Bacula Community Edition is an amazingly powerful open source backup software which works extremely well on private networks. However, if you need to backup workloads that are only reachable over the Internet, your first reflex may be to allow traffic to your Bacula File and Storage Daemons in your firewalls. Certainly, you can safely accomplish this by constraining access to specific source IPs on both sides, but what if you are hosting your Bacula infrastructure behind an ISP providing dynamic IPs? This post provides a solution to backup remote workloads without exposing Bacula’s endpoints to the Internet as such: You…
Transcode Reolink streams for smaller recordings
While my video surveillance system covered all my home’s ingress areas, I did not have full coverage over my outside property. In order to remedy this situation, I installed some Reolink RLC-520A cameras since they allowed me to power them using power over ethernet, provided high resolution video streams and had decent online reviews. However, little did I know that their recordings would end up eating up most of my Frigate NVR’s allotted disk space. I needed to figure out a way to transcode these Reolink streams into smaller recordings. About my Frigate setup I have setup Frigate to perform…
Backup a Kubernetes PassBolt deployment to a NFS server
PassBolt is a great self-hosted password manager which has support for a highly available deployment using Kubernetes. I have been using PassBolt for almost a year now and while I wish I had the ability to store files into it in a similar fashion as with KeePass, the fact that I have access to my passwords from my computers as well as my mobile device has prompted me to exclusively use PassBolt. I favoured a deployment based on the Helm chart using MariaDB as the database backend and even though the data is stored on a PersistentVolume hosted on a…
Adding Ceph storage to my Proxmox cluster
I have been self-hosting workloads at home on a Proxmox cluster for many years now and of course, I have been backing up workloads I deemed important enough, using Bacula. However, when I needed to run maintenance on one of the cluster’s node, migrating its Virtual Machines (VMs) to another node was taking a very long time to complete since some of my VM disks are quite voluminous. Enter Ceph Ceph is an open source software-defined storage solution and it is natively integrated in Proxmox. By hosting the VM disks on the distributed Ceph storage instead of a node-local LVM…
Backing up your homelab using Bacula
Like most homelab enthusiast out there, I came to the realization that several workloads I’m hosting contribute significantly to the digital quality of life of my household and while I tend to ensure such workloads have minimal single points of failure, the fact remains that mistakes DO happen which could cause significant data loss. Backing up important data is essential to facilitate service recovery in such situations. Because I’m hosting rather large amounts of data, such as video surveillance footage, I wanted a backup solution that would allow me to select recovery points going back at least 30 days without…