https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/7ccf1999fbd849e739bbc3403990689d?s=240&d=mp

Daniel Mason

Site Reliability Engineer, Dad, Pilot

Expanding OpnSense root disk (21.7+)

Expanding root partition on OpnSense VM Expand underlying VM disk Reboot Run below commands to online resize Reboot (Optional?) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 # View the layout gpart show # Resolve GPT issue before extending gpart recover da0 # Make it use all the new space gpart resize -i 3 da0 # Grow the FS to fill the new partition growfs /dev/gpt/rootfs

iCloud synced SSH configs on macOS

Maintaining SSH configs can be a pain when you’re hopping between multiple devices, even more when syncing apps (Synology/NextCloud/etc) are blocked on some networks/devices. Make sure you have iCloud Drive enabled and this will symlink your SSH config + key to a folder in iCloud Drive and sync across devices. The iCloud Drive is located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs. By putting this file + your config/id_rsa files in here, it will simply symlink them.

Mastodon.nz and the recent twitter influx

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.

Configuring an APRS receiver with an RTL-SDR and Direwolf

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.

Recovering from a root 'rm' and why you need backups

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}.