For over 2 years now I’ve been running OpenWrt on my main router. It’s a reasonably powerful Qotom box, meaning it uses the x86/64 image which is fairly atypical for OpenWrt. And the upgrade process is not exactly straight forward. So I decided to document the procedure, and create a script to automate it!

Recently I setup Authelia to use as an SSO (OIDC) for lots of my compatible applications. With Authelia running, it was time to start implementing it into an application. I’m a huge fan of Bookstack, and decided to start there. But, before making a big change like this, I wanted to make sure I had a good, recent backup.

Ntfy is becoming one of my favorite self-hosted services, and now I’m finally integrating it into system monitoring. I finally have enough drives to run a couple of ZFS mirrors, and wanted to be notified of any problems with the drives. As a bonus, I also found the notifications for SMART statistics and decided to add that as well.

Once again I’m late wrapping up the previous year. However, I haven’t forgotten the promise I intend to uphold for as long as I can.

For too long I have been manually running certain tasks on my server. This includes updating my Podman containers roughly once per week. For this, I have all of my containers set to run as systemd services which allows me to use the extremely helpful podman auto-update command. But I often use the --dry-run switch the first time to see which containers will actually have updates available for them.

Home Assistant has been on my radar for quite some time, but only recently have I dived into the app that everyone is raving about. I have a handful of sensors setup, one of which is connected to Home Assistant through a Bluetooth integration. For the most part, all has been running seamlessly and mostly trouble-free. However, I have noticed that the Bluetooth sensor disconnects sporadically and Home Assistant isn’t able to reestablish the connection.

I know we are already nearly a month into the new year, but I wanted to follow through with a promise I made to myself last year.

Protecting your SSH port is a critical part of any good Linux security policy. While the list of things to do is well documented across the internet, I wanted to give an alternative to the standard SSH protections. Why not only expose the SSH port via a Wireguard Tunnel? The steps are fairly straight forward, especially if you’ve setup a Wireguard server before. However, there are one or two unforeseen pitfalls which could trip up even more experienced users.

In November, 2021, Nextcloud released a much anticipated feature: a backup app for a less technical user! I hadn’t been following the project closely, but decided to give it a spin as I see it recommended on occasion. This is my quick review as of April 2022 using the Nextcloud Backup App version 1.0.6.

Updating my 2013 Macbook Air to Linux kernel version 5.17.4 broke my Broadcom wireless and required a bit of extra work to get it working.