For those of us who rely on Logitech Media Server (LMS), now known as the Lyrion Music Server, to stream music and radio throughout our homes, a recent change threw a wrench into our routines (if you are french). In April 2024, the partnership between Radio France and TuneIn came to an end, leaving many users without access to their favorite French radio stations.

Let’s fix that !

If you ever tried to setup ZFS replication between 2 TrueNAS instance, you might have been very surprised by how easy it is. But what if you don’t want or don’t need a dedicated TrueNAS instance for your backup ? Maybe you want it to replicate to a Linux machine that does other type of backup for example ? In this post, I’ll show you how I’ve done it in a secure and reliable way, and hopefully make it way easier for you to do the same.

A couple of years ago, I made this DIY add-on to my gate controller to manage it through Home Assistant. It’s Wi-Fi enabled, can warn me if it’s stuck, allows me to check its state, and control it reliably through Home Assistant, and didn’t cost much more than 15€.

Because the gate controller was provided with the house, I didn’t want to replace or damage it in any way, so I needed to make something that works in harmony with what I had.

If you have a homelab or a small web server for your tool, you probably know the Fail2ban software. It’s a tool capable of taking input from another software (usually log) to flag the IP doing bad stuff and block them for a defined amount of time (usually using iptables). It’s really not a tool for big production-grade projects, but for small personal stuff, it does the job quite well!

But as long as you have multiple VMs running for different tools or projects, having all of them individually fully exposed to the internet isn’t a good idea. It costs some extra IPv4 allocation (assuming you aren’t IPv6 only), and securing them may require more time and effort. Most people end up with some kind of proxy. It can be a single Nginx/Apache2, a haproxy, or a traefik… it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that now, all of your requests will come from the IP of that proxy and no longer the one trying to mess with your stuff. Does this make Fail2ban useless? Dropping the ban hammer on your own proxy IP isn’t a good idea, but how can you selectively ban something that comes from a single server?