Migrating to OPNSense - Part 1 Focusing on PPPoE Performance I recently migrated to OPNSense form OpenWRT. And the appliance I used was N100 fanless unit with 8 GB RAM and 256GB NVMe, and it worked beautifully. It has 4 i226 chips which enabled my offset processing perfectly. And the results were obviously quite beautiful. I&
Self-Host Using ZFS for TimeMachine I have multiple Macs in my home and Time Machine daily backups can be a life saver if you're trying to find a file you accidentally deleted or if you want to migrate to a new Mac device. I prefer to backup over a physical plugged in disk,
Self-Host Unattended Upgrades I prefer mostly Debian based platform, and while I prefer Ansible for most automation, some headless IoT devices that I maintain, I will prefer to have a pull based configuration rather than push based one for security updates. Thus another clear alternative is unattended-upgrades. To install it please go through
Hardware Setting up NUT for UPS So in my rack, I use a Back-UPS RS 1000G-INÂ with Battery Extension Pack to keep powering through the outages or power fluctuations. While the society has DG, switch over can take up to a minute and then UPS helps achieve that. I watched a Jeff Geerling Video which discussed
Hardware NVMe External Storage So I am a heavy user of the my desk setup, and I try to avoid buying apple storage upgrades. So I bought a USB 3.2 10 Gbps case, but it was quite limiting. I then bought a Thunderbolt 4 Case by Acasis, and it worked beautifully. I used
Machine Learning Audio Super Resolution Another pending project of mine was ASR. Audio Super Resolution is a dream for a person like me, who wishes to listen to old mp3 files in much higher fidelity than possible. While ASR is more like DLSS / ISR for image, I think it is good to have options even
Machine Learning CoquiXTTSV2 Audio Generation I had some pending experiments in my list for a really long time and this was one of those. Following is my quick guide to achieve Voice Clone based Audio Generation using it (however it is terrible in Hindi). Installation Because CoquiTTS has closed down, we need to use the
Kubernetes K8s Container + VSCode I am huge proponent of remote development, and having resources like K8s Clusters and Home Labs can help improve your Developer Experience by a huge margin. To assist with that goal, I thought that it would be a nice (but a also a bad security issue) to create a local
Edge OSS OBiX Driver I worked on an extension of an existing Python based OBiX Driver. You can check it out here. My changes are minor, including addition of control methods and tuning of other small stuff, but we were quite happy that we can Open Source it. Let us know if you need
Networking DNS Hijacking Some days ago I stumbled on the some text, which explained that a lot of firmware lately bypasses your supplied DNS server with something that they trust. And this is specially true in malware. And I had been wondering what can I do to minimize this. And this is where
Apple Silicon Mac Studio Special Antennas So I've been a happy owner of Mac Studio and it works flawlessly for everything that I care about (performance in workflows with decent efficiency that I can leave it running. However, ever since I upgraded to my Wifi 6E router, I had connectivity issues. Earlier I blamed
Some macOS Hacks My love for macOS comes from BSD based POSIX compliant OS running efficiently on a decently modern hardware. However, the walled garden approach of apple and certain things do rub me the wrong way. However my portable work device, Apple certainly makes the best hardware. Here are some hacks that
Security Cowrie as HoneyPot on my Router Running cowrie has been a fun little side project I've been on since quite some time. Setting up and running cowrie is quite simple. One basic thing I'd recommend is to use correct network and system isolation. I prefer a physical host with separate everything. I
Malware More Malware Updates So this is just a regular update on the malwares I captured using my Honeypot. Ever since I've upgraded the security measures (`banIP`+`snort3`), the number of hits are pretty low. Thus the updates this time are pretty boring. Bots are also advanced at this level and tend
Docker MapTiler - Self-Hosting Maps Well this exercise began with some requirements from office, but while I wasn't able to achieve what I'd set out to do, it became an interesting problem to solve over the weekend. I was curious about how to serve maps. I tried using OpenMapTiles, but that
Database PostgreSQL Backups - COPY vs INSERT I wrote some scripts to backup and restore the data of Postgres tables. And normally everything was fine initially with Inserts, but as the size of the table increases, the restore took much more longer than tolerable. For example, one local restore action of Home Assistant DB took approximately 4
Apple Silicon Draw Things - Image to Image One thing a lot of people asked me was to modify an existing image or enhance an existing image with Draw Things. And this one is also very easy to do. Instead of following instructions as per the previous post, we make a slight difference of importing the image first.
Networking banIP - OpenWRT IP List Blocker So I host a HoneyPot to test whether how many attacks I get per day and what security measures are able to block it. And I started with Snort3 in IDS mode which allowed to detect malicious activity. After I switched to IPS, I noticed that while miscellaneous attacks had
Proxmox Understanding Proxmox Backup Server I use a NAS currently as my storage for my Proxmox VE backups. And it has been really well as far as the use case goes. I've used it many times to revert the VMs and containers. However I was curious about what additional features can I gain
Proxmox Proxmox8 on ARM64 So Proxmox7 is widely supported on ARM64 using the now famous Pimox7 project. However recently Proxmox 8 and Debian Bookworm was released. And I wanted to explore if the same can be done for my ARM64 cluster based on 3 Raspberry Pis as well. And after some exploration, I found
Malware Running SSH on Port 22 vs 2222 So I host a SSH server Honeypot on my public IP and I thought to myself - How big a difference is running the service on port 22 vs 2222. Is this single step a big enough hurdle to consider it better? And of course, like everything else in my
Apple Silicon Windows on ARM64 Running Windows on ARM is not as straightforward, since Microsoft does not supply ISOs (understandably as well, since they want to limit the hardware scope at the moment). Instead we've to follow a bit of a different path. I am using M2 Max as my host with VMWare
Hardware Geekbench 6 Benchmark across Devices I own multiple devices and recently I thought that since all of them are on the same CPU architecture arm64 it'll be great to compare the performance across tiers. P.S. I've added amd64 machines as well, and showing how these tests are not tuned for
Malware P2P Botnet PanChan So in my usual pattern of being curious, I did some more analysis of old malware samples on IDA. First thing that I caught was that it contained a huge (30-25 MB) with a bit chunk of Go Code. This is a bit unusual as most of the malware that
Compose Home Assistant for Home IoT I generally prefer OSS / self-hosted solutions, but this one was pushed for a serious need. I've BSNL as my ISP, which works mostly fine, but having high latency while trying to turn on a bulb or an appliance is just annoying. Not to mention that "Sorry, I&
