Biting more than a regular eel can chew. A blog

This is mainly as a brain dump of the things that currently fascinate and captivate my attention.

A sort of journal for learning tech, self-hosting, homelab, privacy and security, sustainability, self sufficiency, and other interest…


Moving on - my humble homelab with naming convention taken from towns and place of the old Ultima games:

“Britannia”

Dell Optiplex Micro 7010 Desktop daily driver with Fedora 41 - I think its a nice HS:4 device

“Sorsaria”

Purpose-built poor man’s with real ECC support for TrueNAS Scale Server, its apps, and SMB network share

  • AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G
  • 64 GB of NEMIX ECC UDIMM
  • Asrock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX
  • Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1TB
  • 2x 8GB HDD (Ironwolf and Toshiba)
  • 2x 4GB HDD (Ironwolf)

“Skara Brae”

Was my bare metal gaming PC but repurposed as Proxmox VE Server for gaming VM and for future local only AI LLM ambitions

  • AMD Ryzen 5700X3D
  • 64 GB G.Skill non-ECC RAM
  • Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi
  • Gigabyte 7900XT Gaming OC
  • Samsung 500GB 980 M.2 NVME SSD
  • SK Hynix 512GB M.2 NVME SSD

“Cove”

My old TrueNAS server now repurposed as my kid’s gaming rig, running Fedora 41

  • Intel I3-12100F
  • Asus Prime B660 M-A Wifi D4
  • 32 GB Non-ECC RAM, Corsair Dominator i think
  • Sapphire Pulse 7700XT Radeon
  • 500GB WD Black SN770 SSD

“Serpent’s Hold”

Protectli VP2420 running pfSense CE 2.7.2

“Trinsic”

Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED - my laptop daily driver I thought I’d actually use the Nvidia GPU for gaming. No time sadly. Fedora Silverblue - its a pain to update. I’m considering changing it to vanilla Fedora Workstation or learn distrobox like I should. Upgraded the stock SSD (its the 2nd SSD in Skara Brae)

  • Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1TB

“Olympia”

Asus Vivobook Pro 14 OLED - My old daily driver, now my spouse’s work laptop running Fedora Linux

“Moonglow”

Odroid H4+ TrueNAS Scale backup replication target machine for Sorsaria

  • 500GB Crucial P3 NVME SSD
  • 32GB DDR5 4800MT/s Crucial RAM
  • 12TB HGST Ultrastar He

“Buccaneer’s Den”

OG 256 GB Steam Deck… I should actually put ROMs in it to make it live up to its name… Someday…

“New Magincia”

Raspberry Pi 5 8GB for a “command center” kind of device that I havent really conceptualized yet. Its powered down right now looking at me judgingly…

  • 500GB Crucial P3 NVME SSD
  • Argon NEO 5 M.2 NVME PCIE case

“Vesper”

Pixel 9 Pro flashed with Graphene OS, current daily driver.

“Yew”

Old Pixel 6A flashed with Graphene OS, my old daily driver phone.


Other machines that will not be named…

Spouse likes fruit branded computers and phones but slowly she is hating it…

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image

Looking forward to updates!

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source

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Wow I was certain this wasn’t posted when the L1T server went down earlier this day. I think it was supposed to be a save draft rather than post.

Oh well. :rofl:

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Now you have an audience. Do something :joy:

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:eyes: nice title :eyes:

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doesn’t mention me once…
EvWVsdaVkAAIUWZ

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Waits :popcorn:

Hey man I am not promising a daily update of stuff, I will try to unload my thoughts as often as I comfortably can.

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Overybuying a solution to a minor inconvenience (for public good?)


