DeltaTangoLima

Took this coming down the mountain from Lovick's Hut, roughly halfway to Bluff Hut, looking west.

The peak at the centre (with cloud hovering over it) is Mt Buller and the one to the right of that (1/4 in from right edge, slightly more cloud) is Mt Stirling.

Love me some Victorian high country.

Hi all - I have a sectional garage door, that I'm currently automating with a relay to trigger button press on the garage door motor, and a simple reed switch for open/closed state, using esphome on a Wemos D1 mini.

Lately, I've been thinking about finding/building a door position sensor, instead of the reed switch.

If I had position data being sent reliably, I could very easily determine if the door is opening, as well as open/close state. I have a number of automations in mind that would benefit from such data.

So far, my searches for "garage door position sensor", and variations thereof, aren't bearing much fruit. I've been pondering of couple of home-brewed approaches:

1. A series of reed switches on a track that a magnet on the door will trip as it moves along.

   I guess it's theoretically doable, but they'd have to be sensitive enough to be tripped by a moving magnet, but not so sensitive that too many of them are tripped at the same time, which might confuse my "moving mathematics" to determine door movement direction.

    

2. An ultrasonic sensor could possibly do the job.

   I'm mulling over exact placement of it so it has a reliable surface to reflect off, to give me an accurate read on position. Nothing (yet) comes to mind on that front.

It's not that I wouldn't enjoy going down the very enjoyable rabbit hole of prototyping something, but I thought I'd just ask first.

Is anyone aware of an off-the shelf sensor that might give me what I'm looking for, please? If it needs something beefier than an ESP board, I've got a couple of RasPis lying around doing nothing.

Cheers in advance for any suggestions.

Just wondering what tools and techniques people are using to keep on top of updates, particularly security-related updates, for their self-hosting fleet.

I'm not talking about docker containers - that's relatively easy. I have Watchtower pull (not update) latest images once per week. My Saturday mornings are usually spent combing through Portainer and hitting the recreate button for those containers with updated images. After checking the service is good, I manually delete the old images.

But, I don't have a centralised, automated solution for all my Linux hosts. I have a few RasPis and a bunch of LXCs on a pair of Proxmox nodes, all running their respective variation of Debian.

Not a lot of this stuff is exposed direct to the internet - less than a handful of services, with the rest only accessible over Wireguard. I'm also running OPNsense with IPS enabled, so this problem isn't exactly keeping me up at night right now. But, as we all know, security is about layers.

Some time ago, on one of my RasPis, I did setup Unattended Upgrades and it works OK, but there was a little bit of work involved in getting it setup just right. I don't relish the idea of doing that another 40 or so times for the rest of my fleet.

I also don't want all of those hosts grabbing updates at around the same time, smashing my internet link (yes, I could randomise the cron job within a time range, but I'd rather not have to).

I have a fledgling Ansible setup that I'm just starting to wrap my head around. Is that the answer? Is there something better?

Would love to hear how others are dealing with this.

Cheers!

So I recently (a couple months ago) moved my fragmented docker-on-raspberry-pi architecture over to a Proxmox cluster. I'm running it on a pair of HP DL360 G6s, and I couldn't be happier.

Except, well, I could be happier with just one more thing: high availability.

In particular, I want HA for my OPNsense firewall/router, but eventually for more of the workloads my family are depending on for life in general - Home Assistant, Plex, Overseerr, Immich, etc etc.

My current storage setup is a couple ratty old ARM-based NASes - an ancient Netgear ReadyNAS and an even more ancient Qnap TS-410. They're both populated with 4 x 4TB (max raw size they can take) using RAID5, so I get about 22TB usable across the pair of them. They mostly store media for my Plex setup, but also support my 2N+C backup strategy for stuff like Immich, Paperless, and other important data.

My high-level plan is to grab another DL360, so I can have a quorum, then introduce a new storage system that:

• provides an iSCSI target for my Proxmox cluster; and
• can eventually grow to replace my old NASes.

The two solutions I'm pondering are:

1. Build a TrueNAS setup from scratch - mini ITX case, board - the lot
2. Pickup something tried, true and proven in the market, like a Synology

Up front cost is a consideration - I have a family to feed, so I can't just run out and buy an 8-bay enclosure and fully populate it with 16TB disks.

Whatever I get, I'm likely to want to start with, say, 3 disks and grow it over time.

So, I guess this is a call out to the community to share any and all successes, war stories, and other advice. The more technical, the better. I want to make a sound, data-based decision here, and anecdotes from others who think like me are the best way to set my compass.

Cheers for anything you can offer!

This weekend, I cutover my home network to OPNsense on Proxmox.

So far, it's been... OK. I'm having some issues with state tracking on a couple of VLANs, so need to dig into some pcaps from my switch and see what's going on there.

But one question I have is how to get the best out of my hardware, as it seems my WAN speed is a lot less than it should be.

I'm running Proxmox on a HP DL360 G6, with the pair of built-in 1Gbps NICs. One NIC is dedicated to my WAN connection, using a bridge in Proxmox, and it's plugged in directly to my 1Gbps fibre internet.

The OPNsense VM has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and a 40GB volume.

Using my previous hardware router/firewall (Draytek VIgor 2865), I was easily getting some decent speeds - 500Mbps to 700Mbps+. But, I'm lucky if I can get speeds any higher than about 120Mbps right now through OPNsense.

I've disabled hardware checksum offload and hardware TCP segmentation in the OPNsense firewall. Then I found this post that suggested doing the same to the NIC and bridge in Proxmox as well.

I've even tried rate limiting the interfaces on the OPNsense VM to 1000Mbps (OPNsense says they're 10Gbps), but nothing's made a difference.

So, throwing out to my newfound Lemmy network: does anyone have any suggestions on what to try, or look at, next, please? Kinda worried I might have to go back to the Draytek, which would be a real shame. OPNsense has already proven to be far superior in every other way.

I've fired up my own Lemmy instance, but am keeping it closed right now. It's mainly so I don't contribute to the user load on the more popular instances, but I may open it up to a circle of friends and family at some point in the future.

But, one of the things that has me worried right now is how I could prevent illegal/unwanted content from being cached on my instance.

Aside from blocking entire instances, how can I stop a user from subscribing to a remote community that includes illegal/unwanted content?

What if they sub to an acceptable community (this one, for example) and someone posts something that escapes the mods' attention temporarily, but that content ends up on my instance?