AASullivan

Category: Technology

  • Battery backups: maintaining access when there’s no power

    A little background: Some years back I learned a very hard lesson about losing power on a RAID array that didn’t have an onboard battery backup. The result was ~7TB of data gone, about 1.5TB completely irreplaceable including old school work and photos. This was a hard pill to swallow and helped me get better about redundant backups and another thing that was especially important: UPS backups, or Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

    A UPS is a device which provides power for a short time during a home or business power failure by providing an AC output to whatever is plugged into it. I have several of these scattered throughout my home, including for my desktop and a couple lights around the house which act as emergency lighting using older, smaller UPS devices. My servers are always running UPS backups, but on a big larger scale.

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  • Raspberry Pi offline Wikipedia

    Wikipedia is a vast archive of knowledge and information we tend to forget is there. An encyclopedia of knowledge brought by users and edited by a community, it has a high accuracy rate and information on just about any subject you could want. You can also download an entire archive of it at around 90GB at the time of this writing!

    I’ve had the idea for a while now about making an offline version to run locally for myself or friends, maybe something just to browse during a flight or roadtrip. Or, as my prepping thoughts say, maybe something for when the power’s out and easy to access! Enter the Raspberry Pi, a low cost and low power computer to run this using a suite of tools you can run off a battery pack and access from one’s phone/tablet/computer. Well, this is easier than you might think! I’ll be going over the ideas and thought processes of this at a high level as the project took some time. I can provide more details if you’d like by reaching out to me at if you’d like.

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  • unRAID: capacity and ease of use over performance

    I’ve been looking over various NAS (Network-Attached-Storage) operating systems for some time now. Naturally, there’s two big players in the game that everyone seems to go to: FreeNAS and unRAID. Both boast a considerable user base, community add on support and a ton of customization but one big difference at a quick glance: FreeNAS, as the name implies, is free while unRAID is a pay for licensed OS. But a quick glance only shows so much.

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  • Automated Youtube Downloads Into Plex (Windows)

    Welcome to another Overly Complicate Project! This time, it started with some advice from our friends at r/DataHoarder and a fun tool called “youtube-dl”. This has taken a bit of tinkering and some custom code, but I now have an all-in-one solution that downloads Youtube videos from a playlist/channel, confirms progress to save bandwidth on future downloads, and stores them into a Plex library for local viewing. Let’s begin.

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  • 2020 BSIDESROC load out!

    Welcome to 2020. This year, we have BSIDESROC coming up in late March and, with a few of us hoping to compete and learn, I’ve adjusted my hacking kit and tools a little for this.

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  • WordPress permalinks issues

    After running into this issue once more with a fresh WordPress install, I’ve found the only way to use custom permalinks is to have them custom set up like this:

    Go under Settings > Permalinks

    Click on “Custom Structure” and insert like this:

    /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

    After hours of google searching with people saying anything from disabling plugins (there were none) to reverting settings (it was a NEW site with no posts prior to changes), this is the ONLY way I’ve gotten the custom WordPress Permalinks to work in the manner I wanted. Hopefully this saves others time/frustration.

  • Archiving youtube and website data

    YouTube has become a bit of a dilemma for many people like myself who enjoy music and video edits with said music; We love supporting artists we enjoy along with the video edits. But, with companies locking down on content, these videos and channels are going offline suddenly and often without warning. I’ve taken to downloading backups of these as often as possible. With a little help from r/datahoarding, I now have a great set up that does this with minimal user intervention.

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  • My choices for browser addons

    A web browser is something everyone uses but no one really thinks about. Sure, some people prefer Chrome or FireFox (myself being in the latter), or some even stick with the MS choice of Edge or IE. But what a lot of people don’t know, is there is a myriad of add ons, themes and plugins that make them so much more than just a browser. Some of these addons also provide extra layers of security. That’s where today’s discussion will be: The addons I run for security and privacy and what they do.

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  • Glasswire: First impressions and review

    In the wide world of interwebs, there’s a lot of dangerous exploits, vulnerabilities and attacks that can happen regularly. With this also comes a vast number of trackers both online and built into Windows 10 itself. I’ve been looking for a new firewall program for sometime and did a free trial of Glasswire for 14 days a couple months ago. I enjoyed the application but couldn’t justify the cost (30/year at the time) for this app and decided to shop around for something potentially cheaper/better.

    I ran into an application called NetLimiter. It was hailed as a cheaper replacement to Glasswire (specifically: a one time charge for the lifetime of the product with free updates for the current release). I tested this and was a bit disappointed with the interface and options. It’s a gorgeous GUI and tool, but didn’t quite have what I wanted. Back to Glasswire I went!

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  • Pi-hole: The dns blocker

    ” A black hole for Internet advertisements”. I’ll vouch. The amount of DNS blocks I’ve seen and how much snappier everything loads and runs has been an amazing improvement. PiHole is a software primary built for a Raspberry Pi 3 (or 2 I believe) and blocks known DNS entries of advertisers and trackers. It was a quick project to implement and has been working like a charm since.

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