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
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.
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.
How AI Fed My Anxiety Without Asking
How AI quietly consumed my focus, patience, and mental space — and what I did about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deploying OpenClaw on Proxmox
Deploy OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot/Clawdbot) on Proxmox in an unprivileged LXC — setup, security hardening, and post-breach recommendations.
2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dual Boot Guide: Windows 11 and Ubuntu
Step-by-step guide to dual booting Windows 11 and Ubuntu — partitioning, installation, GRUB, and common fixes.
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.
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.
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.
2024
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.
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.
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.
Tailscale Site-to-Site: pfSense to Linux
How to set up a Tailscale site-to-site L3 connection between a pfSense homelab subnet and a Linux cloud VM subnet.