Hi there 👋

So after some totally innocent poking around at school, I found out our school was using Smoothwall to control our network activity. Now, this wasn’t that hard… especially considering that every time we tried to open something that was blocked it said ‘Smoothwall’ in big green text, but there’s a bit more to this. I wouldn’t suggest trying most of this at your school/work, as I had oversight from the IT department before I started my endeavours. ...

On our school laptops, for whatever reason, the applications menu from settings has been removed. As a result, you cannot uninstall any non-Microsoft store applications - it just tries to open a settings menu that we can’t access. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to build a PowerShell script to tap into the Uninstall Information registry keys - and get the uninstall paths from here. It also has some other features, such as: ...

All the images on my blog need a place to live, and while I could just serve it on the blog itself, some of my other projects need locations for files to live - and serving it on them natively just isn’t a viable option. Images and the like are also more heavier then text, and so it can often be beneficial to load them from a more local server. ...

I recently learnt that you can control the UniFi APs LEDs via SSH, which allows you to script their control. This means that I can change what colour they are using, and schedule them to turn on and off automatically - see here for that. However, I though it might be worth making a small post regarding exactly what I found. DISCLAIMER: Proceed at your own risk. These have been tested on a U7 Pro, and are unlikely to have any catastrophic problems on other APs, but be careful regardless. ...

Modularity always helps when it comes to the maintenance of complex systems, and so it should help when it comes to managing Home Assistant. A while back, I stumbled across Frenck’s GitHub profile, where he was showcasing his Home Assistant config - https://github.com/frenck/home-assistant-config. I found the idea of splitting each entry into it’s own dedicated file, rather then having one huge config file, much more intuitive and easier to manage. Setup Navigate to your data folder 03:43:35 vivaan@ultimate ~ → cd /clstr/homeassistant/data Create a new integrations folder This will be where all the entries for Home Assistant’s config will be stored. ...

The UniFi U7 Pros have these neat LED rings on them, but they can be pretty distracting during the night - so I thought it would be cool to be able to control them via Home Assistant, and automate them. And honestly, another set of lights to have control over - especially considering they seem to make pretty good night lights. Setting up the APs In order to control the AP LEDs, you will need to enable SSH. You can do this via the UniFi Controller. ...

In order to fully utilise the UniFi APs full feature set, you’ll need to have a UniFi controller of some sort. This can be a UniFi Cloud Key, a UniFi Cloud Gateway, or… you can host one yourself. So obviously, I chose the third option. There are two methods for installing the controller. One is on Docker, or you can use a Bare-Metal install. I’ll go through both, but I personally use the Docker setup. ...

Docker is one the most critical parts of my homelab, allowing services to run in their own containers, with access to the files and resources that they only need. As well as this, it also means that if one service goes down (as long as nothing else depends on it) it doesn’t bring down everything with it. Installing Docker Installing docker is pretty simple - they even provide a script to do so: ...

Passwords are one of the most important aspects of our digital lives nowadays, making the password manager of your choice one of the most important tools you use. I was using Bitwarden, until I decided that I’m gonna take a little risk and self-host my password manager. Enter: Vaultwarden - an unofficial rewrite of the Bitwarden server. Brief Introductions For the uninitiated, Bitwarden is an incredibly powerful password manager, with many feature, and a pretty intuitive UI. However, a few of it’s major painpoints revolved around a few of it’s features being locked behind a paywall. It’s not that I needed those features, they were just a nice to have - take organisations for an example. I like to follow a similar idea to Zero-Trust Architectures, in which all devices only are able to access the resources they need. One way I could achieve this with Bitwarden is having all my Personal devices use one account, and all my School devices use another. ...

I’m planning to possibly add a Raspberry Pi 2 (Old, I know, but it does the job) to my lab, for providing some key network services. It will be dedicated to this, reducing the risk of another service breaking and bringing down both the lab, and the network. I thought it might be worth scripting the setup process, as it’s a pretty repetitive process. What does each node need? It must be a part of the tailnet It must have docker installed on it It must have access to the /ultmt folder, whether its via a CIFS mount, or using glusterfs-client It must use the LLDAP server for centralised authentication It must have the main 5 nodes in its hosts file, in case DNS fails It must have certain tools/packages installed I want it to be very general, in the sense that I can use it for things other then just the nodes of the server, say if I want one specific computer to authenticate against my LLDAP server. ...