Where to begin.. It’s been an interesting fortnight! I started hosting mastodon.nz around January 2020 on my home ‘server’ for myself and few friends. It started off as a small LXC container inside Proxmox with 2 cores and 2GB RAM allocated. It stayed this way until about 6 months ago when I kept having scheduled power outages and I couldn’t keep running it from my house while maintaining a reasonable uptime.

What is APRS? Automatic Packet Reporting System! Essentially a VHF radio sending out GPS location pings in the 2M ham band which can be seen at aprs.fi . If you take a look at that link you will often see radiosondes and their reported data, weather stations as well as bunch of amateur operators transmitting data all over the world. Fascinating stuff. I recently got my hands on an RTL-SDR v3 which claims much better accuracy and performance over previous models.

Last week I was finally getting around to fixing my backup tooling and validating the recovery procedures. I thought it would be a good idea to have rolling nightly backups on a secondary ZFS pool with weekly syncs to an external disk. I ended up using this exact command to purge the rolling backups: $ find ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/* -mtime +${DAYS_TO_KEEP} -exec rm {} \; Before we go any further, I want to point out that I was using the variable ${BACKUP_DIR}, not ${BACKUP_FOLDER}.