merox

Notes

Notes from production and from the rack at home. The ones that no longer hold are in the archive; the commands I keep looking up are on one page.

2026

  1. Spinning Down SAS DisksSAS drives ignore ATA standby and the usual tools quietly stop working on them. What actually parks them, and a script that keeps them parked. 12 minute read
  2. Offsite Backup to Oracle Cloud with resticAn encrypted offsite backup on an Oracle Cloud Always Free instance, no dependencies — in place of a HyperBackup setup that needed a working DSM to restore. 4 minute read
  3. How AI Fed My Anxiety Without AskingHow AI quietly consumed my focus, patience, and mental space — and what I did about it. 5 minute read
  4. One Identity Provider for EverythingAuthentik on Oracle Cloud in place of scattered logins: Google login everywhere, proxy auth for Guacamole, OAuth2 for Portainer, a K8s outpost for the cluster. 8 minute read
  5. Five AI Agents Running My InfrastructureFive OpenClaw agents — news, monitoring, backup checks, dashboards and an orchestrator — running securely as a dedicated user, with a custom command center. 15 minute read
  6. The Update RoutineKeeping a Proxmox cluster, Talos Kubernetes, Synology, pfSense and Docker services updated: rolling upgrades, Renovate, and a cadence that spares your weekends. 9 minute read
  7. pfSense Boot TroubleshootingOne accidental reboot, three failures: a CAM disk detection delay, a serial console that locked out the keyboard, and a NIC enumeration mismatch. 6 minute read
  8. Proxmox GPU Passthrough GuideStep-by-step GPU passthrough on Proxmox VE 8: IOMMU groups, VFIO binding, NVIDIA driver quirks, ROM dumps, and Tesla P40 for AI inference workloads. 6 minute read
  9. Deploying OpenClaw on ProxmoxDeploy OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot/Clawdbot) on Proxmox in an unprivileged LXC — setup, security hardening, and post-breach recommendations. 7 minute read

2025

  1. Migrating Longhorn Backup from MinIO to GarageHow to replace MinIO with Garage as the S3 backend for Longhorn backups — setup, bucket config, Kubernetes secret, and HelmRelease update. 4 minute read
  2. SSH Hardening: Securing Your Linux ServersPractical SSH hardening for production Linux servers — key-based auth, sshd_config, 2FA, host-based auth, fail2ban, and log monitoring. 13 minute read
  3. Restoring from Longhorn BackupsHow to restore Kubernetes applications from Longhorn backups — scale down, remove empty PVCs, restore volumes, create PVs/PVCs, and bring everything back up. 5 minute read
  4. SMB Authentication with AD on LinuxHow to integrate Linux SMB file servers with Active Directory using SSSD, Samba, Kerberos, and realmd — tested on RHEL 8 and OpenSUSE 15.6. 9 minute read
  5. Networking Specialist: My CCNA JourneyMy journey from networking beginner to CCNA: study methods, practical labs, the challenges, and how the certification opened doors to cybersecurity work. 3 minute read
  6. Dual Boot Guide: Windows 11 and UbuntuStep-by-step guide to dual booting Windows 11 and Ubuntu — partitioning, installation, GRUB, and common fixes. 6 minute read
  7. From WordPress to Hugo: My Setup ExplainedWhy I moved from WordPress to Hugo, and how the site runs today — GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare. 4 minute read
  8. Inside Google's OfficesA look around Google's offices in the Warsaw HUB, from a work trip to Warsaw where a friend who works there showed me around. 2 minute read
  9. 3-2-1 Backup Strategy for Your HomelabA practical guide to the 3-2-1 backup rule — what it means, how to implement it, and how to actually recover when things go wrong. 4 minute read

2024

  1. My First Steps in IT CareerHow I went from skipping university classes to landing my first sysadmin job — the CV, the interview, and the questions they asked. 3 minute read
  2. How to Set Up Your Own AI at HomeRunning Ollama, OpenWebUI, and Stable Diffusion on a CPU-only homelab server — installation, configuration, and integration. 3 minute read
  3. Setting Up Dell R720 Server in the Home LabAdding a Dell PowerEdge R720 to my homelab: fan control with IPMItool, firmware updates, a Proxmox migration over NFS, RAID storage and UPS integration. 4 minute read
  4. Tailscale Site-to-Site: pfSense to LinuxHow to set up a Tailscale site-to-site L3 connection between a pfSense homelab subnet and a Linux cloud VM subnet. 3 minute read