THE COMPANY INDEX TRACKED BLOG
Ideas, decisions, and lessons from the team.
blog.monstermuffin.org (opens on the source site)📙 Introduction # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🤦 Intro - The rantings of a muffn # 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 don’t understand, wrapped up in the classic “think of the children” rhetoric that’s become the defacto justification for the surveillance state.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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 when I looked).
Read at the sourceBelow are some of the projects I have been working on that I am most proud of. Awesome Mini PC # My attempt to create a catalog of mini PCs and similar systems. Built to be simple and usable, with data being the focus Awesome Mini PC is something new for me which I continue to spend too much time on. Would be great if you checked it out!
Read at the sourceThis is the definitive guide to MANS - I truly outdid myself with the yapping on this one. 🎯 Introduction # 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 Ansible. MANS aims to be ‘JBOD1’ but smarter. This guide explains everything you need to know about MANS - from understanding when to use it to deploying your own setup.
Read at the sourceYou can skip my yapping and jump to the fix. 🎬 Intro # 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 maintenance.
Read at the source📔 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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 installs, especially with the ridiculous amounts of cheap, powerful mini PCs available today.
Read at the sourceAI Usage # AI tools have been used in my content for two purposes: Generating featured images for certain blog posts. Note: I don’t actually do this anymore. I did for 2-3 posts but it’s lame. Proofreading certain sections of my writing for spelling and grammatical errors. Note: Again, however, I am not really doing this anymore as I have found these tools have become more overbearing than helpful. This diclosure will nonetheless stay here as LLMs were used to do this at some point or another, even if I do not currently do this. I have no intention/interest in using AI tools to generate…
Read at the source📔 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source🎬 Intro # 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.
Read at the source📔 Intro # 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.
Read at the sourceThis is an image heavy post. 📔 Intro # 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.
Read at the source📔 Intro # 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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