I run a Hashistack on my homelab and I’ve had a startup issue with Consul on one of my Raspberry Pis. The systemd unit file is correct and I was able to start the service manually with systemctl start consul without issue. However, consul just would not start successfully on boot. I finally had some time to work on the issue tonight and the fix was actually quite simple. Troubleshooting consul is rarely simple, but working with a simple systemd startup script shouldn’t be that bad. Here’s what happened…

In this post I’m demonstrating how you could use Hashicorp’s Vault TOTP generator and an authenticator to connect to a dynamic ssh port. This is mostly a proof of concept and not a production grade solution, so use at your own risk.

What’s TOTP? It’s a Time-based One Time Password. TBOTP is probably too ugly of an acronym to have gained widespread use. I don’t know, I didn’t coin it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The crux of this article centers around personal branding in the field of tech. Whether it’s work, play or social, having an online persona has become the new normal. Online personas have grown from bleeding-edge gamers, content creators, vloggers and bloggers - to traditional soccer moms with recipe groups. The internet continues to connect everyone and as online trust and validation become more societially valuable, so too does the way you present yourself.

What’s in a Name?

I was searching github for some uptime monitoring apps when I stumbled across a github actions based uptime and status page.

It’s aptly named upptime and while it wasn’t what I was looking for, I found it to be novel and worth setting up:

While browsing my local thrift store, I stumbled upon a little gadget that I decided to repurpose:

It was only $6 USD, so I thought it would be a fun project.

I searched for ‘Disney Infinity Linux’ to see if any work had been done toward decoding it or making it work. I found various sources that suggested that Playstation or Wii versions work fine, but the X-Box version was challenging. Fortunately, among the 5 they had, one was the Wii/Playstation version so I bought it.

If you’re a heavy command line (cli) user in Macos, Linux or WSL, you may it convenient to easily start or stop your robot from it’s cleaning cycle. In this post I’ll you fellow keyboard jockeys how to control and even view your robot as is cleans.

I’ve been exploring Thunderbolt quite a bit lately. As a follow up to my post about using Thunderbolt in a NAS, I recently bought a Gigabyte Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 add on card. I’ve captured a few thoughts, observations and pics here.

Gigabyte GC-Maple Ridge

In this post I’m demonstrating how to create a high-speed macos volume using quantity 2 Thunderbolt ports and NVMe enclosures. This solution uses RAID-0 (striping) so the failure threshold is more than twice that of a normal standalone disk. This example is for demonstration purposes and could be useful for video editing scratch space, rendering, large photo sessions or similar uses. Obviously, good backups (RAID is not a backup) or a more reliable storage tier is recommended for daily use.

In this post I discuss how you can upgrade a NAS Server by adding Thunderbolt 3 for lightning fast connectivity at 20 or 40Gbps. This particular implementation is specific to an Apple Mac Mini M1 and a Linux NAS server on an older Supermicro X10SRL-F motherboard, but the principles should be the same on similar architectures and operating systems.