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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 14th, 2023

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  • Keep in mind that if you set up raid using zfs or btrfs (idk how it works with other systems but that’s what I’ve used) then you also get scrubs which detect and fix bit rot and unrecoverable read errors. Without that or a similar system, those errors will go undetected and your backup system will backup those corrupted files as well.

    Personally one of the main reasons I used zfs and now btrfs with redundancy is to protect irreplaceable files (family memories and stuff) from those kinds of errors, as I used to just keep stuff on a hard drive until I discovered loads of my irreplaceable vacation photos to be corrupted, including the backups which backed up the corruption.

    If your files can be reacquired, then I don’t think it’s a big deal. But if they aren’t, then I think having scrubs or integrity checks with redundancy so that issues can be repaired, as well as backups with snapshots to prevent errors or mistakes from messing up your backups, is a necessity. But it just depends on how much you value your files.





  • My primary use case is safeguarding my important personal artifacts (family photos, digitized paperwork, encryption key / account recovery / 2FA backups) against drive failure (~2TB), followed by my decently sized Plex server (23TB), immich, nextcloud, and various other small things like selfhosted bitwarden, grocy, ollama, and stuff like that.

    I run all of my stuff off of a 6 bay Synology (more drives helps with capacity efficiency as double redundancy with 6 drives costs you 30% and I wanted to be protected against drive failures during rebuilding) with an Intel nuc on top to run plex/jellyfin transcoding using quicksync instead of loading the poor nas with cpu transcoding, I also run ollama on the nuc since it has faster cores than the nas.




  • The key difference is that during normal use, the private key of the passkey doesn’t leave the device (or password manager). The passkey basically comes in 2 parts, the public and private (secret) part. In order to log in, the website presents a cryptographic challenge that is only solvable using your private key - and crucially you can solve the challenge without revealing your private key. An attacker could get your answer to the challenge and still be unable to solve additional challenges without the private part of your passkey.

    This of course makes it basically impossible to manually log in using a passkey and a keyboard, without any password manager to do the cryptographic calculations (unless you have a LOT of paper and time), but the security advantage of making it near impossible to be phished is generally regarded as a net positive. In order to steal a passkey there would need to be a vulnerability in the software, since passkeys make it much harder to trick a user into giving it away (since tricking the user into logging in on a fake website doesn’t work due to the aforementioned cryptography, the main way to steal a passkey would be to trick the user into exporting it - which is a much higher bar).


  • If you mean the “passkeys” that are becoming popular as a “password replacement”, it’s basically speaking a public private keypair. What makes it more secure is that, under normal conditions (aside from backing up the passkey), the private “secret” part of the keypair never leaves the app or device it’s stored on. It’s only used temporarily to sign messages and prove that you have the secret key, unlike a password which needs to be sent securely to a server to validate.

    You could in theory store a backup on a USB drive but since passkeys are new, it highly depends on the password manager you use to store the passkey. Since passkeys are more complex than something you can memorize/type, it has to be stored in a password manager of some sort to be useful, so you would need to check that password manager allows backing up passkeys. There is currently work being done to standardize the formats/protocols to transfer passkeys so it seems this is very much up in the air. For example, I use BitWarden which stores passkeys, but it seems like I can only add or delete passkeys to an entry, not export them and apparently they get exported with the passwords when the vault is exported. BitWarden also syncs your vault to every logged in device though so you could see that as a form of backup. Going one step further, even though BitWarden doesn’t have a passkey export/backup feature yet (in addition to Bitwarden’s vault export), the self-hosted server also stores all your passwords including passkeys in regular files which also can be backed up (this is how I back up my VaultWarden instance) - although it would probably be hard to use that backup in any other way besides restoring it onto a BitWarden server instance.

    Edit: I didn’t realize passkeys were exported with the vault export, since I haven’t used it and noticed that editing an entry doesn’t allow you to view passkey data - only remove, updated my comment to reflect that.


  • First I’ll say, if you aren’t able to boot a windows installer off of a flash drive (and nothing’s wrong with your flash drive and you created it without errors and there isn’t a setting in bios preventing you from booting it like disabled USB boot) then it could be a hardware issue that Linux won’t fix (it’s not clear how you tried to reinstall windows). But if you’re able to get to the windows logo or the menu for safe mode then it sounds like it “POSTs” (gets past showing the bios screen) and windows should be reinstallable. In short, I think it’s unlikely to be a problem that only Linux can fix if you want to stick with windows.

    That said, if you are otherwise interested in trying Linux and create a USB installer, most will allow you to exit the installer or choose to go into a temporary “live desktop” where nothing is saved, so it’s a good opportunity to try out how that distro feels to use - just don’t save anything important. And if you do end up installing either OS, you can use that “live mode” to use programs to back up any files from your main hard drive to another plugged in drive.


  • I’ve done a backup swap with friends a couple times. Security wasn’t much of a worry since we connected to each other’s boxes over ssh or wireguard or similar and used tools that allowed encryption. The biggest challenge for us was that in my selfhosting friend group we all prefer different protocols so we had to figure out what each of us wanted to use to connect and access filesystems and set that up. The second challenge was ensuring uptime and that the remote access we set up for each other stayed up - and that’s what killed the project as we all eventually stopped maintaining the remote access and nobody seemed to care - so if I were to do it again I would make sure all participants have alerts monitoring their shared endpoint.



  • This is super neat even though it’s basically just running the main board plugged into peripherals - I already knew the main board was pretty small but it’s still surprising seeing it sitting on a table.

    Makes me wonder what you could do with a case the size of a wii (or even a mini wii). Plenty of space for cooling, a 2.5" SSD bay, and I’m sure you could fit lots of other goodies in it too.








  • WiFi 6 has been out for like 3 years now so unless you’re on a budget it might make sense to just go for WiFi 7. Of course you’ll need client devices to be 6 or 7 to take advantage but that’s doable on the cheap for laptops with replaceable M.2 WiFi cards. I upgraded both my laptops to WiFi 7 when I replaced my 3 year old u6 pro with a u7 pro, so I can now get around a gig to my nas. The only thing is that 6ghz barely goes through a wall for me so I need to be in the same room unless I want to fall back to 5ghz but it’s still nice to have when the situation calls for it. Plus if your phone isn’t WiFi 6 already your next one will probably be 6 or 7, so when friends are over with their new phones and laptops they get a nice low-contention experience on my WiFi.

    My main reason for staying on the bleeding edge is the airtime efficiency upgrades unique to WiFi 6 and 7 which makes a big difference in crowded apartment situations the more people move on from WiFi 5.