Coding

Why I wanted this backed up properly This whole site, every post, the theme, the config, lives in one folder on the T620. Nothing about that folder is protected by anything beyond the disk it sits on. Wanted a real backup, and wanted it copied off the box entirely, not just sitting in a second folder on the same machine. First attempt at excluding the build output Wanted to back up the Hugo source without dragging along the generated public folder or the build cache, since both regenerate automatically from a normal deploy and just bloat the archive for no reason: ...

The symptom Added client-side search to this site using PaperMod’s built-in feature. Worked immediately, which should have been my first clue something was off, because it worked badly. Searching “kyber,” the full, exact word, appearing in exactly one post, returned close to a dozen completely unrelated results. Searching just “ky” returned the one correct result and nothing else. Backwards from how search should behave, more specific input giving worse results than less specific input. ...

The actual goal I wanted my QNAP and T620 shares to show up as normal folders in Dolphin on every machine I use, not something I connect to manually every session. Real mountpoints, mounted at boot, showing up as actual directories. Two different systems here, so two genuinely different setups … Fedora with a plain fstab, NixOS with a declarative config. Fedora side (JackSparrow2 itself) … the full block Step 1 … every mountpoint directory, created up front: ...

Why I’m writing this one down properly This site you’re reading right now runs on the same T620 as everything else … the NAS, the Samba shares, all of it. I got it working, but not in a straight line, and I want an actual record of the steps that worked, not a cleaned-up version that pretends I got it right first try. If I ever rebuild this box, this is the post I want to follow. ...

Why Tailscale, not a real VPN server I looked at running my own WireGuard setup by hand … port forwarding, managing keys myself, keeping track of which peer is which. Tailscale does all of that for you, on top of WireGuard, and the actual setup on each machine ends up being a handful of lines. Every device I own is on the same tailnet now: the T620 server, my NixOS desktop, and … the one that surprised me … a MacBook Air 6,2 from 2014 that has no business running anything modern smoothly, and does it fine anyway. ...

Same symptom, completely different machine I already wrote about the remount script I built for my NixOS desktop … clearing stale network mount units through systemd when a share drops. This is the other half of that same story, except this one lives on JackSparrow2 itself (the T620 server) and fixes a genuinely different failure, even though the symptom looks identical from the client side: a share that used to work suddenly doesn’t. ...

The problem this actually solves On a normal distro, if a network mount goes stale … the connection dropped, the server bounced, whatever … the fix is usually sudo umount then sudo mount -a, reading straight from /etc/fstab. Simple, because fstab is a plain text file you can just point tools at. NixOS doesn’t work that way. fileSystems entries in configuration.nix get compiled into individual systemd .mount units automatically at build time. There’s no /etc/fstab to edit or run mount -a against in the traditional sense … the mounts exist purely as generated systemd units with names like mnt-t620\x2drelationships.mount. ...

Why I bothered making this an alias at all Btrfs needs a bit more active maintenance than ext4 or XFS … it’s got its own checksumming, its own way of allocating chunks across a volume, and if you never touch it, things can quietly degrade in ways you won’t notice until something actually breaks. I got tired of typing three separate commands in the right order every time, so I turned it into one alias that does all three, in sequence, with actual visible output so I know what stage it’s on. ...

The hardware I built this on an HP T620 … a thin client, not a real server. Dual-core AMD GX-217GA SoC, the kind of chip that used to sit in front of a cash register or a hospital terminal, not something anyone would call fast. No AES-NI either, which matters more than you’d think once you’re running encrypted traffic through it all day. If you’ve got something like this sitting in a drawer, it’s genuinely enough to run a small personal NAS. Don’t expect it to be quick. Expect it to just work, reliably, once it’s set up right. ...

Why negativo17 over RPM Fusion RPM Fusion’s NVIDIA packages work, but negativo17’s repo tends to track driver releases faster and packages them with fewer of the DKMS-related headaches that show up after a kernel update. For a desktop where I don’t want to babysit whether the driver rebuilt correctly after every dnf upgrade, that reliability matters more than which repo is more “official.” Adding the repos Two separate repos … one for the driver itself, one for the multimedia codec stack that pairs with it: ...