Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

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  • 97 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • The barracuda I have is basically an x64 board in a 1U half-depth case with two extra network adapters (3 total including the onboard one). I have two of them: one’s running OpenWRT (my router) and the other vanilla Debian.

    So if my router one dies, I can just either pull the drive from it or restore a config backup to another suitable PC that has two NICs (or promote the second unit I have).

    The config in openwrt is abstracted. So if the hardware and NICs are totally different, you might need to reconfigure the device names in the config so they’re referencing the right NICs, but everything else should “just work” (e.g. WAN and LAN are just arbitrary labels).


  • If going the route of a backup solution, is it feasible to install OpenWRT on all of my devices, with the expectation that I can do some sort of automated backups of all settings and configurations, and restore in case of a router dying?

    That’s what I do. Every device runs OpenWRT except my ONT. Backing up is just a cron script that calls each one and pulls the config.

    For my router, I ended up buying an old Barracuda LoadBalancer 340 and installing OpenWRT (it’s an x86 device so it was super easy). It’s a little over-powered for a router, but the price was right. It’s got more than enough spare resources to run some extra stuff, including Docker, so I’m probably going to throw my PiHole container on there since I haven’t been impressed with AdGuard Home (which is available in the repos).

    And if you go for an old Barracuda unit like I did, the default BIOS password is bcndk1


  • Wouldn’t restoring from such a backup be equivalent to kill -9 or pulling the cable and restarting the service?

    Disclaimer: Not familiar with Immich, but this is what I’ve experienced generally.

    AFAIK, effectively yes. The only thing you might lose is anything in memory that hasn’t been written to disk at the time the snapshot was taken (which is still effectively equivalent to kill -9).

    At work, we use Veeam which is snapshot based, and database server restores (or spinning up a test DB based off of production) work just fine. That said, we still take scheduled dumps/backups of the database servers just to have known-good states to roll back to if ever the need arises.






  • After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don’t understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal

    GoDaddy is known to do that.

    Technically, they’re not hiking the price. GoDaddy bought scalped it after it expired and then is re-selling it at an astronomically higher price. It’s one of the many, many reasons people hate them.

    I’m ashamed to say I still have a couple of domains with GD that I haven’t migrated yet. This post might just light a fire under me to get that done.


  • The 60 EUR price limit may be your limiting factor. Everything else can be covered by the GL.iNet devices available on Amazon. I’ve got a couple of the older ‘n’ travel models, and they work pretty great. I flashed vanilla OpenWRT over top of their customized one, but the original OpenWRT-based software works fine too.

    https://www.amazon.com/s?k=GL.iNET

    I usually separate my router functions from my AP to make finding hardware easier, so I’m not well versed in router+AP combos these days, but those seem to be well-reviewed and my experience with an older model is also good.