Local sync solution for small scale use Back in January 2019 I was on the hunt for a program that would let me keep a small shared folder in sync across all my local machines, that I could host myself, and that would not need to reach out to the internet to operate. That search led me to Syncthing and it is everything I needed and more. Thank you Jakob Borg (@calmh), Audrius Butkevicius (@AudriusButkevicius), Simon Frei (@imsodin), Tomas Cerveny (@kozec), and all other contributors to this project.

My backup strategy has varied through the years but has always incorporated duplication, at least of my critical data. On top of my current local backup drives, I’ve finally been able to setup a remote machine for offsite backups. I use a Raspberry Pi and a LUKS encrypted drive connected to my network over a VPN. Rsync is used as needed to run backup jobs to the remote site. For the time being, I want manual control over the process and have not automated the backup process.

A simple script to update your ssh config file. I’ve been reading about Bash scripting lately and finally thought of something useful. Below is a simple script that automates the addition of new hosts to your ssh config file. All you need to do is copy the script, save it as yourcommand.sh, set the execute bit with chmod +x yourcommand.sh, and place that file inside of the bin folder in your home directory (which you may have to create).

*** Updated September 12, 2020 Quick Tip: Running Proxmox VE 5.4 and want to wake your cluster nodes through the web interface? You can now set a WOL MAC address for all nodes using the pvenode command. On each node in your environment, issue the following command from the terminal: pvenode config set –wakeonlan XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Replace the XX’s with the MAC address of the NIC that will be accepting WOL packets for that node.

Port Forwarding for Headless Machines. In my quest to find a DropBox like solution for local file sync between my machines, I found and fell in love with Syncthing. It is an excellent piece of software that gives you total control over how your data is synced and has proven itself to be extremely reliable. I will cover my Syncthing setup in another post but for context here; I maintain one master node running on a headless CentOS 7 virtual machine (VM) on my server and all of my other machines sync to it.