Spans - Spans' Blog

A tale of networked storage, asymmetric routing and what not to do when a drive fails

My lab network has a centralised storage server, a Dell R510 with a mismash of drives, running Debian 10 and ZFS. So far it has shared this storage over NFS, but that has turned out to cause issues which is why I opted to change the sharing medium to my

Linux

Raspberry Pi + Arch Linux ARM + bcache + iSCSI + LVM cache + VDO + KVM + ZFS

Yep, that's how mad I've got during this lockdown. What gave the ideaAbout two months ago, an update to the Raspberry Pi OS (ex Raspbian) added Microsoft's VS Code package repository and its corresponding GPG key to the system. There's discussion about it over at r/linux (tread lightly in

Homelab

My take on a Raspberry Pi kiosk dashboard

Like everyone and their mother-in-law, I have a local Grafana instance with a bunch of dashboards filled with graphs and bar gauges about things in my network. I have a desktop network rack with space on the top for a spare 24" monitor I have, so I thought I'd make

Networking

6U desktop network rack build

My "core" LAN network consists of two rackmounted switches and a router. After moving into a new apartment, I didn't want to keep them in a zero-ventilation closet on the other side of the apartment, so I thought I'd put my massive desk to good use and build a small

Networking

I thought PiHole was kinda bad so I made my own

TL;DR: it's a Rust binary called Singularity (because of the gravity lists, domain blackholing? it sounds cool don't judge). You give it sources for malicious domains and it outputs a Lua script that the PowerDNS Recursor uses to automatically respond with a null route (0.0.0.0) to

Networking

Why your port-forward doesn't work

There's a million and then some guides online that tell you how to set up a port-forward in your home router box, but what about when the forward doesn't actually work? In this post I've collected the common reasons why after a port-forward you still can't get your friend to

Factorio

Factorio observations part 1: All about loaders

This post is part of an ongoing series about designs I've come up with and commonly use to do things in a heavily modded Factorio playthrough. These posts are kind-of living documents as well, which I update with corrections and observations as time goes along. I am using the wonderful

Linux

Transforming an Ubuntu installation into systemd-boot + XanMod + LUKS + LVM

My laptop's been running standard Ubuntu 19.04 for some time now. I had the idea of swapping its bootloader, GRUB2, for systemd-boot, using the XanMod kernel and swapping its bunch-of-GPT-partitions into LUKS + LVM. Motivation? I was bored as fuck during this self-imposed quarantine. Quick word of warning, this post

Networking

Why I'm not recommending VyOS anymore and how I built my own

I used to like VyOS quite a lot as a general-purpose lightweight Linux-based easily virtualised router appliance. It didn't really have anything to complain about, other than the fact that the latest build for its version 1.1.8 was released late-2017. Starting October 2018 it's getting too old. Components

Networking

Hyper-V Server 2016 + Intel I350 = weird problems

I have a two-node Hyper-V failover cluster where both nodes have a four-port gigabit PCI-e NIC installed for additional reduntant network ports. The first node has an older Intel PRO/1000, whereas the other one has the PRO/1000's new brother the I350. The PRO/1000 works fine, but the

Networking

VyOS RADIUS user authentication

Authenticating VyOS users with RADIUS is easy, but there's a couple of gotchas you should know of. How to actually do itYou can configure one or more RADIUS servers for authentication under system login: set system login radius-server 192.168.0.100 secret YourSharedSecretInPlainTextKeepItSafe set system login radius-server 192.168.

Homelab

Installing Debian in LVM on an USB drive (and EFI booting it!)

This post is largely based on Will Haley's post over here. I've combined it with various Google searches to show how I built a minimal Debian image, ready to be written to an USB drive and booted off. We'll be using LVM as a middleman in the image to ease

Linux

Solving De-ICE S1.110

The De-ICE S1.110 is an entry-level vulnerable live CD image, meant for learning the very basics of penetration testing. I, being an absolute beginner in such, decided to tackle the challenge. I started with the De-ICE S1.100 image, but ended up following a bunch of guides because of

Programming

C# Gotchas

Recently, I've been working on a couple of C# projects to try and bring myself up to date with .NET Core's latest development. Disregarding my issues with unit testing, I ran into some old 'gotchas' again that have been around for quite some time now, yet they are something I