Aaruni's Blog v 3.0

The story thus far…

Earlier last year, I set up a NAS in my apartment. Since I had not written an update about it then, I am forced to describe it now. Let this be a lesson to all who think laxity will go unpunished!

The NAS

I bought a 5 bay enclosure for drives, and hooked it up to my home server. At the time, I was only able to get a 4 TB drive. So, I stuck the drive into the enclosure, formatted it with BTRFS, and moved most of my media library onto it. Later, I was able to get another 4 TB drive, and I had decided by now that in the long term, I want a ZFS pool. So, I managed to fish out two old 1 TB drives and started thinking on how best to set things up. In the course of my research, I found this article by Jim Salter. He’s also a host on a podcast I subscribe to, so I consider this article a trusted source of information.

I have always been obsessed with computers. Unfortunately, as a child, I never could pick the top of the line parts for any of my computers. They were either hand-me-downs, or decked out to meet my needs, which, at the time, fell well short of my wants.

A Truly Grand Upgrade

I got my first full time job in 2023. The first thing I did with these newfound funds was buy furniture in my new apartment. The second thing I did bought a monster of a computer. A shiny new ryzen processor, double the memory I used to have, and, for the first time since 2008, in a desktop form factor. Before this, I had a relatively beefy Asus ROG gaming laptop, mostly for the high end CPU and good build quality. My new computer was 3 to 7 times faster!

Authentication

Authentication is any process that verifies and validates the identity of a client. Any login process is a type of authentication. Traditionally, authentication is done via a username and a password.

Multi Factor Authentication

Multi factor authentication (MFA) uses multiple factors to establish identity, instead of a single one, as in the classical case. These factors can be

• Something you know (e.g., password)
• Something you have (e.g., a phone)
• Something you are (e.g., biometrics)
• Somewhere you are (e.g., GPS coordinates)

With a sane setup, for the vast majority of daily activities, 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) is sufficient.

One Time Password

A One Time Password (OTP) is, as the name suggests, a single use password. It is most frequently used as a second factor in a 2 Factor Authentication scheme. It provides the “something you have” factor: the device providing the password.

Time based One Time Password

A Time based One Time Password (TOTP) is a One Time Password which uses the current time to generate the One Time Password. This means that TOTPs do not need a working network connection, and can still make a valid OTP on demand. Mathematically, a TOTP is just a function which takes two inputs, a seed, and the time. If the seed is shared ahead of time, as a pre shared secret, TOTP can be, and is used, as a complete and secure replacement for classical forms of OTP.

Tail-what?

Tailscale is a project by Tailscale Inc which creates a mesh network of your devices. It allows all the devices on your tailscale network, the “tailnet”, to talk to each other direclty, in a peer to peer manner. It does not matter if your devices are separated by the internet, or a NAT, or even a CGNAT: tailscale can break through and create a functional tunnel between each of your devices. It works by employing Wireguard behind the scenes to create a tunnel from each device, to every other device in your tailnet. For 9 devices, that means 90 tunnels have to be created and maintained, and without tailscale, this operation would be MANUAL! The full breakdown of exactly how Tailscale works can be found here.