Networking – James Lin's Blog

A poor guy’s home backup recipe

James Lin — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:12:27 +0000

Everyone has tons of photos taken over the years right? And you probably want to make sure that you don’t lose them, either by hard-drive failure or thief visit to your house.

Original setup and problems:

I have a couple of Macs at home, both using TimeMachine for regular backups. I didn’t have a TimeCapsule to centralise the backups, so 2 separate external hard-drives were used. The problem was I had to remember to plug the TimeMachine HDD regularly to perform backup, and had risks of HDD failures
Since there are 2 different standalone backups, I cannot push them to the cloud backup service using a single account.

Building a in-house NAS server

Hardware:

I had a 8 years old PC laying around, it has a Core 2 Duo (64bit) and 2 Gb of memory. I bought a couple of 3TB Western Digital Green Drives for the RAID 1 setup.

Software:

Initially I have tried FreeNas project but later I realised it’s not a poor man’s choice, basically it’s using ZFS and it’s very resource hungry. I ended up using OpenMediaVault It’s a linux distro based on Debian, so you can use apt-get to install different packages outside of OpenMediaVault package.

OpenMediaVault includes a few plugins which allows you to provide Apple File Protocol, which enables TimeMachine backups within the network, also FTP, Rsync etc etc

Cloud Backup

Having mirrored drives might reduce HDD failure impact but still doesn’t prevent hardware being stolen or damage in fire. Originally before setting up the NAS server, I used BackBlaze on my Mac, but the problem is it only runs on Mac, and it can only run on a single computer, so my wife’s laptop was not being backed up to the cloud.

I have made a switch to CrashPlan, which has a build for linux so I use choose the shared folders to push to the cloud.

Hash Reverse Lookup Database Reached 25 Million Entries

James Lin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:23:10 +0000

Just a quick update on my hash reverse look-up database, it has quietly reached 25 million entries!

http://hash.limsbros.com

Hash Reserve Lookup Database Reached Over 21 Million Entries

James Lin — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:49:25 +0000

Just a quick update on my hash reverse look-up database, it has quietly reached 21 million entries!

Hash Reserve Lookup Database Reached 15 Million Entries

James Lin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 22:32:30 +0000

Hash Reserve Lookup Database Just Hit 10 Million Entries

James Lin — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 04:01:53 +0000

Another milestone achieved, 10 million hash reverse lookup entries.

Hash Reserve Lookup Database Just Hit 5 Million Entries

James Lin — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 02:49:35 +0000

Late last week, I started a hash reserve lookup service, and today the database has just grown over 5 million entries. By the end of this week I reckon we will 10 million entries, hopefully we can have better search result by then. Fingers crossed!

Setting up hash reverse lookup database and services

James Lin — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:18:41 +0000

I have published a hash reverse lookup service http://hash.limsbros.com/

It provides:

a web page for searching md5 and sha1 hashes
restful service for search md5 and sha1 hashes

Currently I am still importing the word list, so if you don’t get a result from your hash, please try it again in a few days.

Being attacked/spammed by malicious requests

James Lin — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 08:58:56 +0000

Was watching the access log to find some hints on why apache keep eating up my swap space, and saw a lot of these requests keep hitting my box…

Subnetting

James Lin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:50:59 +0000

These are:

Class A: 10.0.0.0
Class B: 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.0.0
Class C: 192.168.1.0

Each one of those have a subnet.
Class A: 255.0.0.0
Class B: 255.255.0.0
Class C: 255.255.255.0

http://www.3com.com/other/pdfs/infra/corpinfo/en_US/501302.pdf