I tend to get a bit obsessive. A lot obsessive. Just like the word obsessive means. On and off my obsessive behavior has been playing around with Linux. I own a few Raspberry Pi’s and every now and then I work on a project. There are really only so many easy Pi projects available to do. Desktop Linux. Pihole. WordPress. Home Assistant. Minecraft. Terraria. Docker with a bunch of stuff spun up on it like everything just mentioned (done a second time on docker) plus Graphana. Homer. Homepage. Open Media Vault on an SSD. Plex on OMV. LAMP server. Kubernetes cluster. Well, almost a Kubernetes cluster. The git had a bug in it at that time and after 5 rebuilds before figuring out it’s them not me, I gave up. A tiny CA server. OpenVPN, Wireguard, Nginx reverse proxy and still sucking at Linux. Sucking meaning to say is takes me x5 what the tutorial should take.
I’d like to say it is fun. It is fun like gold About ready to give up, then something works, I get a rush and plow forward. Like golf I never got good at Linux, just good at brute forcing myself through the projects.
Sone of the issues I created for myself. Starting over because I locked myself out of port 22 and not knowing all I needed was a keyboard and mouse to log in directly. Starting over because I hosed things up and it was easier to re-image than figuring out where I went wrong. Hardening the machines by learning iptables, nftables, router firewalls, stringing together the right set of fail2ban jails, even though I knew I was never going to put any of it on the web. Doing quality of life & security items like SSH keys to get into each pi without a password or building my own images vs. using the vanilla images.
For all that work it was more about the journey than the results. The thrill of the hunt for commands or a tutorial, even though most time time I had to string multiple tutorials together. I looked up the same command 20 times and probably 100 commands. Spending 2 nights on one install, debugging my work and finally making a breakthrough.
All that siad, I still use some of my creations. Home assistant. The kids maybe played maybe 20 hours of Minecraft…. Building an OPNsense router vs my old wrt net gear router, which I built years ago. I graduated to a Synology NAS to hold Plex for home movies (yes I know I need to migrate to Jellyfin), photos storage, file storage, backing up all my computers, backing it all up to the cloud and an Amcrest doorbell.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, if anything. I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve had a lot of frustration. I’ve compiled a ton of notes and thank god I have LastPass and OneNote. Ironic I use OneNote from Microsoft. Oh, yeah I get obsessive and I don’t mind throwing money at it.
I guess that’s what this blog will be about. The things that I have been, I am or I will be obsessive about.