how I migrated from WordPress to Hugo here:
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 When I started this blog in 2015 it was more to learn than to actually write anything. WordPress was easy enough to set up and maintain along with the plethora of plugins to mess with.
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 I finally took a big leap in my life and said a giant ‘fuck you’ to landlords and decided to buy my first place in London.
This is nothing new, sadly
 
 
 
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 This is not a new build. This post is simply a short and sweet build post repackaging the build I did a few years ago into something much smaller to fit ‘properly’ into my apartment rack. That post is here:
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 POV - Your Mighty is dead and the charger is gonezo. 
 This is not a good situation.
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 This post will be a simple guide on how to upgrade your Cisco Nexus 9000 switch.
🕊️ RIP Unlimited Plex: Gone Too Soon
 
 
 
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 Whilst this posts methodology is still sound, there are no longer any options for reasonable amounts of cloud storage for cheap. You should go buy some drives or something, that’s what I’ve done, see below. 
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2020 was supposed to be a year of adventure and wonder for my girlfriend and me. After years of saving and excitement, we left our jobs, homes, and security to backpack for as long as we could make it.
Building Another NAS
 
 
 
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 A lot has changed in my life over the last 6 months or so, moving out of my flat and quitting my job to travel the world only to have 2020 suck all meaning out of every fibre of my being making me yearn for the eventuality of Earth being obliterated into inexistence, but until that time my storage as of late left much to be…
Another one of these? Really?
 
 
 
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 Yes. I love my Ambilight setup on my TV, and when I was originally doing this had some trouble oweing to different information here and there, so decided to do my own blog post on the matter.
Introduction
 
 
 
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 This post will be a brief intro into VMWare’s distributed switch technology and how to get your feet wet in the setup. This will not cover the advanced features or in-depth configuration but a followup may come in the future.
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 For a while now I’ve wanted a compact, ‘at a glance’ look at some of my lab statistics and other things in my flat, since my lab is elsewhere. Originally I started looking for 4k monitors that could be rotated vertically, then I started looking for small hobby boards that could output in 4k and eventually just putting the…
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 So it’s that time of year again when my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to move, after a few months of searching we found a very cosy (and a not so cosy rent price to go with it) flat in Zone 1/2, London. Without boring you with a life story, the aim of this move was to be extremely light, only moving the bare essentials so when it…
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 So a lot of you read and enjoyed my colocation post a while back and since then things have been going well.
How to pfSense
 
 
 
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 So, you’ve decided to ditch that POS ISP provided router, or just literally anything marketed towards consumers and have installed pfSense, so.. what now?
Intro, A look back into the past
 
 
 
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 So a while ago, I posted this rundown of my Plex server and storage setup for media, and it got some traction, which is nice. In that post I mentioned that my storage setup left a lot to be desired and I had issues with it, let me explain.
Get fucked HP.
 
 
 
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 So there I was, moving VMs off of my main host (DL380 G7, 2x x5690’s, 192GB RDIMM), getting ready to replace the 8x 300GB RAID10 array I’ve been using for a while now with some 1TB disks and SSDs, awesome, right?
It’s colo time baby! 
 
 
 
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 So for a while now I have been toying with the idea of putting my own hardware up in ’the cloud’ but due to the enormous prices for a homelabber I decided against it many times but now, however, I found a deal that was too good to pass up (considering UK/EUR pricing) and pulled the trigger.
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 Virtualization is awesome. It’s been the standard for enterprises for many years and although containers are gaining interest, virtual machines remain the go-to for any business; you’d be either crazy or incompetent not to go down this route in most scenarios. This post will go through the very basics of setting up and using ESXi.
Surprisingly, I don’t have any backups of my stuff. Apart from my Microserver Gen8 FreeNAS replication project which was necessary for my photos and personal media I don’t have any backups of my VM hosts, laptops or machines I use everyday which is very, very bad. A lot of my stuff is stored on RAID or RAID-like systems which I know aren’t by any means secure, but it’s kept…
I have a lot of 9211-8i’s in the lab, probably about 12, all flashed to IT mode. These are a godsend as they just work. They’re easy to flash to IT mode (rids them of any RAID, they become HBAs) and are 6GBp/s which is awesome.
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 So I need to create an IPSEC point to point link between two sites so my two FreeNAS boxes can replicate between each other as per this project. I already run my network on PfSense and have done for a few years now and think it’s great so slapping a PfSense box at my mother’s house seemed like the easiest thing to do. Once all the…
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 So I started off my IT career as an intern for a rather large company in London. I was doing a lot of misc stuff, mostly desktop but always pushed for as many networking bits I could, networking is great. A year later and here I am as a junior network engineer on the path to my CCNA (almost there!)
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 BT is an alright ISP, I get good speeds (150D/40U), never get throttled and have yet to hear anything about my internet activity which involves a fair amount of P2P.. their hardware however is god awful, and the BT HomeHub 5 is no exception to that. I won’t go into how bad it is because if you’re reading this hoping to repurpose it…