Quick start

# from xuganyu96.github.io/docs
docker compose -f homelab/docker-compose.yml --env-file /path/to/.env up -d
docker compose -f homelab/docker-compose.yml --env-file /path/to/.env logs -f
docker compose -f homelab/docker-compose.yml --env-file /path/to/.env down

Guides

File sync with rsync

A masochist way to manually manage file syncing between remote and local:

rsync --verbose --info=progress2 -azhru     \
    --exclude ".DS_Store"                   \
    --exclude ".rumdl_cache"                \
    "<src>"                                 \
    "<dst>"                                 \
    --dry-run

Notes:

  • -azhru specifies archive mode (-a), compression (-z), human-readable output (-h), and skipping files that are newer at destination (-u). The recursive flag (-r) is probably redundant.
  • When syncing directories, pay attention to trailing slashes. The source directory should have a trailing slash, but the destination directory should not have the trailing slash. Otherwise rysnc might copy the entire source directory into the destination directory instead of individually updating the files.

Backup with restic

# Password can be stored as an environment variable in a file with 600 permission
source ~/.restic.env
restic -r ${RESTIC_REMOTE_URL} backup ${RESTIC_SRC}
restic -r ${RESTIC_REMOTE_URL} forget --keep-last 1 --prune --dry-run

Format external SSD as bulk cloud storage on Fedora Linux

Start with formatting the SSD:

lsblk -f
sudo umount /dev/sdX
sudo mkfs.btrfs -f -L "backup" /dev/sdX
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/backup
sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt/backup
sudo chown $(whoami):$(whoami) /mnt/backup

The external SSD will not be mounted on system boot. This can be annoying if the system suffers from a power loss. We can configure the operating system to automatically mount the external drive using the file system table /etc/fstab.

For the OS to correctly, identify the storage device to mount, we need to find the external drive’s UUID:

blkid

I have previously formatted my external drive with label “my-ssd”, so it is easy to pipe the output of blkid into grep. We are looking for the field that reads UUID="..." in the output.

A corrupted /etc/fstab can brick your OS. With an abundance of caution, I will edit a copy of the file, validate the config, then overwrite the origin, instead of editing directly on the original.

cp /etc/fstab ./fstab.bak
cp /etc/fstab ./fstab.new
echo -e "\n# External drive" >> ./fstab.new
echo "UUID=... /mnt/backup btrfs defaults 0 0" >> ./fstab.new
sudo cp ./fstab.new /etc/fstab

After copying over the modified configuration, run sudo mount -a to mount all drives. This command can catch some configuration errors. For example, I made a typo when copying the UUID, so mount -a reports error:

mount: /mnt/backup: can't find UUID=<wrong-uuid>.
mount: (hint) your fstab has been modified, but systemd still uses
       the old version; use 'systemctl daemon-reload' to reload.

Reboot the system and check that everthing works:

sudo reboot