QuickBits

If like me you have a very small Synapse deployment but have joined some very large rooms in the past and left since, you may have your server reaching out still to those previous rooms servers. I discovered this when I noticed my IDS/IPS was catching connections outbound to certain GeoIP restricted locations (Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, etc), thankfully most of the destination ports were 8448 (the default synapse port) so it was fairly obvious what the service was. At first I attempted to take a look at the database and I saw about 10k lines worth of destinations Synapse was reaching out to, I had joined some large rooms so this was not shocking. This is generating many false positives and I left these rooms a long time ago so there is no need for my servers to be communicating with them. Below is how I cleared the rooms from my server.

Recently I have deployed Homebox to my cluster. Homebox is a fairly nifty program for home inventory management. One feature of it that I like in particular is the ability to print QR codes for items and locations. This “quickbit” isn’t intended to go over Homebox itself but its worth mentioning as it seems like a useful tool and spurred this need. One problem is that Homebox can’t directly print to any printer, you need to download the QR code and print it yourself. This has been stated in other posts but I simply do not use Windows and this means more obsurce things like label printing support is limited. Thankfully I found brother_ql and this allows you to print jpegs to your printer. Below are some sample commands for printing said jpegs.

During the install process for NixOS it will not typically (at least in my experience) add a tmpfs entry to /tmp, as a result I need to add this post install. Simply add the following to your nix config:

I recently discovered ZFS datasets are sent unencrypted by default and that they need to be sent with a flag to preserve their encrypted status. Well too late, I had already migrated my data, and deleted the old datasets by the time I had discovered this. After doing some research I found encrypting a dataset that is already created is not possible, so in order to fix this you need to send the unencrypted data set to an encrypted dataset.

If like me you generally prefer NOT to use Helm charts but would rather use Kustomize, you obviously wont be able to escape the ubiquity of Helm. This is not a condemnation of Helm, it is the superior way of distributing software to consumers when done right (GitLab, you know what you did). However in my opinion Kustomize is the better long term solution, so I prefer to template Helm charts out, then split them by Kind and have Kustomize reference each file separately. Below is a very simple bash function to split a templated Helm chart into individual files and place them into directory named “base”. Note: you will need yq.

While I have moved away from using Proxmox in my home lab I noticed a large number of Terraform users had been using Telmate/proxmox provider. In my experience this provider is almost abandoned and seriously lags behind bpg/proxmox, ‘bpg’ in my experience has fewer bugs and more features.