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 Disks

    SAS drives ignore ATA standby and the usual tools quietly stop working on them. What actually parks them, and a script that keeps them parked.

  2. Offsite Backup to Oracle Cloud with restic

    An 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.

  3. How AI Fed My Anxiety Without Asking

    How AI quietly consumed my focus, patience, and mental space — and what I did about it.

  4. One Identity Provider for Everything

    Authentik on Oracle Cloud in place of scattered logins: Google login everywhere, proxy auth for Guacamole, OAuth2 for Portainer, a K8s outpost for the cluster.

  5. Five AI Agents Running My Infrastructure

    Five OpenClaw agents — news, monitoring, backup checks, dashboards and an orchestrator — running securely as a dedicated user, with a custom command center.

  6. The Update Routine

    Keeping a Proxmox cluster, Talos Kubernetes, Synology, pfSense and Docker services updated: rolling upgrades, Renovate, and a cadence that spares your weekends.

  7. pfSense Boot Troubleshooting

    One accidental reboot, three failures: a CAM disk detection delay, a serial console that locked out the keyboard, and a NIC enumeration mismatch.

  8. Proxmox GPU Passthrough Guide

    Step-by-step GPU passthrough on Proxmox VE 8: IOMMU groups, VFIO binding, NVIDIA driver quirks, ROM dumps, and Tesla P40 for AI inference workloads.

  9. Deploying OpenClaw on Proxmox

    Deploy OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot/Clawdbot) on Proxmox in an unprivileged LXC — setup, security hardening, and post-breach recommendations.

2025

  1. merox-erudite: A Customized Astro Theme

    A fork of astro-erudite v1 with comments, analytics, SEO schemas, and an enhanced homepage — built for production blogging.

  2. Migrating Longhorn Backup from MinIO to Garage

    How to replace MinIO with Garage as the S3 backend for Longhorn backups — setup, bucket config, Kubernetes secret, and HelmRelease update.

  3. SSH Hardening - Securing Your Linux Servers

    Practical SSH hardening for production Linux servers — key-based auth, sshd_config, 2FA, host-based auth, fail2ban, and log monitoring.

  4. Restoring from Longhorn Backups

    How to restore Kubernetes applications from Longhorn backups — scale down, remove empty PVCs, restore volumes, create PVs/PVCs, and bring everything back up.

  5. SMB Authentication with AD on Linux

    How to integrate Linux SMB file servers with Active Directory using SSSD, Samba, Kerberos, and realmd — tested on RHEL 8 and OpenSUSE 15.6.

  6. Networking Specialist: My CCNA Journey

    My journey from networking beginner to CCNA: study methods, practical labs, the challenges, and how the certification opened doors to cybersecurity work.

  7. Dual Boot Guide: Windows 11 and Ubuntu

    Step-by-step guide to dual booting Windows 11 and Ubuntu — partitioning, installation, GRUB, and common fixes.

  8. From WordPress to Hugo: My Setup Explained

    Why I moved from WordPress to Hugo, and how the site runs today — GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare.

  9. Inside Google's Offices

    A look around Google's offices in the Warsaw HUB, from a work trip to Warsaw where a friend who works there showed me around.

  10. 3-2-1 Backup Strategy for Your Homelab

    A 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.

  11. How to Set Up a K3S Cluster in 2025

    Rebuilding my K3s cluster from scratch with Ansible — VM provisioning via Cloud-Init on Proxmox, HA across three nodes, and full automation.

2024

  1. My First Steps in IT Career

    How I went from skipping university classes to landing my first sysadmin job — the CV, the interview, and the questions they asked.

  2. How to Set Up Your Own AI at Home

    Running Ollama, OpenWebUI, and Stable Diffusion on a CPU-only homelab server — installation, configuration, and integration.

  3. Setting Up Dell R720 Server in the Home Lab

    Adding a Dell PowerEdge R720 to my homelab: fan control with IPMItool, firmware updates, a Proxmox migration over NFS, RAID storage and UPS integration.

  4. Tailscale site-to-site pfSense - Linux

    How to set up a Tailscale site-to-site L3 connection between a pfSense homelab subnet and a Linux cloud VM subnet.