UserBenchmark – Childish, Biased Garbage

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Please read this: https://rtech.support/docs/learning/userbenchmark.html

It’s worth the read. Simply googling userbenchmark bias will also lead you to more information.

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20231211013813/https://rtech.support/docs/learning/userbenchmark.html

Update Feb. 18, 2024: It would seem they are now going to try and charge users to run a benchmark. Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/controversial-benchmarking-website-goes-behind-paywall-userbenchmark-now-requires-a-pound10-monthly-subscription

Revisiting Frigate & Home Assistant

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I’ve been revisiting frigate as of late, and using homeassistant for sending notifications to my phone. I wish I could do this without homeassistant…it feels so excessive just to get camera notifications.

Anyway, after months and months of procrastinating I hope to post my frigate portainer config soon, and an overall frigate configuration file that I’m using. I’ll also attempt to cover notifications on a separate post afterwards.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

Portainer as Docker Compose file

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Updating portainer becomes:
docker compose down
docker pull portainer/portainer-ce:latest
docker compose up -d

version: '3.0'
services:
  portainer:
    container_name: portainer
    hostname: portainer
    command: --sslcert /certs/lan.fullchain --sslkey /certs/lan.key
    image: portainer/portainer-ce:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: bridge
    environment:
      - "TZ=EST5EDT"
    ports:
      - 9443:9443
    volumes:
      - data:/data
      - /ssl/lancerts:/certs:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

volumes:
  data:

Paste the above into a docker-compose.yml file, I placed mine in a ‘portainer’ folder inside my home directory. Then just run docker compose up -d

I use a folder on my system, /ssl/lancerts, which I map to /certs inside the container. You will have to modify your certificate locations in the volumes section, and the command line towards the top of the compose file. If you are not using SSL, then simply comment out or remove the command line at the top of the compose file and remove the volume mapping.

ITBacon is now ARMed!

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…with an Orange-Pi Zero 3! I’ve moved the website to this tiny little device that doesn’t even have a home yet.

A case of sorts is on the way. I did attach a heatsink to the CPU in the above picture, which was not included.

My impressions so far are very positive. I’m running their Ubuntu image and haven’t had any problems. It reboots in several seconds. It runs the website very well.

I even toyed around with building an arm version of q2pro with no problems at all.

Only downsides: USB 2.0 port not 3.0, and SD slot speed. SD speed is maxed around 22-24MB/s. So a high speed card will not make a difference.

Update: Now with a home of its own! This little fan lowered temps by 13+⁰C!

Quake 2

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Update: Please see https://quake2.itbacon.com for more information! Come check out my jump server, itbacon.com:27920

Had a lot of fun learning meson environments this weekend, and finally building a 32bit version of q2pro (in Ubuntu) to load old mods that never released source code. Now I can load gamei386.so mods. I even compiled an i386 version of q2admin just for the heck of it. I love how everything works still.

PacketFlingers excellent work with PakServe and pakutil made creating compressed pkz files a breeze.

Skullernets excellent work on q2pro made using it all just as easy. HTTP downloads, etc.

It’s absolutely wild to me that I can still load a quake2 mod from 20 years ago on a modern system. And everything works.

I’m running the best quake2 servers of my life and there’s nobody to use them anymore! It’s maddening.

I think I am mainly doing this for my own nostalgia at this point. There are definitely still a number of quake2 servers out there but there’s only a small, small handful of people.

I’d give anything for a truly active q2 community again. I want to play weapons factory, and freeze tag, and rocket arena, and expert CTF again.

RoT MUD v1.4 with OLC 2023

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File: rot1.4wolc2023.tgz

Here is a version of the RoT MUD source code, version 1.4 with OLC, that compiles for me on Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS.

It seems MUD resources are growing very thin these days. I’d like to remedy that if possible. If my brain doesn’t find something else to fixate on for a while.

I’ve included a README file in the main folder that outlines the couple of minor changes I made.

Action Quake 2 servers!

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Update 9-15-2023: All servers are now running q2pro instead of r1q2. I’ve disabled the anticheat module because it’s 2023…I believe this should allow Linux clients to play as well.

I decided to throw up an original Action Quake 2 server! I’ll probably make a whole subdomain for this so stay tuned if you’re interested. I’ll be sure to post downloads etc.

You can vote the map with vote map <map>

Check it out if you want, from the Quake2 console:
– Team Deathmatch: connect itbacon.com:27910
– Deathmatch: connect itbacon.com:27911
– Jump Mod: connect itbacon.com:27912 (this is where I’ll usually be!)

Recent Downtime

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Power outages from storms the last couple of weeks have caused some recent downtime. Apologies for that! I guess 30-45min of battery backup just hasn’t been enough. Unfortunately, currently, I have no plans to move itbacon.com. At least not unless it gets way, way more popular!

Plex Media Server – Convert CRT to Plex SSL Compatible Certificate

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If you’re like me and you use Let’s Encrypt, then it seems sometime semi-recently Plex changed the way their SSL certificates work. I used to just generate a simple .p12 certificate to use with Plex, but it seems that wasn’t good enough anymore.

After some research, it appears the encryption algorithms needed to be updated on the certificate I was generating.

Simply adding the following to my openssl command solved the problem:
-certpbe AES-256-CBC -keypbe AES-256-CBC -macalg SHA256

So the full command becomes something like this:
openssl pkcs12 -certpbe AES-256-CBC -keypbe AES-256-CBC -macalg SHA256 -export -out plex.p12 -inkey your.com.key -in your.com.crt -certfile your.com.ca

I just hit the enter key when it asks for a password since I am only using this certificate locally. You could add -passout ‘pass:’ to do that automatically. Which works wonderfully as I just scp my certs out of pfSense from /cf/conf/acme. I’ve still been experimenting with that and in some cases, e.g. unifi, I’ve found it better to use the fullchain file and not the all file. In other cases I use the all.pem file.

In Plex > Network settings, set the path to this certificate and leave the key field blank.