In my quest to find a suitable replacement for my expiring Standard Notes subscription because of reasons:

  • its getting needlessly expensive, I honestly don’t know why. You are a secure note taking app I do not understand the high cost associated its a text file. I backed you for 5 years and it feels like a very underwhelming experience.
  • feature bloat - I do not need 5 different ways to display markdown, I just need a good one. I don’t need a 2FA manager or a secure file storage - I need a good privacy respecting and secure note app picture support is a bonus. I do not need a full fledged Word Processor/Spreadsheet on a network - I can have Nextcloud+Collabora for that.
  • I need a simple, basic, competent To Do check-list and somehow it cannot give me that.
  • I have a paid account and having dark mode behind a paywall seems like you hate your free users. Its a basic accessibility feature to wish to not be seared by blinding light at night or any time at all.
  • You already sold out to Proton and still cannot get your sh…t together and I do not want to have an all eggs on one basket kind of situation if I can help it.

Anyway rant over, I tried Joplin after ignoring it for many years and all I needed was its basic core features. Completely happy with it and all I needed was a self hosted solution: enter TrueNAS Scale App: Joplin Server!

And I cannot seem to install it the “correct” way with its host path configured the way I want it to. Fine - surely the default ixVolume configuration will work… except it didn’t. Did a cursory search on install failure and I was surprised that there was very little issue of that being posted in the TrueNAS forums.

I did a log check and found this pretty much on repeat (I tried to reproduce it, it still is borked):

2025-01-05 05:07:13.732590+00:0005:07:13 0|app | 2025-01-05 05:07:13: App: Starting server v3.0.1 (prod) on port 30099 and PID 62…
2025-01-05 05:07:13.733098+00:0005:07:13 0|app | 2025-01-05 05:07:13: App: Checking for time drift using NTP server: pool.ntp.org:123
2025-01-05 05:07:46.738005+00:0005:07:46 0|app | Error: Cannot retrieve the network time from pool.ntp.org:123: Timeout waiting for NTP response.
2025-01-05 05:07:46.738068+00:0005:07:46 0|app | at Timeout._onTimeout (/home/joplin/packages/lib/vendor/ntp-client.js:79:22)
2025-01-05 05:07:46.738083+00:0005:07:46 0|app | at listOnTimeout (node:internal/timers:569:17)
2025-01-05 05:07:46.738100+00:0005:07:46 0|app | at processTimers (node:internal/timers:512:7)

So I though ah maybe my server is set to a distant ass location like time.nist.gov but lo and behold, TrueNAS was actually awesome enough to correctly set my NTP server to the place where I am. So I looked around and found out that unsurprisingly tech infrastructure here sucks.

Nice! That was a sarcastic nice, by the way.

I seem to recall that @PhaseLockedLoop made one. Maybe I could too, so I looked around and found @geerlingguy 's videos as well as LTT’s and I was like hooked! I liked the idea of having my own NTP server so that I dont have to rely on the unreliable ones surrounding me. The problem is that the price quoted to me by Timebeat, one of the sellers, was a bit too much, around a new flagship phone around where I am and I have a hard time justifying this right now.

Its wild that there is no fixed IPv6 server here for NTP purposes.

Maybe public good could be a reason enough? Its certainly a solution looking for a problem since I used 2.asia.pool.ntp.org and 1.asia.pool.ntp.org and that seemed enough to allow the install of Joplin.


I saw this Open Time Card mini v2. Its made in the UK according to its web site.

Its pretty. But 959.89 in British funny money is a bit too much.

Its no Rubidium Oscillator but a good enough quartz oscillator. I dont really have a need for nanosecond precision. Plus I’d need a fixed IPv4/IPv6 address and I have no idea how expensive those are right now.

This idea will definitely get a revisit soon.

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bro if you want a simpler solution just strap a gps module to an rpi with pps and PTP support and just make it your time server

get the full kit. its easy

As for a static IP. Just buy a linode vps. Put nginx on it. Wireguard into your lan. Route it… have a domain… and just advertise your stratum 1 via your Linode static 4 and 6 addresses

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Yes but if jamming happens or something stupid happens to the equipment/antenna the whole thing somewhat collapses. I’d still have the correct time but drift will start to happen. Have you encountered jamming/signal interruptions?

