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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’ve worked with Windows environments from 2003 until still today migrating to azure. The biggest skills gap with technicians and engineers administrating Windows is actually networking. This single point connects every single service server and user and yet dns, dhcp, routing and it’s protocols, link layer technologies like vlans interface configurations aggregation and more is so poorly understood that engineers and technicians often significantly mistake problems. Almost all issues happen around network layers 2-4 or layer 8 (the end user).

    It doesn’t need to be first but no matter what os or component, networking is core and the single biggest return on investment for systems admin types.

    Sure other basic skills are required but just being able to test TCP by telnet or understand each hop, and is the server listening? What process ID is listening? Did someone configure rdp off 3389 and that’s why it doesn’t work? Was the host file edited and that’s why it’s resolving some old ip for this hostname? Why is it going out the wan interface of the router when it should be going over an ipsec tunnel?

    All this and more has nothing to do with Windows, and yet, anything that isn’t just user training or show and tell about how to do something, there’s a good chance it requires you to follow the networking layers to make sure behaviour is expected.




  • I don’t know where you work but don’t access your tailnet from a work device and ideally not their network.

    Speaking to roku, you could buy a cheap raspberri pi and usb network port. One port to the network the other to roku. The pi can have a tailscale advertised network to the roku, and the roku probably needs nothing since everything is upstream including private tailscale 100.x.y.z networks which will be captured by your device in the middle raspberri pi.

    I guess that’d cost like 40 ish dollars one time.


  • They could be, but I assume say like an apple device won’t install a ccp root authority unconditionally. Huawei and xiamoi probably could be forced, but the browser too, like Chrome, Firefox and safari need to also accept the device certificates as trusted.

    But the pressure in Europe would likely be to trade within Europe, you must comply.

    It fundamentally destroys the whole trust of PKI if this did go ahead. We just need to hope it does not.



  • A country for example could enact their mandatory certificate authority that they control. Then have ISPs who are in the middle use what was mandatory a trusted CA to act as the certificate issuer for a proxy. This already exists in enterprise, a router or proxy appliance is a mitm to inspect ssl traffic intercepting connections to a website say Google, but instead terminates that connection on itself, and creates a new connection to Google from itself. Since the Google certificate on the client side would be trusted from the proxy, all data would be decrypted on the proxy. to proxy data back to clients without a browser certificate trust issue, they use that already mandated CA that they control to create new certificates for the sites they’re proxying the proxy reencrypts it back to the client with a trusted certificate and browsers accept them.

    It’s actually less than theoretical, it’s literally been proposed in Europe. This method is robust and is already what happens in practice in enterprise organisations on company devices with the organisations CA certificate (installed onto organisation computers by policy or at build time). I’ve deployed and maintained this setup on barracuda firewalls, Fortigate firewalls and now Palo alto firewalls.

    https://www.itnews.com.au/news/eu-row-over-certificate-authority-mandates-continues-ahead-of-rule-change-602062





  • I’m far from an expert sorry, but my experience is so far so good (literally wizard configured in proxmox set and forget) even during a single disk lost. Performance for vm disks was great.

    I can’t see why regular file would be any different.

    I have 3 disks, one on each host, with ceph handling 2 copies (tolerant to 1 disk loss) distributed across them. That’s practically what I think you’re after.

    I’m not sure about seeing the file system while all the hosts are all offline, but if you’ve got any one system with a valid copy online you should be able to see. I do. But my emphasis is generally get the host back online.

    I’m not 100% sure what you’re trying to do but a mix of ceph as storage remote plus something like syncthing on a endpoint to send stuff to it might work? Syncthing might just work without ceph.

    I also run zfs on an 8 disk nas that’s my primary storage with shares for my docker to send stuff, and media server to get it off. That’s just truenas scale. That way it handles data similarly. Zfs is also very good, but until scale came out, it wasn’t really possible to have the “add a compute node to expand your storage pool” which is how I want my vm hosts. Zfs scale looks way harder than ceph.

    Not sure if any of that is helpful for your case but I recommend trying something if you’ve got spare hardware, and see how it goes on dummy data, then blow it away try something else. See how it acts when you take a machine offline. When you know what you want, do a final blow away and implement it with the way you learned to do it best.


  • 3x Intel NUC 6th gen i5 (2 cores) 32gb RAM. Proxmox cluster with ceph.

    I just ignored the limitation and tried with a single sodim of 32gb once (out of a laptop) and it worked fine, but just backed to 2x16gb dimms since the limit was still 2core of CPU. Lol.

    Running that cluster 7 or so years now since I bought them new.

    I suggest only running off shit tier since three nodes gives redundancy and enough performance. I’ve run entire proof of concepts for clients off them. Dual domain controllers and FC Rd gateway broker session hosts fxlogic etc. Back when Ms only just bought that tech. Meanwhile my home “ARR” just plugs on in docker containers. Even my opnsense router is virtual running on them. Just get a proper managed switch and take in the internet onto a vlan into the guest vm on a separate virtual NIC.

    Point is, it’s still capable today.




  • It’s solving a real problem in a niche case. Someone called it gimmicky, but it’s actually just a good tool currently produced by an unknown quantity. Hopefully it’ll be sorted or someone else takes up the reigns and creates an alternative that works perfectly for all my different isos.

    For the average home punter maybe even up to home lab enthusiast, probably not saving much time. For me it’s on my keyring and I use it to reload proxmox hosts, Nutanix hosts, individual Ubuntu vms running ROS Noetic and not to mention reimaging for test devices. Probably a thrice weekly thing.

    So yeah, cumulatively it’s saving me a lot of time and just in trivialising a process.

    If this was a spanner I’d just go Sidchrome or kingchrome instead of my Stanley. But it’s a bit niche so I don’t know what else allows for such simple multi iso boot. Always open to options.


  • Don’t waste time on pandering to proof of ability when actions speak louder than words. The release of your research is personally something I’m looking forward to regardless of your history or experience. I will interpret your research and evaluation with my own bias and sceptical stance. I’d rather question you afterwards if your article left questions unanswered or unclear.

    Jumping the gun now and questioning you before we start just wastes both our time.

    Good luck with your research!



  • Two pihole servers, one n VM vlan, one on device VLAN with OpnSense delivering them both via DHCP options. I sometimes update lists, like yearly… At best. They’ve been there over 7 years. Calling them robust is correct. The hypervisors are 3 proxmox servers in cluster using ceph. Intrl NUC 3rd Gen. Less than 80w combined with all vms. Also 8 years old no failures but tolerant for it.