This week I spent a lot of time working on writing more Protocol episodes. The fourth episode went out, covering an intro to DNS, and I didn’t have the next episode ready to go yet. I also spent a bit of time customizing my MacOS experience to use Aerospace, Raycast, and Wezterm.

March Video Schedule

In March, I am releasing four episodes of Protocol, as follows:

  • March 5th, 2025: Intro to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
  • March 12th, 2025: Telnet
  • March 19th, 2025: Secure Shell (SSH)
  • March 26th, 2025: Intro to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

Additionally, I would like to publish one video about a red teaming topic, of which I have several backlogged ideas to work on. I feel like I got a system in place for Protocol episodes, but doing other videos now feels harder because its less clear the direction I want to take. So hopefully I can get some done and remove some of the weight of uncertainty.

Replacing a failing disk in TrueNAS

Some months ago I set up TrueNAS on my HL15 from 45 Home Lab, and I added 7 20TB drives to it. 3 were brand new drives from western digital, and 4 were Seagate Manufacturer Recertified drives from ServerPartDeals. I started using rsync to copy all my data from my Synology over to it, and all was good.

Until about 3 weeks ago, I noticed that my HDD ZFS pool was degraded. Apparently one of the disks was already having read errors in the smart tests. I didn’t have extra drives ready to go to fix this, but thankfully the drives were in a RAIDZ2 vdev, so I could tolerate two drives failing before risking data loss.

I ordered another drive, as well as started the RMA process with ServerPartDeals. I got both drives towards the beginning of the week and replaced them on Thursday evening. Resilvering took a little over a day, but now we’re back to a healthy state. I also added one hot spare vdev to the pool so that if I have another immediate issue, I won’t have to worry as much about waiting for another drive to be delivered.

Data hoarding is an expensive hobby. But I feel like I’ve really up-leveled my game since getting the TrueNAS machine setup.

  • Intro to Domain Name System (DNS) - Another plug for my own video, intro to DNS.
  • Onefetch is a fetch-like tool for git repositories. I think the various fetch tools are kinda silly, but they are fun.
  • On Troubleshooting - An absolutely huge guide on how to troubleshoot effectively.
  • Athom Tech Smart Plugs - I ordered a handful of these that I’d like to use to help identify where I’m losing so much power at home, and get a better understanding of things like “how much power is my rack consuming” and “how much power is my desktop consuming.” I won’t get them til the end of the month, but supposedly they integrate nicely into home assistant, as well.
  • Hyprland’s development isn’t what it used to be - An article from the creator of Hyprland and talking about how the development has slowed down, and why that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
  • ggwave - A tiny data-over-sound library. I don’t personally have any practical uses for this, but I think it’ll be a valuable tool in future CTF challenge development.

Upcoming Projects

  • Defcon Call for Music/Tracks - I intend to submit as a performing artist as well as submit a soundtrack track again this year. The beat structure is finalized and it’s time to start writing.