Off-Site Backup with Borgmatic As the saying goes “RAID is not a backup”. So I needed a backup solution for my new NAS. Some of my files are already synced with my Google drive but I needed proper backup for the rest. For my personal server setup, I had decided on Borg and… ▶

Password Manager Woes For many many years my password management looked like this: For the majority of passwords I used a stateless password management system. It takes the domain name of the site I want to login at and my master password and creates a new password to be used for that site. Simple and does not require storing or syncing anything. I… ▶

DIY NAS on NixOS I had some kind of home server / network attached storage since I've started working with Linux. The devices and their tasks have changed over the decades. My last iteration was a Synology DS213J which I have been running on it's original spinning rust disks for the last 11 years at least.… ▶

NixOS Agenix (for secrets management) A couple of days ago, I ended my post on setting up Postfix on NixOS with the remaining question of secrets management. Why? The issue with the way how Nix works is that everything is copied to the “nixstore” and then symlinked around the system. However, apparently that store is world readable. So any process on the system can access it. Doesn't matter for most stuff, but is a bit shitty when it comes to secrets.… ▶

Shed Build - Part 4: Interior This is part four of the shed building series. Previously: * Part 1: Foundations * Part 2: Framing and Roofing * Part 3: Walls, Window, Paint Flooring Last time you saw the shed, the shed was just a big empty box. The first thing to do was to finish the flooring. Originally I wanted to use the same PVC tiles I had… ▶

Postfix Relay to SMTP2GO on NixOS I am in the process of setting up a new NAS/Homeserver. But I nerd sniped myself by wanting to use NixOS on it. So things are going slow. But here's a thing I learned today... The goal is to set up a Postfix mail server that will allow me to send mails from the machine itself (through bin/sendmail and localhost:25) as well as from other machines in my network and on Docker. There won't be many mails but when there are, they …… ▶

Some thoughts on NixOS I love the idea of a declarative server setup. I always thought this should be implemented as something more like Ansible, but having it directly at the core of the distribution makes things easier I guess. So in the last couple of days I gave… ▶

Sweden It has been a while that we had a vacation photo post here. So let's go. We just returned from a camper van trip to Sweden (and Denmark and accidentally a bit of Norway). We tried to drive less and sometimes stay a bit longer at one place in hopes to relax more. But I feel like we still didn't really succeed at that.… ▶

Irrigation Automation (with Home Assistant) With a garden, irrigation is key if you care about the survival of what you plant. For a while we watered the garden manually, but of cause that doesn't work when you go on vacation. And it's also a chore.… ▶

The Rubenerd Blog Quiz 2025 Let's pretend it's 2005 again and do one of those blog quiz things! This one comes from RubeNerd. If you're not following his blog already, you're definitely doing something wrong. Anyway, let's have some questions and answers...… ▶