I guess I could do the oscillator separately but then I might actually not have know how to put it together. I guess I could ask around or learn how.

As for the static IP, I checked it seems like I could upgrade my residential internet to a business plan and I’d get a static IP but the ISP didn’t say in its website if it was IPv4 or IPv6.

I guess I could get a local VPS here, not necessarily Linode, to lessen the latency. I thought the whole thing depended on stuff being within the local network for better reliability. I will go look.

Not a problem in my geo loc

I mean your stuff will stay in the local net. what this will offer you is being able to advertise NTP on 6 and 4 for the phillipines as a strat1

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I think I know this one…

:yay:

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Regular eels are lame. Thank goodness for morays!

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As for notes. Have you looked at obsidian? You can store the files everywhere or setup a couchdb server to sync it from different devices.

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Obsidian has a lot of features that I dont really need and a bit of proprietary? I could try it someday but right now, Joplin fits my need and use case.

Might want to check out suggestions here

I use foam with vscodium and some additional plugins, but feel free to look at these suggestions

This video suggests some more, but highlights QOwnNotes

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So update on the current NTP project:

I got the following on the way now:


I may still need:

  • Case housing/enclosure for the whole thing (the RPi5 CM5 has case but I doubt if it will fit all of the other dev boards).
  • Aluminium Ground Plane? - I asked LLMs and it seems beneficial to get one.
  • Lightning Arrestor? - If I want to mount the GPS antenna higher and actually clear the neighbors tree line but boy, its just as expensive as the GPS module its supposed to protect.
    • LMR-240 wire extension from Antenna to the SPD
    • Ground wire
    • Separate copper grounding rod(?) - I might need an electrician for this. I dont think its wise to combine the ground connection in the house with an actual lightning rod.
    • CAT5/6 lightning surge protector

I’ll definitely need more Linux proper IT SysAdmin Server knowledge if I actually want to serve and service NTP pools. Having botnets knock on your door and possibly recruit you will definitely cause problems for whatever VPS service I will need to setup one with static IPv4 and IPv6.


Initially a humbler NEO-M9N board would have sufficed but I bought a chip only module by mistake (I needed an SMA or uFL module) and then I saw this guy shill this:

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I visited the area where I will mount it and it looks somewhat good enough already - although I don’t know really anything much about RF signal reception.

It looks rickety and ghetto 3rd world no engineering applied tower… :rofl:


There is a clear enough upwards view of the sky :


(this is from a Pixel 9 camera at 1x, I should have used the fisheye…)

I saw an old video GNSS installation video saying that I needed a minimum around 270deg of clear sky around the antenna but the image they took had a fish eye lens and it isn’t clear how it exactly works. There is a dense tropical foliage around and it is about 10+ foot (or 10+ meters?) above my proposed antenna mount.

I don’t have the treeline cleared near the water tank where I will mount the GPS. I am a bit worried if the vibration within the water tank is significant enough to adversely affect the GPS signal reception. Maybe I should have chosen the less precise but significantly cheaper NEO-M9N for timing? So much questions and using oLlama and Haiku seems to divert my attention away…


I could mount a separate metal pole above the water tank but that significantly increases the risk of lightning surge events as there are no high rise buildings anywhere.

The lightning surge protection equipment seems to be at same price as the antenna kit itself, plus some of the kits look like it has a consumable gas venting component - lol no.

Current I am on a vicious hardware what if. Looking for methods to dampen the vibration and found a 35USD a piece silcone dampening screw…

I should just get vibration dampening materials of varying stiffness silicone and foam, mostly and layer them so as to remove vibrations of varying frequencies. I probably need some sort of spring system to remove the lower frequency ones but I already have a water tank and that could maybe sort of attenuate some of the vibrations. The tank is loaded at night so I guess I could do the maintenance as the tank fills up?


Anyway I should really focus on the software front as most of the hardware is already somewhat on a final status. I already skimmed some of RFC8633 its very dry and seems to paint a broad stroke of what to do.

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