Hey - what Linux-related things are you working on this month?
For myself, I am pretty well maxed out at work and family life right now – so much going on. Trying to wrap up some things so I can get back to my hobbies – ham radio, Unix, and other related things.
As for what we have going on, it’s a little crazy. I recently replaced my Ubiquiti USG with a UDM-SE, and I have 3x G5 Bullet cameras to install yet. We are replacing our house’s 35-year-old deck, and our contractor died last week, so we are trying to find a new contractor to take over the project mid-project. We have other house projects, multiple family weddings, we have had multiple family funerals to attend, funerals of other friends. TBH I have lost track of everything that is going on. And, in our family of 5, all 5 of us have been sick on and off for the last couple weeks.
Sounds like you have your hands full this month! Life can definitely get hectic sometimes. Hope things settle down for you soon, and you can get back to ham radio and Unix tinkering.
On the Linux front, I’m neck-deep in migrating CentOS 7 servers. Aiming to transition most to AlmaLinux 8, with a few going to Rocky Linux. It’s been a bit of a slow process, even though we’re using the Alma Linux elevate scripts.
About a month ago, I made the final switch from Windows to Linux full time. POP!OS on my main desktop, Linux Mint on my laptop. Currently trying to install Fedora 40 onto my other PC with encryption, LUKS and rollback. It’s a lot to take in for me, but I wanna go big AND go home. I’m both nervous and excited to do this. Honestly, not all that bad a shift. I just need to get more used to using the command line. The thing I miss most about Windows is all my games, I accidentally erased my entire D: drive when I installed POP. If anybody has any advice on if/how i can recover those games, that’d be great.
Hey @Metabot . Sorry, I don’t know about data recover on Windows.
Anyway, @hydn 's comment reminds me… I need to upgrade my web server VM at DigitalOcean. It is still running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS! I need to upgrade to 24.04 LTS.
My mail server is still running FreeBSD 12 – I need to upgrade that too.
Hi there!
I’m working on a Zabbix server for my client. Few days ago they had air conditioner stopped and temperature in server room rised as hell. Backup server was automatically turned off due high temperature. I want to setup notification if temp rises again to prevent slowdown or disconnection of services.
Hi @Crazy80 Welcome to the forums. Are you considering specific sensors? Like rack unit for monitoring temps/humidity or maybe Raspberry Pi with room temp sensor?
But you’ve learned lesson: backup all the stuff before doing any jobs with storage. I recommend to build a NAS and setup backups of all of your critical data from your devices.
Having lost many GB of my own Q3A game recordings after Windows install kindly chunked it all up as lost fragments, you have my sympathy.
Whether your data is recoverable will depend on (i) Whether it still exists and (ii) Whether any tool exists that can restore it. Item (i) depends on how your accident happened.
You’d need to describe exactly how your drive got erased, to stand any chance of getting any sensible advice, I’d suggest. Even then, I’d expect your chances of recovery to be quite slim.
And finally - just started re-learning software development/CS from the ground up again. Kay Lack is awesome at delivering this information - go check it out:
Dealing with layoffs at work, new responsibilities and trying to convince management that some things really can not be done anymore, certainly not at the rate/quality as before.
Hoping to work on and get my CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) in the next 6-8 months.
Here’s to less stress, kids back in school, and hopefully much cooler weather for the foreseeable!
Great to see you back, @CrustyB ! Sounds like you’ve been up to some interesting stuff. Diving into AI and LLMs is quite the journey—Machine Learning for N00bs is a solid starting point.
Kay Lack’s ODE5 is fantastic for getting back into software development and CS. Good luck with the CEH certification—that’s a solid goal. I hear you on the work front; it’s tough convincing management sometimes about the realities of what’s doable.
Here’s to all of us catching a break, getting the home labs back on track, and enjoying some cooler weather soon!
I am currently in some XUL runner and a java projects for work.
My last personal project is a C# console program for change Windows background, because I was no satisfied about Windows integrated slideshow.
The project I done before is a Discord rich presence updater for a specific media player, I wrote it in Python.
As Linus Torvalds said “I made tools because I have some needings”, this is also my case.
For now I don’t have a specific tool I need to do as personal project, I am in a low inspiration period, will let you know if something will come in my mind in the future.
I need to upgrade my home firewall solution. I’ve been looking into pfSense CE or Sophos Home and others. They require the hardware, which I’m a bit indecisive about.
I also have the oppertunity to access the Firewalla Gold SE. I like that there’s no monthly or yearly fees, which is pretty common for serious firewall solutions and other security devices like for example, stingbox.com -I don’t like those type of subscriptions; feels a bit like my ISP and “renting” me their modem.
But I do understand what it provides access to, and the cost and time involved for them to maintain that. Which is why usually, their target audience is business and enterprise. So for home firewall, meh.
Excuse me, why looking for an enterprise hardware firewall for home?
I mean, there’s alot of software solutions, I think if you look accurately you might find a software with import / export configurations so if need to manage many computers you might consider a software solution.
Also Windows integrate a base firewall, or maybe on home router config page you can do some kind web filtering.
I can’t see any advantage using a professional firewall in home, but maybe I’m missing something.
I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding. I’m not looking for anything enterprise-level since those typically come with annual licensing fees. What I’m after is a firewall solution that offers access to robust security and features without the enterprise overhead. This is for my home lab / home-office, and I want to refresh my skills in firewall management since it’s been a while.
Just like with Linux, where distros offers access to an extensive playground of tools and technologies to explore, I want a firewall that goes beyond basic features like port blocking or simple traffic forwarding. I’m looking for something with advanced capabilities that allows for deeper learning and experimentation… essentially more than just a “dumb firewall,” if you know what I mean.
Hey all, this thread’s been great to read—love seeing the projects everyone’s got going on.
Lately, I’ve been focusing on cleaning up my home network setup. I put together a small homelab running Proxmox with a few VMs: Pi-hole for ad-blocking, Nextcloud for personal cloud storage, and a Midarr to keep things running smoothly.
I’ve also started experimenting with Tailscale for a mesh VPN. It’s been a game changer for accessing my setup remotely without overcomplicating things. My next step is replacing my ISP’s router with OpenWRT router to get better control and performance—been overdue for that upgrade.
On the Linux side, I’ve been working on customizing my WM to fit my workflow. Digging into config files and scripting has been a fun challenge—still learning, but it’s starting to click.
What’s everyone else working on? It’s almost 2025, we need a new thread!
I love your home lab setup there. I still run ESXi on the M900, and one of my VMs is Pi-Hole. I used to run Nextcloud on my DigitalOcean VM, but haven’t run that in a while; I just use iCloud at this point, but should probably switch again.
For DNS, I configured 3 Pi-Hole servers with Anycast, using OSPF, so I can upgrade any Pi-Hole without taking down my network, focusing on service uptime rather than server uptime.
As personal projects these months, since I love listening alot of music, I had needings about create a custom playlist for media players (I use Strawberry as default music player: Releases · strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry · GitHub)
In some words I created a C# winforms program in Windows .NET for managing to create a custom playlist and a Python CLi tools that do the same in Linux shell.
With a small amount of prompts (how many songs, max each song duration) my script create a custom playlist and put playlist file on user desktop. You can drag and drop the file inside the music player and let the music begin!
